The slack rock from Wimps is a take back to simpler times when talking about your wretched living quarters, being the older and wiser one at a party or the temperature in the basement was the “it” thing. Those unassuming topics are what drives Suitcase and its quick undertone of punk that is smart, funny…
This live recording finds Nada Surf joining forces with the esteemed Potsdam, Germany-based orchestra Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg. Quite simply – indie rock meets strings! At this point in Nada Surf’s career, Peaceful Ghosts captures the perfect challenge for the quartet. Take an extensive catalogue that spans 24 years, whittle it down to 13 tracks, choose…
Wow! What a ripping good, most entertaining, magnificently realised origin story. Cruella is clever, funny and sassy – a family comedy turned sophisticated adult offering. English children’s novelist and playwright “Dodie” Smith is best known for the novel The Hundred and One Dalmations (1956), which became the big screen animation 101 Dalmations in 1961. Disney…
For quite a while now, Disney/Pixar has “owned” the animation space. The decline of Dreamworks Animation has left the field basically open to them. But competitors are emerging, including (relatively) smaller player Sony Pictures Animation. Their first animated musical, Vivo, is a swing for the fences. Vivo sees the storied Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights)…
Sand Storm is a family drama that takes place in a Bedouin Village in the desert in southern Israel. Two women, mother and daughter, are dealing with life changing events at the same time. Jalila is a 42-year-old with four children. Her eldest child is an 18-year-old university student, Layla (Lamis Ammar). Jalila is coping…
The combination of the new and the old is intoxicating in The Australian Ballet’s double bill Etudes/Circle Electric. Up first is Circle Electric, which combines modern dance, ballet, sound and light to create a maelstrom of movement, majestic and, at times, harried. I was totally sold on choreographer Stephanie Lake’s first full length commission for…
The top 5 Honourable Mentions Robert Goodman For more of Robert’s reviews, visit his blog Pile By the Bed
A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters is the heart-warming story of two people who share a lifetime of experiences through the now old-fashioned medium of handwritten letters. The epistolary work is a unique theatrical experience, not quite a play reading and not entirely a play, but very much an unforgettable event. For those unfamiliar with the play, its…
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…
Whatever else you might think about writer-director Damien Chazell’s first two films – Whiplash and La La Land – they definitely had a very clear narrative drive. And, even though it was grander in scope, you could say the same about his third film, First Man. But with Babylon, he replaces sharp linear narrative with…
