What is real and what is imagined? What if you firmly – hand on heart – believe something to be true and you act accordingly? These are questions dealt with in the ambitious new experience The Door in Question, part of the Sleepless Footscray Festival. It is about identity and psychosis and is the brainchild…
Family connections drive Tim Brown’s Australian-set drama Buckley’s Chance. Following the death of his beloved father, New York teen Ridley (Milan Burch) and his mother Gloria (Victoria Hill) travel across the world to spend time with the grandfather he has never known. Gloria hopes that the change of scenery and the new environment will help…
I cringe when I have to say this, but here is another one man against the world movie. Think quiet assassin. Action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Liam Neeson, Keanu Reeves and Jason Statham all do it. I speak of taking out hordes of adversaries on their own, while living to tell the tale….
A family movie about the impact of war on children, The Railway Children Return is a sequel 52 years in the making. It’s 1944 and a new wave of German bombing has British families on edge. Parents scramble to get their children onto steam trains bound for the country to families who will care for…
An indigenous lad (Aswan Reid) reshapes the lives of those living at a remote monastery in 1940s Australia in Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy. The outback facility serves as a mission for Aboriginal children. It’s run by a feisty, renegade nun, Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett). At the time only men could operate missions. But the…
I am fast running out of superlatives with which to describe the choice of material, the interpretations and the staging of plays at the Owl and Cat Theatre. Gabrielle Savrone, a director and Thomas Ian Doyle, a playwright and director, took over the space in Swan Street, Richmond only 18 months ago. In that time…
While I sincerely wish it weren’t so, the power struggles the proliferate globally ensure that Shake & Stir’s brilliant adaptation of George Orwell’s prescient and dystopian novel 1984 appear chillingly real. We are in Oceania, where Big Brother rules with an iron fist. What BB says goes. If he says 2 + 2 = 5,…
In May, Palace Cinemas will once again bring the best of American independent film to Australian screens with American Essentials. Twenty films will make their Australian premiere—many hot on the heels of their world premieres at A-list festivals around the world—as the three-week festival tours five cities, celebrating the latest indie treasures in narrative feature…
I never thought I would ever ask the following question: “Mr. Scott, could you draw a line under the whole Alien franchise and concentrate on other projects? Please?“. As an Alien fan of the first order, I was deeply disappointed about this film. In hindsight I thought Exodus: Gods and Kings was even better. It’s…
In 2013 Canadian director Dennis Villeneuve gave us the tough and taut claustrophobic thriller Prisoners (starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal), which made many critics’ lists of the best films of the year. He returns with Sicario, a powerful, hard hitting and gritty thriller that takes a look at the US’s war on drugs. It…
