After a 19-year hiatus, the emotion charged, highly acclaimed production of Romeo and Juliet by choreographer John Cranko takes centre stage at Arts Centre Melbourne. It has power, passion and playfulness and introduces a new generation of The Australian Ballet Dancers. They are headlined by Callum Linnane and Sharni Spencer in the lead roles on opening night. In…
As a long-time fan of Kate Forsyth, I was thrilled to received an ARC of her new novel, Beauty in Thorns. This passionate and compassionate re-imagining of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale is centred on the Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets in England, and sweeps readers up into their lives, loves, losses, desires and dreams. This is how the…
A feel-good road trip, The Peanut Butter Falcon concerns a couple of outcasts who take to each other like ducks to water. A down-on-his-luck fisherman and a young man bent on achieving an impossible dream make their way down the waterways of a mythical American South. At a loose end since the death his brother,…
Time and tide wait for no man, they say. In the sci-fi drama Synchronic, a chemist invents a time travel drug that sends people back. It has greatest impact on those with young minds. They’re the most inclined to be high … and what a trip it sends them on. Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis…
In his seventh year at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Michael Shafar is laid back and effortlessly funny. In short, the 33-year-old knows how to entertain a crowd, as howls of laughter ring out throughout his hour-long standup routine, where nothing is sacred. He is clever and ribald and risqué. Home base – formerly Melbourne – is…
Dear Son is a powerful piece of theatre that deserves full houses every night. It stars five Indigenous male actors who not only perform the work but embody the sentiments presented. The play has its roots in the book of the same name by Thomas Mayo, in which 13 Indigenous men wrote letters to their…
Woman in Gold is a wonderful and sometimes touching film. Not because of the topic as this was already highlighted in The Monuments Men, but because of the brilliant rendition Helen Mirren is showing here. A role that suits her perfectly. A distinguished elderly lady who’s a descendant of a wealthy Jewish family and who…
May December is a richly layered, melodramatic but deliberately ambiguous character study from director Todd Haynes (Carol). The film was inspired by the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a 34-year-old schoolteacher who was convicted of abusing her 13-year-old student. After completing her jail sentence for statutory rape, she married her teenage victim and started…
The highly political German drama In Times of Fading Light concerns the end of an era and personal tragedies associated with it. It’s 1989, and the days of the GDR are numbered. The structures of East Germany are giving in to the pressures of the West. But in the living room of the Powileits, time…
Hero or villain? Richard Jewell, the movie, answers that question about the chief suspect in the Centennial Park bombing in 1996. That incident killed two people and left more than 100 injured. On 27th July that year, during the Atlanta Olympics, security guard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) discovers a suspicious backpack hidden under a bench…
