The Queensland Ballet’s Dangerous Liaisons is not only a world premiere but it is also an amazing blockbuster of a show. The whole production just blew me away. It was the ballet’s premiere season and yet the choreography, the costumes and the music, made me feel I was watching an ageless classic. It was genius on…
Delivering all the flash and dash you’d expect, the alcohol-soaked pressure cooker environment of a glamorous location wedding sets the scene for grisly murder in Lucy Foley’s latest crime offering, The Guest List. The marriage of a television celebrity and a trailblazing magazine publisher demands something extra special. Bride to be Jules Keegan finds the…
Danish star Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt) virtually plays a lone hand in this grim tale of endurance and survival set in the frozen wastelands of the North Pole. Arctic recalls other survival dramas like All is Lost, in which Robert Redford played a lone role as a stranded sailor, or Cast Away with Tom Hanks…
The superior and effective Australian-produced horror film Talk To Me taps into the trope of a group of teens playing around with the supernatural and facing some nasty consequences (like Ouija, for example) but gives the familiar ideas a freshness. At a party in a small South Australian town, a group of teens play games…
Planting little seeds of doubt is what the stranger does. The wellbeing of those she informs is of little concern to her, and there are many she intends to make aware of the duplicity of their loved ones. Up until the time of his brief encounter with a woman previously unknown to him, Adam Price…
Bringing a story to life with poise, polish, precision and pizzazz is a fine art that few can master to the extent that they figuratively hold a room in the palm of one’s hand. But such is the craftsmanship of writer and performer Ralph McCubbin Howell, who has more than the odd trick up his…
We haven’t seen much from former film historian and critic turned director Peter Bogdanovich on the big screen for a long time, as he has spent much of the past two decades concentrating on tv movies and directing the odd music video and an occasional episode of The Sopranos. Bogdanovich was an auteur who made…
A film for fanboys, Black Adam is mired in mythology, which will be far more meaningful if you’ve read the DC comics. The film tells the story of Teth Adam, the slave who became champion, who becomes Black Adam (Dwayne Johnson). The action starts in the ancient city of Kahndaq, where Adam is enslaved before…
France’s nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, Mustang is, not surprisingly, a riveting drama about five beautiful Turkish girls whose lives are turned to hell by age-old practices. It is the start of the summer. In a remote village in the north of Turkey, Lale and her four older sisters come…
A gritty piece about the travails of an ageing Las Vegas showgirl and those around her, The Last Showgirl feels real. Back in the day, decades ago, Shelly (Pamela Anderson), was one of the headline acts in Le Razzle Dazzle, which was fashioned on erotic Paris shows, like the Lido. Now, at 57, she is…
