Light-hearted and fun, Footloose: The Musical is centred around change in conservative America in the 1980s. Navigating it, especially when it is forced upon you, can be mighty difficult, especially when it leaves you feeling like a fish out of water. That is the situation for the central figure in the story, Ren McCormack. About…
Merce Lemon is a Pittsburgh-based artist whose musical journey has been shaped by the community and culture of her hometown. Growing up in a creative family and surrounded by a supportive music scene, Merce has been part of local shows for years, often performing with her parents’ friends and, at times, alongside her father and…
Australian author Robert Gott is best known for two series of historical crime novels. The first of these features Richard Power, a bumbling Shakespearean actor during World War 2. His latest book Naked Ambition, is contemporary but features at its centre a similar deluded, self-aggrandizing character who seems determined to hoist himself by his own…
Australian director Craig Gillespie continues his successful foray into American film with Dumb Money. The film showcases Gillespie’s fast-paced directorial style in a David vs Goliath story that replaces slingshots with sub-Reddits. For whatever reason, Gillespie seems to be attracted to stories that say something about America and its people. That was certainly the case…
Turning Agatha Christie murder mysteries into popular cinema is proving quite lucrative. So it’s not surprising that for the third time Kenneth Branagh has teamed with writer Michael Green to adapt Christie’s late (1969) novel Hallowe’en Party for A Haunting in Venice. The unsettling supernatural thriller follows the success of Murder on the Orient Express…
Australian science fiction and thriller author Max Barry has done arcane conspiracies (Lexicon), satire (Jennifer Government) and space wars (Providence) so it is perhaps no surprise that he has moved on to multiple world theory in his latest book The 22 Murders of Madison May. With its delightfully onomatopoeic title, the book is based on…
This is the third feature length documentary from Oscar winning director Asif Kapadia, who previously gave us the superb, well-researched and insightful documentaries Amy (2015), about the late singer Amy Winehouse, and Senna (2010), about the late Formula 1 race driver Ayrton Senna, which were two of the finest documentaries of the past decade. For…
Every Secret Thing is a meagre attempt to create a thriller full of suspense. The inspiration came from a book written by Laura Lippman. Usually a story about missing children makes you feel uncomfortable and tells about the most terrible thing that can happen to you as a parent. However, I would recommend to watch…
A sensitive and endearing tale that links three unlikely people – a student, a baker and an elderly woman – this Japanese movie was a selection for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival. The title, An, refers to a sweet red bean paste, which is a favourite in Japan. Taciturn Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase)…
Scientific subterfuge is at the centre of a gripping drama concerning the secret of life. We’re in London in the 1950s. Photograph 51 pivots around one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, no nonsense English woman Rosalind Franklin (Nadine Garner), who lived from 1920 to 1958. Franklin was a workaholic who was driven…
