Over the years I’ve read a few Lynda La Plante novels featuring DCI Jane Tennison. Actor Helen Mirren, who portrayed Tennison in the award-winning ITV television drama series Prime Suspect, described Tennison as “extremely directed, ambitious, talented and very uncompromising”. Fans of the series, both book and television, will know that although Tennison is an extremely skilled detective,…
Former Australian cricketer Brett Lee stars in this cross-cultural romantic comedy, the first production of the Australia India Film Fund. Beautiful divorcee and single mother of one, Meera (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is an Australian of Indian origin. Smart and independent, she has carved out a successful life for herself and her daughter … in the face…
A classic crime thriller, this is the story of Britain’s most notorious gangsters, Reggie and Ronnie Kray (both played by Tom Hardy), as they have the time of their lives, ruling over London in the midst of the Swinging Sixties. With Ronnie fresh out of prison, the brothers set about consolidating their power in the…
Mia Wasikowska and Jessica Chastain generally make good choices when it comes to accepting movie roles. Here, Wasikowska plays Edith, an aspiring author living with her highly regarded builder father in Buffalo, New York, at the dawn of the 20th century. She has grown up haunted (literally) by the loss of her mother. Cursed with…
Approximately twelve men have walked on the surface of the moon, but only one man has walked a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York. In 1974 Frenchman Phillippe Petit spent some 45 minutes 100 floors above the street, without a safety harness, enthralling New Yorkers who had gathered…
An enticing, exotic new theatrical concept has hit Melbourne with force … and the only shame is that you have very little time to see it before it will disappear. Called Bordello, it is a journey through a house of ill repute as we, the audience, are voyeurs to the fragile foundations that are the…
City and Colour’s latest release, If I Should Go Before You, is a full band effort and it shows. Formerly, Dallas Green (of Alexisonfire) was the primary creative force for City and Colour. I fell in love with 2013’s The Hurry and The Harm, which was a beautiful folk album marked by thoughtful lyrics, sweet…
It is 1991 and materialism lives. There’s tension in the house when four people spend time together in a chalet on Mount Buller, which the wealthy and bombastic owner – a psychologist and author – has just won as part of a bitter divorce settlement. He has had a Jacuzzi newly installed smack bang in…
My book club read books on ‘royals’ last month, and since this was on my review shelf, it was an easy choice. At the same time, I was watching TV series The Tudors, and the month before I’d finished Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I’m in Tudor overload! Here’s the blurb: Why would a woman marry a serial…
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…
