Pain informed the work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954), who’s best known for her self-portraits. For her, life was always precarious, but it was only after a tragic accident that the idea of becoming an artist crystalised. The art-house documentary Frida: Viva La Vida gives us rare insight into Kahlo’s tumultuous life,…
Grab your tuning forks, sequin vests and spirit fingers: the Barden Bellas are back to serenade us in Pitch Perfect 2. The clever followup to 2012’s runaway smash Pitch Perfect, this sequel reunites the core acapella afficionados for their senior college year after their win at the national titles. The troupe suffer a global fall…
Eleanor’s Secret by Caroline Beecham is part mystery, part love story, and proved just right for a couple nights’ winter reading. Here’s the blurb: London, 1942 When art school graduate, Eleanor Roy, is recruited by the War Artists Advisory Committee, she comes one step closer to realising her dream of becoming one of the few…
Turning Agatha Christie murder mysteries into popular cinema is proving quite lucrative. So it’s not surprising that for the third time Kenneth Branagh has teamed with writer Michael Green to adapt Christie’s late (1969) novel Hallowe’en Party for A Haunting in Venice. The unsettling supernatural thriller follows the success of Murder on the Orient Express…
Lovers of classical ballet and dancing have been well served recently with a number of documentaries about famous choreographers and dancers, and there is the wonderful animated film Ballerina due to hit cinemas shortly. In the meantime we have this documentary about Ukraine-born ballet dancer Sergei Polunin, a prodigiously talented dancer who was at one…
Cross 1989’s Tom Hanks’ comedy Turner and Hooch with Best in Show and you should have the makings of one hot-diggity-dog of a film. But potential is one thing – and the realisation of Show Dogs is something else entirely. The film features a cast of talking canine characters, including the hero Max (voiced by…
Back when I was reviewing for Brisbane’s Spectrum radio show I created the “Scottie” Awards. They were based entirely on my taste in entertainment and collated basically as a tribute the people who gave me a lot of pleasure and whose work I admire. This year I have decided to revive this annual event. So…
The Tick is a show I love a bit too much. I don’t know why exactly, but I enjoy it more enthusiastically than I perhaps should. Maybe it’s the fact that this light-hearted series plays with the tropes of the superhero genre in a Deadpool-like way. Or maybe it’s the assured writing and direction. Or…
Night Slows Down, is a new Australian play, by Phillip James Rouse. It is an ambitious play, with a flashback set of scenes interpolated into the forward action of the narrative, that attempts to illustrate the modern political world where the Nationalistic/Fascist tendencies of a government can lead to overwrought and misconceived expressions of power,…
Come From Away is a brilliantly composed, intense and emotional musical. So much so, that it gets me every time. When I first saw it, I thought I had seen nothing like it. Now, several years later, having attended several productions, I feel the same way. Perhaps that is why I keep coming back to…
