The Irish Film Festival is back bigger than ever. Boasting 16 films, including 15 Australian premieres, and award-winning titles and talent the festival screens in five captial cities and online across Australia from October 5 – November 5. Audiences will also have exclusive behind-the-scenes access to films via Q&A sessions with Festival Director & Founder…
Martha: A Picture Story Martha Cooper’s aim was to become a National Geographic photographer. Instead, at 76 years young, she’s revered for her photographing street art (or graffiti). In the 1970s, as the boroughs of New York City burned, Cooper worked as a photographer for the New York Post. She looked for images of creativity…
A gritty piece about the travails of an ageing Las Vegas showgirl and those around her, The Last Showgirl feels real. Back in the day, decades ago, Shelly (Pamela Anderson), was one of the headline acts in Le Razzle Dazzle, which was fashioned on erotic Paris shows, like the Lido. Now, at 57, she is…
Think of the hijinks in Crazy Rich Asians, Bridesmaids and The Hangover and you go some way to understanding why Joy Ride will be a fan favourite. There are laughs, silliness and good times aplenty. As five-year-olds, Audrey and Lolo meet by chance in 1998 at a New York park. Born in Asia, Audrey –…
Speculative fiction often lives and dies by its premise. So long as the author can sell the premise and hold it together, speculative fiction has the capacity to open minds and deeply explore issues. Guy Morpuss’s debut novel Five Minds has what can only be described as a double speculative premise. On top of this…
Va-va-voom! What a talent Chris Burgess is. The young man studying honours in musical theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts is a star in the making if Lennox: Legend in my Living Room is anything to go by. He is an entertainer extraordinaire with a strong and powerful voice and a confident persona, combining Annie Lennox (of…
Here we go again… More than ten years later and Mamma Mia! the Musical is still delighting fans. Despite the fact that many audiences members were born well after ABBA’s heyday, the pop anthems interwoven with a sweet story of love and family still generate smiles, whoops and applause after every performance. If you’re not…
Filmmaker Guy Ritchie gathers together most of his usual band of players for Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. And this action-packed but cliched globe-trotting spy movie ticks all the right boxes for the genre. When a mysterious device (the film’s MacGuffin) is stolen from a secret laboratory MI6 needs to act quickly to recover it…
Whitney is a well-researched and revealing film from Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin McDonald (Touching the Void). It’s the second documentary in as many years charting the rise and tragic death of pop diva Whitney Houston. Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me centred more on her later years. it charted her decline through drug abuse and…
The Stranger is a mesmerising portrait of young man different to any other. We are in French controlled Algiers in 1938. It is where Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), who is in his early 30s, works as a clerk. He is quiet, unassuming, has little to say and lacks drive. One day he receives a telegram indicating…
