A delightful, poignant, funny, uplifting play with music, The Heartbreak Choir charms its way into our hearts. It features a bunch of quintessential country town Aussies and a Zimbabwean-born immigrant. Barbara (Maude Davey) is the leader of the local choir, which has just had an acrimonious spilt, the reason for which is only revealed as the play…
The offspring of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) trying to resolve deep-seated familial issues is front and centre in this official close of the Skywalker odyssey. A largely masked Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is given the opportunity to be the unchallenged galaxy leader, with power and control…
The ‘50s and ‘60s continue to resonate as Shake Rattle ‘N’ Roll gives us a cavalcade of song, movement and colour. The fuse is re-lit and burns for more than two hours, thanks to a poised, polished and preened cast of four singers and 10 dancers. The pretence is the re-creation of famous, gravelly voiced American DJ…
History shown through the gentle, softening eyes of love – that’s what to expect with Anita Heiss’s latest read, Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms. Here’s the blurb: Over 1000 Japanese soldiers break out of the No.12 Prisoner of War compound on the fringes of Cowra. In the carnage, hundreds are killed, many are recaptured, and…
A moral conundrum and the consequences choice are at the heart of The Commuter. This is the fourth collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and Liam Neeson (after Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night). Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a 60-year-old middle manager at a faceless insurance company. Like so many hard-working family men, he’s at financial breaking point. His son…
An erotic psychological drama starring Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes and Dakota Johnson, A Bigger Splash is a loose remake of Jacques Deray’s seductive 1969 film called La Picerne, which starred Alain Delon. Director Luca Guadagnino (better known for the gorgeous and visually sumptuous I Am Love) and writer David Kajganich (the dire Nicole Kidman sci-fi…
“Have you ever wanted to solve a murder? Gather the clues the police overlooked? Put together the pieces? Identify the suspect?” Where have we heard of this writer? For this reviewer, it is due to the riveting new true crime podcast, The Murder Squad, which Jensen co-hosts with former police detective, Paul Holes. The two…
There’s Always Tomorrow is a bittersweet story about a family of six. The film is set in Rome in the mid-1940s, after the Liberation. But the war has left misery in its aftermath. The primary focus is on wife, Delia (played by Paola Cortellesi, who has co-written and directs the film). She and her family…
Churchill is a fascinating portrait of a man of high intellect who was facing a fight on two fronts in the final months of the Second World War. On the one hand there were the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men whose lives he was about to put on the line and then there…
A pushy tennis dad or a man on a mission? Or both? You can be the judge with Reinaldo Marcus Green’s biopic King Richard. The film follows Richard Williams’ (Will Smith) journey to bring child tennis prodigies Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena Williams (Demi Singleton) to the world stage. The focus of the film is Richard’s…
