It’s been a long time since I have read George Johnston’s 1964 Miles Franklin Award-winning My Brother Jack. However, through the lens of undergraduate literary-study nostalgia, I still recognise the seminal Australian novel’s place as part of our country’s canon, despite its challenge to our comfortable assumptions of national character. Still, like many I imagine,…
The subject matter of Pimped is tawdry; nasty in fact. This is a film that starts out without much promise, but gradually draws you into its deviant web. It’s a psycho-sexual thriller in which the protagonist is emblematic of the #MeToo era. Sarah Montrose (Ella Scott Lynch) is a conflicted, mysterious woman. I say that…
Eccentric Danish auteur Lars Von Trier makes controversial and deliberately confronting films. His latest is likely to be divisive as well. Despite the title, The House That Jack Built is not a family-friendly fairy tale. Rather this is Von Trier’s portrait of a sadistic serial killer. But the film isn’t as illuminating nor as insightful…
Dread is palpable throughout Arthur Miller’s drama A View from the Bridge. The Melbourne Theatre Company’s version features seven actors and one old wooden chair but held me transfixed for two hours. The time is the 1950s; and the place an Italian-American neighbourhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. The narrator is Alfieri (Marco…
The events depicted in Hotel Mumbai are ghastly … made all the more so because the story is based on fact. I, like so many, recall the day it started and how horrific the reports and images were. For three days in 2008 — from 26 to 29 November — Mumbai was under siege. Arriving…
– Us – Only in cinemas from 28 March 2019 We have 10 double in-season passes thanks to Universal Pictures Australia. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE After sending shockwaves across contemporary culture and setting a new standard for provocative, socially-conscious horror films with his directorial debut, Get Out, Academy Award®-winning visionary…
I loved the droll humour in the slow-moving Sometimes Always Never. The film features the supreme acting of Bill Nighy at his aloof best. The plot concerns a Scrabble-obsessed family and the impact the game has had on their lives. Nighy plays a Merseyside tailor, Alan, whose eldest son, Michael, stormed out of the house…
Sam Esmail has become something of a TV god following his (rightly) acclaimed Mr Robot. I mean, the guy basically came from “nowhere” to make one of TV’s best series, not to mention making Oscar winner Rami Malek a star. His latest offering is Homecoming, a project that’s very different from Mr Robot, yet also…
The complexities of music, human relationships and health all get a working over in Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations, featuring Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn. In the early 19th Century, Anton Diabelli (Francis Greenslade) is a Viennese music publisher who composes a simple waltz and then invites that city’s leading composers to construct a single variation on…
Have you thought about running your own pub? Could you resist drinking the profits? What about the diverse range of regular customers you’ll engage with? In Two, the attraction of pub ownership will either be cemented or disintegrated before your very eyes! And the three words you never want to hear are “on the house”….
