Racism comes in many forms and from many quarters and can strike with the speed of a bullet train. That subject is explored in a dramatic and humorous way through a series of anecdotes from the coloured English daughter of West Indian parents. Her mother is an actress and her father a mathematician, who migrated to Australia….
Love. Oil. Economic freedom. We come full circle from when oil was first discovered until it runs out in this drama with dystopian elements, appropriately named Oil. We move through five-time frames, from Cornwall in 1889 and Tehran in 1908 to Hampstead in 1970 in the first act, then Baghdad in 2021 and back to…
Readers will enjoy a piece of Australian Gothic with Luke Devenish’s novel, The Secret Heiress. Here’s the blurb: A fabled house. A fabulous fortune. Beautiful, identical twins … Dark shadows fall across the golden summer of 1886. Naive country girl Ida Garfield longs to escape the farm. When Miss Matilda Gregory, the elegant mistress of Summersby House,…
People and cultures collide in David Leitch’s literally fast-paced action thriller, Bullet Train. Leitch (Deadpool 2) uses his stylised but often profuse violence to great effect in this rollicking tale of intersecting characters and agendas. And while the film is hardly cerebral, I found myself swept along by it. Screenwriter Zak Olkewicz adapts Kôtarô Isaka’s…
It’s one of those vagaries of film distribution that we sometimes get two films released at the same time with similar plots and ideas. Within the space of a couple of weeks we get two road trip movies. Both feature two people on a journey through some of Europe’s most picturesque areas. They sample the history, culture…
Charming, quirky and humorous, Microbe and Gasoline is a delightful little film about a couple of adolescent outsiders determined to forge their own path. Microbe (Ange Dargent) is 14. A talented artist with his long hair, he is often mistaken for a girl, but he doesn’t fit in and he knows it. So, he’s a…
Opposites attract, repel, and attract again in the French comedy Two Tickets to Greece. In 1989, brash teenager Magalie and conservative Blandine were besties at school. An argument over a boy saw an end to that and Magalie moved away. Now, three decades on and two years after her husband left her, radiology technician Blandine…
American playwright, Lisa D’Amour wrote Detroit in 2010 for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, which was awarded to Clybourne Park, by Bruce Norris. The play is set in the backyards of two next-door-neighbours, in the first ‘ring’ of suburbia, now, and, although, the play is…
If you thought abusive communications were a recent thing, think again. Humans have unfortunately been sending horrible correspondence to each other basically since writing began. In the late 19th Century, these nasty notes were given a name: poison pen letters. Now they’ve largely disappeared – thanks to the Internet – replaced by the equally nasty…
Triple X is an honest and moving love story that is powerful and entertaining. Scotty (Josh McConville) is living the dream. A successful Wall Street banker, he is about to marry his beautiful and rich girlfriend. On the eve of their wedding, his family descends on his recently purchased multi-million dollar Tribeca loft. There are philosophical…
