Alliance Française is back to delight Australian film-lovers and Francophiles with the 28th edition of the French Film Festival, running through March and April with a showcase of the best in French cinema from the past year. Opening in Sydney on 7 March and wrapping in Adelaide on 23 April, the festival will present screenings…
Fifty shades of bland? This offbeat film exploring a sadomasochistic relationship between two women in an unnamed community of women situated somewhere in Europe has hit local cinemas in the wake of more sexually explicit films like Blue is the Warmest Colour and Nymphomaniac, as well as a couple of other more risible films exploring…
This laboured, overlong comedy inverts the premise behind What Women Want, the 2000 rom-com starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. In What Men Want, Taraji P Henson plays Ali, a self-absorbed and ambitious agent working in the male-dominated world of sports management. While she represents a number of Olympic athletes, she hasn’t got an NBA,…
The life-changing influence of platonic female relationships rarely gets covered in fiction, and for this alone Seven Lies deserves a tip of the hat. It’s not a subject matter many writers have invested in and anyone who has ever been or spent time around a teenage girl would know that the connections young women make…
Forty years on, the winner of 11 Tony Awards remains so much rambunctious fun. This all-new Australian production stars five-time Helpmann Award winner Paul Capsis in the lead role of Albin. By his side is renowned singer and actor Michael Cormick (Beauty and The Beast, The Phantom of The Opera) as husband Georges. Georges and the flamboyant,…
It’s only if you read the additional notes at the end that you learn Joshua Cohen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Netanyahus is loosely based on a true story. How loosely is up to the reader to decide but it does shine a light on key figures in the history of modern Israel, not just prime…
Confession time…. I hate interactive/immersive theatre and I’m not much of a zombie fan. Yet I didn’t hate Directors of the Extraordinary’s Containment. This zombie adventure game sees the Brisbane Powerhouse transformed into a paramilitary-protected private research facility. Scientists have been weaponising a contagion that zombifies humans… until there was a leak in the lab….
Aardman has a rich history of creating fine animated features in movies like Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep. Although Early Man – the largest Aardman production mounted in its 40-plus year history – isn’t up there with the best of them, it still has its moments. Set in prehistoric times, the film follows the story of…
Lady Bird and the Fox by Kim Kelly is one of the best historical fiction titles I’ve read in a long time, a claim boosted by the familiarity I felt with the setting (not far from where I grew up). This is the blurb: It’s 1868 and the gold rush is spreading across the wild…
Eddie Redmayne won the Oscar last year for his portrayal of brilliant scientist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. He now has the chance to go back to back after another Academy Award nominated turn as artist Einar Wegener, later Lili Elbe, in The Danish Girl. Redmayne stars opposite Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina) –…
