Director Egor Abramenko delivers a creepy creature-feature with Sputnik. It starts with two cosmonauts planning to return to Earth, but quickly morphs into something else entirely. It’s 1983. After a Soviet space mission returns into barren Kazakhstan, the support team find one of the intrepid travellers hasn’t make it and the other – the commander…
You can’t say Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo doesn’t wear his influences on his sleeve. On last year’s self-titled (White Album) everything pointed to the Beach Boys, from “California Kids” and “L.A. Girls” to “Endless Bummer,” and that Brian Wilson spark can still be heard on Pacific Daydream. On “Beach Boys,” Cuomo admits it’s a hip hop…
Slingsby’s production of Oscar Wilde’s The Young King (adapted for the stage by Nicki Bloom) is a deceptively simple but lusciously layered show. That is once the acclaimed Adelaide theatre company’s show actually starts as before the audience makes it into the theatre space, things begin with an immersive entry process through the Cremorne Theatre…
Finnish author Cristina Sandu has translated her own second novel The Union of Synchronised Swimmers, her first to be published in English. This work is almost a work of micro fiction. In a novella of just over one hundred pages, Sandu tells six separate stories and then provides connective tissue between them. The story that…
The Ritual is a British horror that takes place in a Swedish forest where four friends go on a hike in honor of a deceased friend. After seeing so many films where a dark forest provides terrifying and life-threatening situations, I made a decision. I’ll never spend a weekend somewhere in a forest far from…
“You’re doing really well … I love you so much,” Simon tells his partner Emily as Naked & Screaming opens to a familiar birth scene scenario – ironic, given the story that will unfold in the following 80 minutes that marks La Boite Theatre’s return. Naked and Screaming may well describe how their baby Dylan…
Cassandra Austin’s debut All Fall Down was a sometimes dreamlike Australian gothic tale set in a rural country town. While it is at times a little more grounded, her latest book Like Mother, finds Austin in similar territory. An Australian country town in the late 1960s in the middle of a heatwave and a set…
What should you do when making a film of a world-famous book by Agatha Christie and a large part of the audience knows the ending already? Well, the best thing you do is to gather a star cast and using the necessary digital magic tricks to ensure a wow effect. Whether this is enough in…
Filmmaker Guy Ritchie gathers together most of his usual band of players for Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. And this action-packed but cliched globe-trotting spy movie ticks all the right boxes for the genre. When a mysterious device (the film’s MacGuffin) is stolen from a secret laboratory MI6 needs to act quickly to recover it…
Justice or revenge? If someone close to you was murdered, what would you want and what would happen if you didn’t get what you wanted? That conundrum is at the heart of this thriller. I like a good police whodunit, an involving mystery that entangles you until the final frames. You might think you have…
