St. Vincent’s eponymous 4th solo album, released in 2014, was easily her most accessible, while also delivering some pretty amazing songs packaged with electro-pop polish, and marked by her unique guitar playing. And it paid off big, landing her on dozens of “best of year” lists and winning that year’s Grammy for Best Alternative Album,…
Isabel Allende’s In the Midst of Winter is a quiet, emotive read about friendships built out of unlikely circumstances – a freak snowstorm, a car accident and a dead body. Here’s the blurb: Amid the biggest Brooklyn snowstorm in living memory, an unexpected friendship blossoms between three people thrown together by circumstance. Richard Bowmaster, a…
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…
Is bullfighting a subject appropriate for children? I don’t think so. It’s an ancient and barbaric practice. Just why the producers of Ferdinand believed it was appropriate to turn this into a cutesy animated feature is puzzling, to say the least. I say that notwithstanding that the central character is a gentle giant. At one point he literally…
Writer and director Rian Johnson (Looper) has delivered in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the second film in the sequel trilogy. Johnson takes over from J.J. Abrams, who is due to direct Episode IX. Following the events of The Force Awakens (2015), Rey (Daisy Ridley) starts her training under the surly and powerful Jedi Master Luke…
On their 25th studio album, The Church maintains the sense of revitalization that developed from the band’s 2014 release, Further/Deeper. Longtime Church fans universally recognize the band’s breakthrough radio single, “Under the Milky Way” from 1988’s Starfish, but from there the band’s strongest efforts are up for debate. I’m prone to the early 90’s albums…
Thirty years ago, Tom Cruise played a cock-sure, gung-ho naval pilot in the classic Top Gun. Now he plays another hot shot pilot in American Made. This bizarre story about drug smuggling, gun running and money laundering again proves that quite often truth is far stranger than fiction. Cruise plays Barry Seal, a disenchanted pilot…
Well, here it is, a new Australian musical. It’s based on the film Muriel’s Wedding from 1994; an iconic, quirky, favourite of the nation. At its centre is a misfit, Muriel, who embarks on finding a life, an identity, away from the ‘closed’ world of her upbringing in Porpoise Spit, by hook or by crook…
Tulip Fever is a melodramatic bodice-ripper set in Amsterdam in 1634. Tulips were highly prized and a source of great wealth. Playing out against this backdrop of an economic bubble is a more formulaic story of romance, deception and betrayal. Sophia (Alicia Vikander) has been raised in an orphanage. The pipe-smoking abbess (Judi Dench) seems to have…
Melodrama is amped up in Wonder Wheel, a period piece set in the hustle and bustle of Coney Island amusement park. Woody Allen has always had a special fondness for Coney Island. He set the childhood home of Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer under the clattering Cyclone roller coaster. Set in the 1950s, like so many of Allen’s…
