Gritty, grungy and wickedly pleasurable, Patti Cake$ is a downbeat rags tale about a blue collar rap wannabe. Patricia Dombrowski, a.k.a. Patti Cake$, a.k.a. Killa P. (Australian newcomer Danielle Macdonald), has had it with life in her rundown New Jersey hometown. At 23 she is ready to hit the road and make a play for…
Violence abounds in American Assassin, a revenge flick which pits the CIA against the forces that instigate terror against the west. We are introduced to Mitch Rapp, a one-of-a-kind American assassin, who possesses savage skills and a ferocious drive for payback. This is the story of a 21st century counter-terrorist spymaster-in-the-making who, in a world of…
Queen Victoria formed an attachment late in life that brought the royal household to the point of apoplexy. That true story is given poetic licence in Victoria & Abdul. In 1887, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) – a 24-year-old clerk – travelled from India to the UK to present a ceremonial medal as part of the…
Kamasi Washington’s new EP Harmony of Difference is set to be released on 29 September 2017 via Young Turks / Remote Control Records. This is the first new music from Washington since his acclaimed 2015 debut album The Epic. Harmony of Difference originally premiered as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art 2017 Biennial. It appeared alongside…
What a superb piece of writing, so magnificently realised … set up with a crackerjack opening monologue! Big Heart should be mandatory viewing in an ever-burgeoning multicultural Australia. Mother (Andrea Swifte) is affluent – significantly so. She has married and divorced twice and never aspired to give birth naturally. Now though, she decides the time…
Australian singer/songwriter Leah Senior’s second album finds the artist travelling the quiet path of the folk song troubadours of years past. Pretty Faces is recorded, for the most part, in the minimalist folk-singer tradition of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and the early work of Joni Mitchell. Senior’s gentle voice floats over finger-picked or lightly strummed…
Talk about high-concept. An unlikely pair of Swedes try to make a go of it as semi-skilled (but totally unlicensed) private detectives in Stan’s Swedish Dicks. The outcome is a kind of Get Shorty meets Scandi-crime. It’s fair to say this Swedish-US collaboration doesn’t aim very high. The producers aren’t looking to make another Fargo here. Swedish Dicks plays…
A New Map of Love by Abi Oliver* brings readers an old-fashioned life-in-an-English-village story about George, who leads a predictable but comfortable life until his wife, Win, dies. Life is suddenly a whole lot less predictable but a whole lot more exciting, especially widow Sylvia arrives on the scene with her heaving bosom and fluttering…
A perennial festival favourite, the Lavazza Italian Film Festival screens at Palace Cinemas around Australia in September. Italian/Australian actor Greta Scacchi is on board as this year’s Festival Ambassador. She’ll be participating in Q&As at selected festival screenings of Tenderness (La Tenerezza), Gianni Amelio’s latest film, in which Scacchi features. The opening night film is…
A relentless, super intelligent mind puzzle, which gets better and better as the stakes grow, this is one of the year’s best offerings. Based upon Herman Koch’s 2009 international bestselling novel – which has been published in more than 50 countries – The Dinner is a dark, suspenseful drama about the lengths people will go…
