I entered the theatre really wanting to like the new Australian comedy The Last Parma Night, but I am afraid I didn’t even get close to doing so. In fact, I struggled greatly with it. It suffered from a slow start and, in my eyes, it never gained a foothold. The storyline concerns a bloke,…
JJ Abrams (Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek) is the man of the moment and he deserves all the recognition he will get. The visionary director (and co-screenwriter, in this case with Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt) has achieved what we all hoped he could with the reboot, or perhaps that should read refocus, of the…
Adoration for ABBA in Australia shows no signs of abating if the crowd at The ABBA Show at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne is anything to go by. The audience (of a certain age) turned back the clock as they danced, swung their arms in the air and frequently cat-called “Ya” as a group of two Brits…
Recently we saw Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur’s Everest, a dramatic and at times thrilling recreation of the tragedy that struck a group of climbers on Mount Everest in 1996. That film was enough to put you off climbing mountains for ever! Now Australian director Jennifer Peedom (Miracle On Everest, and she worked as high altitude…
A whip smart script, pacey dialogue and a couple of stellar performances distinguish this pulsating drama. Molly’s Game is based on the true story of Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), an Olympic-level skier who was forced to abandon her sport after a devastating injury. With law school on hold, Molly takes a job that introduces her…
Innovative and highly creative, east meets west in playwright Shane Woon’s love story about Chinese gods and AFL football. The Rabbit in the title is the Rabbit God Tu’er Shen (played by Sean Yuen Halley), the patron saint of queer people. Watson (Anton Pan-Cassin) is a budding AFL player, at age 22 on his last…
Taciturn American Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) is about to be interviewed in her London home. She questions why she should allow the interview to take place and then agrees on the condition that she can ask the interviewer some hard questions of her own. That (apparently) is Lee Miller to a tee – unapologetic, surly,…
Intense. Visceral. Passionate. Angry. Confronting. My instant reaction to a remarkable two-man show about art and what it means. It is the late 1950s. A master painter lets loose – doesn’t hold back – in “schooling” his assistant. In short, it is verbal diatribe of biblical proportions. Ken (Jordan Briggs) is like the cat that…
The British Film Festival celebrates the best of British with a line-up of 31 films, many of which are screening for the first time in Australia. This year’s event includes the best in contemporary cinema, documentaries and some of the most significant British films of the 1970s on the big screen. The Festival opens with…
The third and final installment in the Raymond Electromatic series, I Only Killed Him Once sees robot detective – turned gun for hire – in the fight of his “life”. “Life” requires a bit of wiggle room here as Raymond Electromatic is a robotic detective / hitman with a 24 hour long memory, and a…
