If you think it is nerve-wracking planning and orchestrating a dinner party or perhaps even a gallery opening, just imagine what it would be like helming an exhibition that will attract 800,000 people. Opening night will be veritable who’s-who of paparazzi favourites dressed to the hilt by the foremost fashion designers. That is what The…
Chilean director Pablo Larraín (No) takes on the enigmatic figure of Jacqueline Kennedy (neé Bouvier; later Onassis) and the mythos of the “Camelot” years in Jackie. This visually stunning and finely textured film is a kind of elegy to a lost time and lost hope, while simultaneously providing an intimate portrait of the former First…
In the 1950s, Biblical films were extremely popular. Sweeping epics like the Oscar-winning Ben Hur and the spectacular The Ten Commandments scoring at the box office. These stories featured timeless themes of good versus evil. But in the 60s, their popularity seemed to wane. More modern takes on Bible stories have tended to be revisionist,…
The Greats: masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland is one of the most significant collections of European “old master” paintings ever seen in Australia. Part of the Sydney International Art Series 2015-2016, it’s now showing at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney. Spanning a period of 400 years from the Renaissance to Impressionism,…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 11 October 2024. Pressing play on the self-produced Backbone will take listeners on a journey through not only where Kasey Chambers has been over the years, but where she’s at right now. Chambers enlisted some of the usual suspects…
Slow to ignite, The Witches is an uneven adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel of the same name. It’s 1967. Eight year-old Hero Boy (newcomer Jahzir Bruno) loses his parents in a car accident and goes to live with his Grandma (Octavia Spencer) in rural Alabama. Clearly hit hard by their passing, he says little and…
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…
Dream$ong may not be Hillsong, but this sure feels like a parody of that church, founded in Sydney’s western suburbs in 1983. Everything is exaggerated for the sake of comic appeal … and it works. The pastor, Richard Sunday (Nelson Gardner), is a slime ball who saw his first wife off in a catastrophic sky…
Body image is a hot topic at the moment, something The Substance recently tapped into with great success. But while The Substance leaned more into a particular kind of body horror, Aaron Schimberg goes in a different direction with his intriguing but perplexing A Different Man. In the film, the main character has neurofibromatosis. Basically…
I’m slowly acquainting myself with Angela Carter’s writing, and when I saw The Magic Toyshop in a Sydney bookshop, I had to have it. This is the blurb: One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother’s wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her…
