The Second Mother is a film about a set of social rules, which have been in place in Brazilian culture since colonial times and which continue to affect its emotional architecture to this very day. Val (Regina Case) is the kind of live-in housekeeper who takes her work seriously. She wears a crisp maid’s uniform…
Written by Bryan Sipe (who also penned the recent adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ The Choice), Demolition is a rather downbeat and unpredictable drama dealing with death, grief, and the process of moving on. Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a hot shot financier whose wife is killed in a car crash. He goes into denial and…
With re-boots, re-writes and re-imaginings de rigeur these days, it’s not all that surprising that Robert Ludlum’s famous super-spy gets to have another go around in the eponymous Jason Bourne. This stylish thriller re-unites star Matt Damon with Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass. It hardly seems nine years since Ultimatum; but there…
Comedy, melodrama and hijinks abound in the Australian premiere of A Very Modern Marriage, a play previously only performed at the 2015 Hollywood Fringe Festival. There are frenzied and vitriolic arguments aplenty when a gay friend, Chris (Jayden Popik), moves in with a married couple – whose relationship is already on shaky ground – as they…
You would be hard pressed to find a more accomplished musical theatre performer on the big stage than Caroline O’Connor. In short, she is a league of her own. She sizzles. She is pure dynamite, the best of the best of the best. In almost every scene of Funny Girl, she struts, pouts and jiggles…
Like many of us, writer/director Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station) grew up watching Rocky movies. He did so with his father. It was their thing. But before he could reboot the franchise with Creed, he had to receive Sylvester Stallone’s blessing. Stallone, who stars in and is a producer of the film, had previously played one…
To borrow a phrase from this record’s boldest rocker, in a world dominated by American Idol Voices, Disney divas and flash in the pan pop star wannabes, the collaboration of k.d. lang, Neko Case and Laura Veirs proves to be one of the world’s best kept secrets. Of course, Canadian lang has had a long…
I received Lie With Me by Sabine Durrant (Remember Me This Way) from The Reading Room, started reading and didn’t stop. Here’s the blurb: “I suppose what I am saying is, how much do we collude in our own destruction? How much of this nightmare is on me? You can hate and rail. You can…
Whit Stillman (The Last Days of Disco) directs his own adaptation of an unfinished Jane Austen novella, titled Lady Susan, in Love & Friendship; a period comedy about matchmaking and heartbreak. Set in the opulent drawing rooms of eighteenth-century English society, Love & Friendship focuses on the delicious scheming and manipulations of a beautiful widow,…
In 1962 French filmmaker and auteur Francois Truffaut flew to Hollywood and sat down with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock, the “master of suspense”, for a series of extensive interviews. A former film critic for the influential French journal Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut had just begun to make his mark as a director himself with his…
