Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is an extraordinary, original work by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Nick Paley that has Best Animated Feature written all over it. It’s a delightful tale, beautifully told. Marcel (the voice of Jenny Slate) is a one-inch-high shell from a large community of shells. Now only he and his grandmother Connie…
Guy Ritchie (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) puts his own take – a gritty, modern edge – to the classic Excalibur myth and the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Arthur is not yet king, instead a ruffian, a thoroughly reluctant hero compelled to discover…
Adoration for ABBA in Australia shows no signs of abating if the crowd at The ABBA Show at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne is anything to go by. The audience (of a certain age) turned back the clock as they danced, swung their arms in the air and frequently cat-called “Ya” as a group of two Brits…
Nonsense, fiddle-faddle and poppycock is the essence of Lewis Carroll’s timeless classic Alice in Wonderland. Now writer and director Penny Farrow has sourced characters, dialogue and poems from several sources to bring the adventure to life. These include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking-Glass, The Hunting of Snark and Rhyme? And Reason? (a collection of…
David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize for At Night All Blood Is Black, returns with a novel that explores colonialism and the slave trade. Beyond the Door of No Return (translated by Sam Taylor) opens in France in the early 19th Century but the bulk of the novel is set in Senegal over…
A filmography featuring Dumb and Dumber To and Shallow Hal doesn’t exactly scream Oscar. Yet director Peter Farrelly finds himself as an Oscar frontrunner for his crowd-pleasing film Green Book. This conventional take on race relations in the American South of the 1960s seems to be carefully designed to push the right buttons. Of all…
Saltburn is a dark thriller about obsession, power, privilege, and a desperate desire to belong. It’s a debauched variation on The Talented Mr Ripley meets Brideshead Revisited. This is the sophomore feature from writer/director Emerald Fennell, who won an Oscar for her screenplay for 2020’s Promising Young Woman. It’s 2006. Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is…
Comedies featuring strong women can be funny and risqué like Bridesmaids or patchy and disappointing such as Like a Boss. Best friends forever Mia (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel (Rose Byrne) are both happily single. They live together and one even puts toothpaste on the other’s toothbrush. They run their own small cosmetics company – a…
In Sean Durkin’s The Nest, a house of cards is waiting to come tumbling down. We’re in Ronald Reagan’s America – specifically 1986. British-born stock trader Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) is having a hard time of it. On the surface all appears peachy. He’s married to an American horse riding instructor, Allison (Carrie Coon). Rory…
Quilt’s second album, Held In Splendor, was one of 2014’s biggest surprises. I ranked it the #9 album of the year but in the twenty-four months since its release I confess that I kind of forgot all about them. When word came out of a new record from them I went back and listened to…
