Australia’s most prolific playwright has come out of retirement and has his finger on the pulse, addressing the cost-of-living crisis. The title of his play refers to the haves and have nots in society. When David Williamson was a boy in the 1950s, the difference in salary between a worker and a managing director rarely exceeded fivefold. Now…
At age eight, Anna (Max McKenna) was writing brilliant, highly creative, if dark stories. She was a very bright little girl. Upon reflection, a decade on, she regards that as indicative of being a child prodigy. Her mother Renee (Nadine Garner) though had real concerns. When Anna was on a high, her energy and enthusiasm lit up a…
What do women want? Writer/director Renee Webster explores the question in her debut feature film How To Please A Woman. Webster has worked extensively in television on series like The Heights. Gina (Sally Phillips) is a middle-aged woman stuck in a loveless marriage. Her husband Adrian (Cameron Daddo) is a stuffy workaholic attorney who has…
JJ Abrams (Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek) is the man of the moment and he deserves all the recognition he will get. The visionary director (and co-screenwriter, in this case with Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt) has achieved what we all hoped he could with the reboot, or perhaps that should read refocus, of the…
Une Pratique De Pays? After screenings at the French Film Festival the gentle bittersweet drama The Country Doctor gets a limited cinematic release on the art house circuit. Jean-Pierre Werner (played by Francois Cluzet, from The Intouchables) is a dedicated doctor in a regional area of France. He is the sort of old fashioned doctor…
The church, religion and medical science have a lot to answer for in The Wonder. This is acclaimed director Sebastián Lelio’s first feature since Gloria Bell (2018). In 1862, nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) travels from England to small-town Ireland to watch an 11-year-old girl Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy). The reason soon becomes clear….
Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds’ fourth album for In The Red Records, La Araña Es La Vida summons the Mexican muse of The Great Spider Goddess of Teoticuhan, who sprouts hallucinogenic morning glories and protects the underworld, or in Kid’s eyes, the world of underground music. Recorded in a high school gym in Kansas, guitar slinger and…
All the Money in the World is prolific filmmaker Ridley Scott’s dramatization of the real life kidnapping of J Paul Getty III. He was the 16-year-old grandson of oil magnate J Paul Getty, the richest man in the world (Christopher Plummer). In 1973, the teenage Getty (Charlie Plummer, no relation to Christopher) was living in…
A rich, harrowing and deeply evocative story has been superbly translated into captivating musical theatre in this Australasian premiere production of The Color Purple – The Musical. It charts the life of Celie Johnson (played by Jayme-Lee Hanekom – Disney’s The Lion King), a battered and downtrodden African-American woman from when she was a 14-year-old…
A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters is the heart-warming story of two people who share a lifetime of experiences through the now old-fashioned medium of handwritten letters. The epistolary work is a unique theatrical experience, not quite a play reading and not entirely a play, but very much an unforgettable event. For those unfamiliar with the play, its…
