Partly Cloudy is the full-length debut from the enigmatic female dream pop/folk rock artist who is most comfortable sharing her deepest, most intimate thoughts from behind her somewhat mysterious cat face mask. Most of the 13 tracks here are rooted very closely to simple acoustic guitar folk rock, with producer Billy Mohler providing just enough…
In The Hate U Give, 16 year-old Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) is caught between two worlds. She lives with her African-American family in the ironically named Garden Heights, an impoverished black neighbourhood in Georgia; but she attends Wilmington Prep, a prestigious primarily white school in a more affluent neighbourhood. At school, Starr carefully protects her…
What would Aussie TV be without the luminous Claudia Karvan? We’ve seen her grow up on-screen to become one of our most loved and consistent stars on the box. She and producer John Edwards’s affiliation goes back to Network Ten’s The Secret Life of Us in 2001 and now along comes BUMP, the Stan series…
The excitement I felt while watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – a pivotal movie in my formative years – came flooding back while watching Unsane. A smart young woman seeks help after a stalker has made her life miserable for two years. But she’s inadvertently admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. The…
For those viewers who soaked in the glory and the drama that was the first two seasons of The Crown, this third season still has a lot to offer up. No need to be a royalist of any kind to enjoy this gorgeous production as the life and times of House Windsor holds up to…
Feeling and sensitivity pervade every fibre of the sensual and artistic work by French auteur Céline Sciamma (Girlhood). We’re in Brittany, France in 1760. Slow-moving but compelling, Portrait of a Lady on Fire concerns a secretive and developing relationship between a painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her subject, Héloïse, (Adèle Haenel), who has just left…
The Making of Christina by Meredith Jaffe is the first I’ve read by this author, but will not be the last. She’s taken the story of an intense, all-consuming affair to a confronting, evocative level. Here’s the blurb: Interior designer Christina Clemente is caught off guard by an intense affair with her charismatic client, Jackson…
A Trip To The Moon is the fourth full-length album from Ghost Funk Orchestra, the brainchild of producer and multi-instrumentalist Seth Applebaum. An immersive and playful song-cycle inspired by moon missions past and present, factual and fictional, the album adds new elements to their already diverse sound while retaining the funky, jazzy psych-soul sound that…
Speculative fiction often lives and dies by its premise. So long as the author can sell the premise and hold it together, speculative fiction has the capacity to open minds and deeply explore issues. Guy Morpuss’s debut novel Five Minds has what can only be described as a double speculative premise. On top of this…
One of the most anticipated films of last year was Rogue One, the latest stand alone film in the Star Wars franchise. While it doesn’t quite live up to the hype it is still a solid film that delivers plenty of action that won’t disappoint the die-hard fans of the series. This “stand alone” Star…
