In a plentiful year for Australian film, Ladies in Black is the latest local story to grace our screens. Directed by iconic storyteller Bruce Beresford, Ladies in Black has the makings of the next Australian classic. Adapted from a book by Madeline St John (and subsequent successful musical, with music by Tim Finn), the story…
Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s latest novel The Wolf Hunt (translated by Sondra Silverston) was first published in Hebrew with the name Relocation. And while the new title has some resonance with the plot, the original name cuts deeper to the concerns that Gundar-Goshen is trying to explore. That is, the split and tension in the…
Elegant production design, a big name cast and twists aplenty characterise Death on the Nile, a new take on the Agatha Christie classic. After five killings, Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) solves the crimes, but not before all stand accused. We’re introduced to Poirot’s extraordinary mind through his remarkable instincts on the battlefield during World War…
It’s been four years since the last Son Volt album, Honky Tonk (2013), and Jay Farrar describes his effort here as an attempt to climb inside the guitar tunings of two blues icons, Skip James and Mississippi Fred McDowell, and British folk artist Nick Drake. As such, we find Farrar approaching his songs intentionally with…
Thought-provoking and confronting, Imperfect by Lee Kofman is the book I’ve been recommending to anyone who asks lately. Imperfect (clever cover design makes the title read I’m Perfect, sans apostrophe) skillfully weaves memoir with interviews in a compelling and heart-tugging way. The blurb reads: By the time she was eleven and living in the Soviet…
Balsam Karam’s The Singularity (translated by Saskia Vogel) is a quietly devastating book about displacement and loss, and the tribulations faced by refugees. It revolves around two stories of two very different mothers. In doing so, Karam is able to range across a range of experiences of people displaced from their homes. In what is…
– Driving Madeleine – Only in cinemas from 22 June 2023 We have 10 double in-season passes thanks to Rialto Distribution. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE When taxi driver, Charles (Dany Boon) reluctantly takes on an early-morning booking, he begins to regret his decision even more so when a cantankerous old…
Olivia Ruggiero is talented. No doubt about it. She is operatic and she is adept at musical theatre, but at times there is a struggle between the two. I noted that very early on in Broadway Diva, when she sang a medley of show tunes. The operatic tended to overwhelm what I would call traditional musical theatre and…
“Dead bodies usually mean something bad…” It’s 1945, towards the send of WWII. The German navy are even sinking hospital ships. When the film opens, a group of survivors from a sunken hospital ship are adrift somewhere in the North Atlantic. Tensions are high as they are desperately short of food and water. This motley…
If you can follow the intricate (at times maddening) plot in Transformers: The Last Knight then “You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din!”. At least that is until Anthony Hopkins’ character pulls together the threads well into the film. It is the fifth film in the series, following on from 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction. …
