A turgid, moody snore fest is in store for those who venture out to see Angelina Jolie’s second film as a writer and third as director (fourth if you count the documentary A Place in Time). She also happens to star in it (and produces it) alongside her husband Brad Pitt, but even two actors…
Four hours before he is due for execution, Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) is visited by a priest (Adrian Lukas). In this black comedy, Becket proceeds to calmly relay his sordid story to Father Morris. Becket’s mother, Mary (Nell Williams), was heir to a family fortune worth US$18 billion – $19 billion. But when she fell…
Canadian author J.M. Miro’s Ordinary Monsters, a gaslamp fantasy with powered children at a secret school, an implacable enemy and an inimical other-world has plenty of obvious antecedents. But Miro has managed to spin these familiar elements into an enjoyable, tense and sometimes surprising narrative. A glowing blue baby is rescued from a train carriage…
Youth drug culture may not sound like the material to make a short but compelling musical out of, but the reality is quite the opposite in 21 Chump Street. Firstly, the story is not only relevant, but it reflects upon a scourge of our age. Secondly, the way it has been written and is performed gives it…
Egyptian-born Akmal emigrated to Australia with his family when he was 11 years of age. From the roof of his 20-storey apartment building in Cairo he could see the pyramids and the sphinx. Imagine what it was like then when his parents took him to see the Big Banana in Queensland. That is just one of the…
She’s a YouTube sensation on her first trip Down Under and judging by the reception she received the night I attended her one-woman show at The Alex Theatre in Melbourne, she’s also a massive crowd magnet and audience pleaser. I speak of Diva impersonator extraordinaire, diminutive, playful and big voiced Christina Bianco – a woman…
Tasmanian-born Errol Flynn was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s, and the swashbuckling star of action films like Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood dominated the box office. The charismatic and handsome movie icon also had a reputation as a hard-drinking cavalier womaniser and a hell-raiser off-screen….
Lee Alexander McQueen set the fashion world alight when he burst onto the scene. He was also deeply troubled through various periods of his life. The beautifully shot and illustrated McQueen is a sanitised version of that life. The youngest of six children, he was born in a working-class London neighbourhood in 1969. His family…
A glorious spoken and sung hoot, this is an audacious retelling of Pride & Prejudice. Just what would author Jane Austen have thought of it? I dare say she would be figuratively rolling around the aisles, just like the rest of us. Scottish playwright Isobel McArthur simply goes “bang” and wows us, time and again…
It is such a cliché, but trust the magnificent wordsmith in Joanna Murray-Smith to give it so much edge and polish. I speak of an older man leaving his long-term wife for a younger woman. In this case, it is a feted journalist married to a writer – a poet, no less. She gave up…
