I love a good psychological suspense novel, especially edge-of-the-seat stories. Bone By Bone by Sanjida Kay hooked me so deeply, I read it in one sitting. Here’s the blurb: Laura is making a fresh start. Newly divorced and relocated to Bristol, she is carving a new life for her and her nine-year-old daughter, Autumn. But things aren’t going…
For a long time local filmmaker Lawrence Johnston (Life) has been fascinated with neon, and he even managed to include images of neon lights into his documentaries Eternity and the whimsical Night. But now he has made a carefully researched feature length documentary exploring the heritage, design and history of neon and neon lighting. While…
What a delightful and engaging comedy, which moves along at pace and is entertaining throughout. Tommaso (Marco Giallini) is a respected heart surgeon, although his relationship with the “heart” is limited to the operating room because his hard-nosed manner is hardly endearing to patients, their families or his students. Nevertheless, he is a highly capable…
A disturbing drama about a smart but wayward 17-year-old boy, Is This The Real World is the independently made first feature from Melbourne-based writer and director Martin McKenna. Mark Blazey (Sean Keenan from Puberty Blues) is part of a chaotic family – a heavily tattooed older brother, Jimmy (Matt Colwell), who is always in trouble…
Much-buzzed-about band Whitney have released their debut album, Light Upon the Lake, on Secretly Canadian via Inertia. This follows on the heels of recent inescapable single “No Woman” and a notable trip to SXSW. Light Upon the Lake marks the culmination of a short, but incredibly intense, creative period for the band. Whitney was born…
A harrowing and dramatic story based upon fact, Belinda Giblin gives the performance of her life in what could well be the role of her life. Blonde Poison is an award winning, singled handed play about beauty, treachery and the high price of survival. Stella Goldschlag (Giblin) was living illegally in war-torn Berlin when she…
This queen of the desert is not a bus named Priscilla. Rather she is a modern thinking, fiercely independent, headstrong and intelligent British woman named Gertrude Bell who is apparently right up there with the famed T E Lawrence as an important figure in contemporary Arab history. An explorer, writer, archaeologist and traveller, she had…
This thriller about an unusual hostage situation is a sort of Dog Day Afternoon for the post GFC crowd. It also plays to our own innate suspicion and distrust of financiers, bankers and corporate executives who deal in hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, both large and small, but who are rarely held accountable…
Bigger than Ben Hur when it comes to tricks on a grand scale, three of the original four magicians return for a second installment of hijinks and thrills. That about sums up Now You See Me 2, with Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and Dave Franco joined by Lizzy Caplan (who replaces Isla Fisher) to form…
Now reworked, with a new creative team, this play was the first performed by The Owl and Cat Theatre, when Gabrielle Savrone and Thomas Ian Doyle took over the venue from Jason Cavanagh at the start of last year. A woman, a playwright, has been married for eight years but has fallen deeply in love…
