Hot on the heels of the far more serious Trumbo comes another paean to Hollywood in the 1950s, in the form of the Coen brothers’ manic comedy, Hail, Caesar!. If you’re a fan of the movies from that period, this film will be unmissable. For everyone else though, I suspect there’s likely to be a…
Slow moving but compelling, Felix and Meira is a Canadian drama concerns a young, unhappy Hasidic wife and mother, Meira (Hadas Yaron), who wants more out of life than the cards she has been dealt. She finds the strictures of her ultraorthodox upbringing are choking her vitality. Meira likes lively popular music – much to…
There have been many film versions of Shakespeare’s bloodiest and most cinematic play, from Orson Welles’ idiosyncratic 1948 version through to Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood in 1961, which reinvented the play as a samurai drama. More recently Australian director Geoffrey Wright (Romper Stomper) gave us a more contemporary take on the play, setting the…
10 years is a long time between albums, so Scheherazade is a true welcome back to the simple folky rooted songs from Catherine Ann Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean of Freakwater. For some, this reunion is something special as their 1995 record, Old Paint, is always an album you may hear listed as helping put…
Legend certainly won’t be remembered as a brilliant gangster movie. You certainly can’t compare it with a gangster epos like The Godfather or The Untouchables. This film about the notorious Kray twins surely exhibits a successful retro look and shows how the brothers founded their business empire full of glamor and violence, and how it…
Castaway in space? That one line essentially sums up the plot of this sci-fi drama that heralds a return to form for director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, The Duellists, etc). Not long after playing an astronaut stranded on an inhospitable planet in the bloated Interstellar, Matt Damon returns as an astronaut stranded in space on…
If you like books that warm your heart, make you cry and want to read it all over again, Our Song by Dani Atkins might just hit the spot. Here’s the blurb: This is the story of Ally and Charlotte, whose paths have intersected over the years though they’ve never really been close friends. Charlotte…
This March a brand new event will be bringing folk music to the inner western suburbs of Sydney and it looks pretty exciting. The brand new Summer Hill Folk Festival is set to take place at the Summer Hill Church on Saturday 5th March. The line-up for the festival is impressive, bringing together some of…
A slow-moving British adult drama about a couple in the twilight of their lives, 45 Years features outstanding performances from Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. Married for 45 years, without children, Kate Mercer (Rampling) and husband Geoff (Courtenay) are poised to celebrate their wedding anniversary with a party in a week’s time. They couldn’t do…
One for the American Bible Belt, Risen is the story of the resurrection as told through the eyes of a non-believer. Clavius (Joseph Fiennes), a powerful Roman military leader and his aide, Lucius (Tom Felton), are tasked with solving the mystery of what happened to Jesus (referred to by the Hebrew name Yeshua) in the…
