Senior high in the US in the late 1950s is re-energised in the colourful new production of Grease The Musical at Her Majesty’s Theatre. It is set in fictional Rydell High School (named after pop singer Bobby Rydell). That is where Australian blonde beauty Sandy Dumbrowski unexpected bumps into her summer love, the too cool for school,…
The Safdie brothers – Josh and Bennie – had success with their gritty crime drama Good Time. That film featured one of Robert Pattinson’s best performances. Now they bring us another tense, slow-burn thriller in Uncut Gems. Infused with their usual street-savvy edge, the film builds to an unexpected finale. The brothers bring a gritty…
One of the most complex and sophisticated animated features I have seen, Zootopia pits a high achiever rabbit alongside its natural predator, a cool and wily fox. The studio has a long and storied legacy of talking animals – from Mickey Mouse’s debut short, Steamboat Willie to Bambi, Dumbo, The Jungle Book and The Lion…
Juliette Binoche, Vincent Cassel, Yvan Attal, SMarion Cotillard and the incomparable Catherine Deneuve are just some of the big names Australian audiences will be able to see on screen at the 31st French Film Festival. Covering 8 cities and 4 satellite locations, the Festival kicks off on 10 March (running until 19 April ) with…
A crucible is a vessel in which substances are heated to high temperatures; when impure elements are melted away, only the pure parts remain. Metaphorically speaking, it therefore represents the perfect titular description for American playwright Arthur Miller’s award-winning classic The Crucible, a play which was itself written as an extended metaphor of the hysteria…
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,…
You know those books that pop up so often on your feeds that you begin to feel that the universe (and lots of very savvy literary publicists) would really like you to read them? This is how I came to read The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley. Having heard many good things, and with Foley’s…
First, a confession. I don’t believe I’ve seen any of the films in the Saw franchise before Jigsaw, the eighth in the series. The seventh, Saw 3D, came out in 2010. To date, the Saw films have grossed $874 million worldwide. And they’ve created one of the most influential horror villains of all time. The films follow…
Damon Galgut’s ninth novel The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize. Not having read all of the shortlisted novels it is hard to determine whether it was the best of the five. But there is no doubt that The Promise is a towering yet often intimate novel combining family drama and incisive character observation set…
Perhaps you are bit late to the party and have not yet powered through this most clever and British of TV series. You may think that reading a quick online review of the first season might get you up to speed fast enough but we wouldn’t want to rob you of the absolute pleasure that…
