Two of Australia’s most cherished singer-songwriters and sometimes Basement Birds band mates Josh Pyke and Bob Evans have announced a co-headline tour, Another Evening with Josh Pyke and Bob Evans, from 24 November through to mid-December. Josh Pyke and Bob Evans embarked on their first Evening with Josh and Bob tour a decade ago. “That…
Golden Globe winner Brie Larson (Short Term 12) gives the performance of a lifetime in this dark, disturbing and emotionally affecting psychological drama that is also one of the films of the year. Larson plays Joy Newsome (though known to her son only as Ma), a woman who has been held prisoner for seven years…
The attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 is the jumping off point for A Voice in the Night, the debut Australian crime thriller by Sarah Hawthorn. 9/11 was a global trauma, played out on live television, the consequences of which still resonate. The events of the day are told through the…
Only The Animals surprised me. This remarkably well-constructed French mystery-thriller is three stories in one. Alice Farange (Laure Calamy) is in a loveless marriage in rural France. She’s having an affair with a strange loner named Joseph Bonnefille (Damien Bonnard), who barely tolerates her. Then Bonnefille seemingly callously ditches her giving no reason. There’s a…
Adult entertainment at its glorious, risqué, musical and side-splitting best. That is what you are in for when you enter the house of debauchery that is Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett. Leaving little to the imagination, it is slick, sexy, salacious and oh so much fun. It is a superbly orchestrated show for the broad minded….
Anne Frank’s story is a tragic but inspiring one and it is played out in dramatic fashion on stage. As Jews, when her Dutch family was forced to go into hiding during the Holocaust, she was gifted a diary, which she wrote in religiously. It contained her innermost thoughts about those she was with and…
Here is an engaging documentary about a woman in her ‘90s who still has the world at her feet … in her case the world of fashion and creativity. Her name is Iris Apfel and she is 93, extremely quick-witted, flamboyantly dressed and still married to a man who turned 100 during the making of…
Song Sung Blue is a warts and all American biographical musical drama based around a couple of divorced tribute artists. When Mike Sardinia (Hugh Jackson) meets Claire Stengl (Kate Hudson) in 1987, she is singing Patsy Cline numbers. She gives him the idea of performing as Neil Diamond. Although there is a decade age difference…
Tobias S Buckell’s standalone speculative fiction novel A Stranger in the Citadel opens with literally a killer first line: The gods say, “You shall not suffer a librarian to live”. Riffing on classics like Fahrenheit 451, Buckell creates a future world in which largesse is provided through giant machines known as the cornucopia and books…
It may be hard to believe that 22 years have gone by since Steven Spielberg directed Jurassic Park, which gave the T-Rex renewed sex appeal. Two further instalments followed in 1997 and 2001, before the dinosaurs went into hibernation. Now they are well and truly out there again. Two decades ago it was Dr John…
