Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 27 September 2024. Kit Sebastian – composed of K. Martin and Merve Erdem – have released their latest album New Internationale. The duo wrote most of it on the road, energised by the sounds they discovered as they magpied…
A Dog’s Way Home is a family-friendly and heartwarming animal adventure that combines elements of classics of the genre like Lassie Come Home, Homeward Bound, and even 2017’s A Dog’s Purpose. As a pup Bella was raised in the crawl space beneath a dilapidated house in Denver. She was rescued by Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King), who…
It is a cliché to say politics is a dirty game. Suffice to say, The Long Game takes that truism and overlays it with the glass ceiling. Just what do women do or need to do to get to the top and what have men done since time immemorial and gotten away with? I am…
Weird and wacky Australian film noir, Burning Kiss is a psychedelic whodunnit in reverse. We know who committed the crime, but a disgraced former detective concocts a story to make himself look like a hero. It’s been six years since a hit-and-run incident put ex-cop Edmond Bloom (Richard Mellick) in a wheelchair and took the…
In 1843, German philosopher Karl Marx famously wrote that “religion is the opium of the people”. So, does religion exist to assuage the tough times? But so much about it can’t be explained. It just is. Think of a virgin birth for starters. And then how do you deal with the untold misery in the…
Pablo Neruda was the pen-name (and later legal name) of Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, who lived from July 12, 1904 to September 23, 1973. In 1971, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lyrical, poetic and steeped in politics, Neruda is what I would term a “festival” film; one for purists. It’s…
If Shakespeare had the vision of Nostradamus, he may well have foreseen The Merry Wives of Windsor being set in a 1980s Australian backyard. Nonetheless, director Viktor Kalka has made the geographic transition and it is an interesting concept, to say the least. Inspired by “The Bard’s” intention to make the play contemporaneous, Kalka creates one…
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…
Jim Cummings gives a bravura performance as a man on the edge in Thunder Road. This offbeat drama concerns a small-town US police officer who suffers a breakdown after the death of his mother. Cummings wrote and directed the piece, and appears in almost every scene. It’s based on his short film of the same…
So, you think you know the Cinderella story – the one about the poor “servant” to the evil stepmother and her taunting stepsisters? Well, think again, for the creatives behind the musical have shaken things up, even if the essence of the tale remains unchanged. “Yes”, Cinderella still gets to go to the ball and catch the…
