Directors Elaine Bogan and Ennio Torresan deliver a charming and colourful animation in DreamWorks’ Spirit Untamed. The story concerns a feisty 13-year-old girl and a wild horse. The youngster is Lucky Prescott (the voice of Isabela Merced), who is being brought up by her aunt Cora (Julianne Moore), in a prim and proper household, governed…
The Arab Film Festival offers a selection of some of the best contemporary cinema from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The Festival commences screenings from July 21 in Sydney. The opening night attraction is the romantic comedy Halal Love. We spoke to festival director Fadia Abboud about this year’s lineup of films. Last year the…
Jean Hanff Korelitz’s last book, The Plot, was a morality play on the issue of authorship and the use of ideas. Some of those concerns come into play in her latest book The Latecomer, but they are dealt with in a very different mode and in a much richer and deeper scenario. The Latecomer is…
Calendar Girls was a real hoot when it came out as a movie featuring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters in 2003. I wish I could say the same about the play I saw at the Athenaeum Theatre – but in all good conscience I can’t. Tim Firth adapted the script from his hit film, which…
After a break of 16 years (since 2006’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Road), award winning author Cormac McCarthy returns with a pair of connected novels. The first of these is The Passenger – centring on salvage diver Bobby Western. McCarthy sets the scene with a suicide, an event that is central to Bobby’s life. This…
Nearly 25 years after Gladiator, Ridley Scott has gone back to the well… and this time there are sharks in the Colosseum. In Gladiator II, Russell Crowe, who played Maximus in the original, is only seen in a couple of quick throwback scenes. But even with the focus squarely on his son, Lucius (Paul Mescal),…
Fans of Americana with a long enough memory, will remember The Jayhawks as one of the best bands of the mid-90’s, when albums like Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass thrived critically and commercially thanks to the strong songwriting and harmony vocals of Gary Louris and Mark Olson. “Blue” is perhaps the best…
Not since the ground-breaking show Empire in 2013 have I been so totally engrossed in the daring do and dexterity of performers at the very top of their game in an intimate environment. That is what you get when you enter the beautiful, 120-seat, 97-year-old Spiegeltent, uncovered in Belgium, that has now taken pride of…
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the cinema, along comes another shark thriller in the form of The Shallows. Ever since Steven Spielberg gave us the summer blockbuster with Jaws in 1975, great white sharks have been given something of a bad reputation by Hollywood filmmakers. The success of Jaws…
Scintillating, fast paced, brilliantly choreographed Irish tap dancing. A strong, rhythmic, ear-pleasing score. Maestros on the fiddle and flute. Elegant and evocative costumes. Mesmersing magic. That is Celtic Illusion Reimagined. This dynamic, spicy and intoxicating hour and a half stage show (excluding interval) is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Celtic Illusion, the vision of creator, director,…
