J M Barrie first created the character of Peter Pan, the boy who could fly and who never grew up, back in 1902. He then featured the character in the 1904 play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, which enjoyed incredible success. Since then the character has featured in several stories, and…
“She doesn’t answer. Death is never banal. If someone can live for more than fifty years without realising that, then it is beneath her dignity to teach them any better. ‘The water’s boiling. I’m making tea,’ she says. ‘Let’s talk later.’” Outside of Norway, Kjell Ola Dahl is perhaps best known for the Oslo Detective…
The sophomore feature from Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), The Nightingale offers up horrors of a different kind. Set in Tasmania in 1825, the film is a bloody, brutal and unflinching tale of revenge that also addresses the savage history of colonial Australia, the systemic abuse and mistreatment of women and the indigenous population. It makes…
Our Town, 1938 Thorton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ode to small-town American life, requires only minimal production values, with the playwright calling for no curtain, no scenery, and an empty stage in half-light. The play ignores most dramatic conventions. It is set in the actual theatre where it is being performed, but the year is, as…
Once seemingly a license to make money, the sheen seems to have worn off the superhero movie genre following a few disappointing films like The Marvels, Blue Beetle and the troubled The Flash. And now here comes what is, arguably, the nadir of the genre with this waterlogged sequel to 2018’s Aquaman. Aquaman and the…
I’m a big fan of Greta Gerwig. Along with the likes of Brit Marling and Natalie Portman, she’s part of the vanguard of women filmmakers who can literally do it all. As well as 40 acting credits, she has 10 writing credits under her belt. Now she makes her solo directorial debut with Lady Bird. This…
David Burton the playwright, was a lapsed Catholic who returned to worship when he discovered Fr Peter Kennedy’s breakaway congregation in the Trades and Labour Council hall in South Brisbane, just down the road from St Mary’s Church, in the late 2000s. Fr Kennedy had been a bit of a revolutionary pastor, welcoming gay and…
The Hunger Games franchise has so far grossed more than US$2.2 billion at the global box office. It is based upon the runaway success of the novel trilogy by Suzanne Collins, which was released between 2008 and 2010. Mockingjay Part 2 is the fourth and final movie in the series (the first came out in…
Dazzlingly frocked up, the seemingly ageless Rhonda Burchmore sizzles as the dastardly Carabosse in the delicious pantomime Sleeping Beauty, A Knight Avenger’s Tale. At one point she literally soars above the audience belting out Cher’s 1989 hit “If I Could Turn Back Time”. That’s one of several popular numbers that punctuate a familiar story with…
Feeling and sensitivity pervade every fibre of the sensual and artistic work by French auteur Céline Sciamma (Girlhood). We’re in Brittany, France in 1760. Slow-moving but compelling, Portrait of a Lady on Fire concerns a secretive and developing relationship between a painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her subject, Héloïse, (Adèle Haenel), who has just left…
