Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 16 December 2022. On Mynolia’s sharp debut All Things Heavy, the singer invents herself as a vulnerable dreamer, armored by heavenly melodies as she moves through an increasingly disconnected world. Though the album is titled All Things Heavy, Mynolia…
It’s safe to say that soul music has been experiencing a major revival the last few years. The rise of independent labels like Colemine Records or Daptone Records has produced an abundance of new top-shelf acts, from Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings and Charles Bradley to Monophonics and Durand Jones and the Indications. With…
The magnificent journey that is Avatar continues with awe-inspiring distinction in The Way of Water. The franchise has maintained its ability to mesmerise and excite. Seeing it in 3D on the biggest screen possible, with the most advanced sound, served to heighten an already captivating experience. Maestro James Cameron doesn’t do anything by halves and…
On finishing Susannah Wise’s standalone post-apocalyptic debut The Fragile Earth, some readers may have wondered where she would go next. It’s hard to imagine anyone predicting the antic, comedic, sometimes surreal ghost story with multiversal elements that is her follow up – Okay Then That’s Great. When the book opens, Marnie has once again seen…
The bleak melodrama The Road Dance is set against the backdrop of a tight-knit crofting community on the storm-lashed island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in 1916. It’s based on the bestselling 2002 novel of the same name written by Sky TV journalist John MacKay, and the events of the book were supposedly inspired…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 9 December 2022. Shannen Moser wants to have a conversation: with their past selves, their present self, their undesignated, unfurling future selves; with the trees that adorn their old street, and the door they used to call home; with…
In Violent Night, the wealthy Lightstone family gather at their secure remote family compound to celebrate Christmas. But this is a dysfunctional family as everyone tries to suck up to Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo), the family matriarch to curry favour and remain in her good graces. Jason (Alex Hassell) is separated from his wife Linda (Alex…
Nora O’Connor’s list of credits providing backing vocal support, both in the studio and on tour, is as long as her arm. She’s recorded and toured with Iron and Wine, The Decemberists, Andrew Bird, Robbie Fulks, and sang on Mavis Staples’ “You Are Not Alone” album produced by Jeff Tweedy. Knocked off the road during…
Alex Miller has twice won Australia’s premier literary award, the Miles Franklin, for The Ancestor Game in 1993 and Journey to the Stone Country in 2003. His fifteenth novel A Brief Affair, shows how he has continued to develop his themes and concerns. It is a character study that asks deep questions about what we…
Sophia (Lou Wall) has been desperate to get into the property market for some time. So it is that (yet again) she puts the hard word on her father – Tony (Joe Petruzzi) – trying to guilt him into going 50/50 with her on an apartment she has found. He is far from impressed. It is small,…
