Inspired by a seven-year affair between celebrated British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor Harold Pinter and television presenter Joan Bakewell, the silences say as much as the words. In fact, when he had finished writing the play, Pinter sent it to Bakewell, who was shocked her life was being raked over. As she read through…
We’re among African Americans in a working-class suburb in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the 1950s. Although affable when it suits him, Troy Maxon (Bert Labonte) can be a hard man to stomach. A garbage collector, he has a “my way or the highway approach” and sometimes the choices he makes are decidedly ordinary. His upbringing was far from desirable….
Gritty and raw, this is no film for the feint hearted. During the late ’80s, the streets of Compton, California were some of the most dangerous in the country. The plague of crack cocaine was escalating at a rate as alarming as the violent, gang-driven business that propelled its use. The LAPD and its specialised…
Four actors … who break the fourth wall, track down a Melbourne man from a seven-minute rant obtained by a transcription service and give a potted history of the internet. That, in a nutshell, is the subject matter of the cleverly orchestrated play that puts the fear of God into you. In fact, humour and paranoia are…
L’Appartement: Chaos in the City of Love is a play with lots of laughs, dark moments, some excellent acting from a top team and a set I’d be happy to live in! Joanna Murray-Smith worked hard as a director to bring her words to life, and it’s not an easy job. The plot sees an…
Lee Alexander McQueen set the fashion world alight when he burst onto the scene. He was also deeply troubled through various periods of his life. The beautifully shot and illustrated McQueen is a sanitised version of that life. The youngest of six children, he was born in a working-class London neighbourhood in 1969. His family…
Stuber is another variant on the buddy-cop formula that was popular in the 80s and 90s. However, films like Lethal Weapon, Midnight Run and 48 Hours did this sort of thing much better. It’s LA’s hottest day since 1911. Vic Manning (played by former wrestler Dave Bautista) is a tough and perennially angry LA cop…
Multi-award winning indigenous American author Louise Erdrich has set her new novel The Mighty Red in the heartlands of the Ojibwe people (Erdrich herself is a member of the Turtle Band, a tribe of the Ojibwe). Set on the banks of the Red River in North Dakota, country used for growing sugarbeet but also subject…
Take a base of screwball comedy, add a dash of French New Wave, stir in some 1970s Woody Allen sensibility and top with a dollop of Clueless – now if you can wrap your head around all that, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what to expect from Mistress America. This is director Noah…
Spielberg returns to the history of war long after War Horse, the story of a stallion with a Lassie attitude during WWI, but not with heroic images of the battlefield as in Saving Private Ryan. Bridge of Spies takes place during the Cold War, a period during which espionage was commonplace and super powers completely…
