The second longest running play (excluding musicals) in London’s West End, The Woman in Black is no neatly packaged fairy story. It is a dark tale of despair and revenge. It concerns a man driven to tell his truth after the death of an elderly and reclusive widow, Mrs Alice Drablow. I speak of Arthur Kipps (John Waters),…
Double act author A J Rich (Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment) build on themes introduced in the classic 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, also known as Dangerous Liaisons. I’ve seen the 1988 film version and the play – both are fascinating – so I had high hopes for The Hand That Feeds…
The best horror films have featured nasty boogeymen who haunt our dreams. In the 80s we had the likes of Michael Myers, Freddie Krueger and Jason Vorhees. More recently we’ve had the apparitions of The Babadook and It Follows to creep us out. Now director David F Sandberg gives us a chilling creation that plays…
Where have all the indies gone? The days when the likes of Steven Soderbergh or Hal Hartley were delivering idiosyncratic but exciting films seems a world away. With the rise of franchises and “sequel-itis”, a lot of American indie movies seem to have been squeezed out of cinema real estate. But occasionally one sneaks through,…
From the outer reaches of space to the backwoods of Georgia, the hunt goes on in Shane Black’s reboot of the Predator series. Black, who directed Lethal Weapon and wrote Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, played the role of Hawkins in 1987’s original Predator. Here, he directs from a script he penned with Fred Dekker (RoboCop…
Cyrano is a massive triumph. The MTC production of the season. A talented cast, headlined by writer and star Virginia Gay prove that the pen is mightier than the sword. This is a contemporary rewrite of the classic play by Edmond Rostand about a French army soldier and gifted poet with a particularly large nose enamoured…
Energetic, powerful and haunting – such is Spring Awakening. This is a musical journey from adolescence to adulthood set in Germany in 1891. Teenagers struggle with the adversity of coming of age at a time when sexual education is deliberately ignored and adults appear to hold all the cards. The focus is on Wendla Bergmann (Jessie-Lou…
The Rasputin Affair is a new Australian play by Kate Mulvany. The play is concerned with the assassination, in December 1916, of Rasputin; a Russian peasant, semi-literate monk and mystic, who exercised extraordinary power over the last of the ruling Romanoff family: Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra. There is a note in the…
Imagine if the world had all but come to an end and you were the last person left on Earth. Global warming has sparked a hellfire and only you survived – at least until now. Your demise is but days away. You are 33 years of age. Tortured images grip what little sleep you get. You continue to…
Writer and director JT Mollner (Outlaws and Angels) crafts a tightly wound, stylish, horror-thriller with Strange Darling. Shot entirely on 35 mm, it’s one of the most compelling movies I’ve seen in a long time. It concerns a serial killer with a kink who operated in the US between 2018 and 2020. More specifically, it…
