Kindertransport is an English play written in 1993, by Diane Samuels. Samuels has written: In early November 1938 an intensive series of ‘pogrom’ attacks on Jewish property and arrests of people were launched in Nazi Germany. This became known as ‘Kristallnacht’, The Night of Broken Glass, and has subsequently been called “pogromnacht’ or Novemberpogrome’. In…
From little things, big things (re)grow. After a three-year hiatus, the Brisbane International Film Festival is back. And while this new BIFF is very much a slimmed down version of what it once was, the very fact of its return is a cause for celebration. Where once BIFF screened close to 200 films, the “new” festival…
Gritty and unrelenting, Wind River marks the directorial debut of Taylor Sheridan. He’s the screenwriter behind Sicario and Hell or High Water; and here he weaves a tense thriller. Wind River is Sheridan’s conclusion to a thematic trilogy (with those earlier films) exploring the modern American frontier. The film explores what Sheridan calls “perhaps the most tangible remnant…
The Melbourne International Film Festival screens until August 20. Here are a few highlights from the first week of the festival. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME Call Me By Your Name is a sensitive coming of age story set in a sun-drenched rural part of Italy in the 1980s and it deals with themes of…
The fourth film in The Conjuring series, in which the possessed doll Annabelle originally had a small role, Annabelle: Creation is the origin story of said toy. It also serves as a prequel to 2014’s Annabelle. The story starts in the mid-1940s, but the majority of the action is set in the mid-to-late `50s. This…
Two US soldiers are literally in the firing line in the unrelenting psychological thriller The Wall. The pair are Sergeant Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), an army ranger who serves as spotter; and his sniper partner, Sergeant Matthews (John Cena). They’re pinned down by an Iraqi sniper. But the fight becomes as much a battle of wills and…
Charlize Theron’s character is put through the wringer as the Berlin Wall comes down in Atomic Blonde. This stylish and violent spy thriller is based on a graphic novel series, The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and illustrated by Sam Hart. The screenplay is by Kurt Johnstad and directed by David Leitch (John Wick). It’s 1989 in Germany. The Berlin…
Highly creative and well orchestrated is this mystery fantasy about grief. Directed by J.A. Bayona (The Impossible), A Monster Calls is a visually stylish, emotional drama. Patrick Ness, who also wrote the screenplay, penned the award winning novel on which it’s based. Twelve year-old Conor O’Malley (Lewis MacDougall) is hardly your conventional kid. He is about to escape…
Terrence’s Malick’s The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but it drove me batty because I could not make head nor tail of it. So too David Lowery’s (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) A Ghost Story, which I only understood in the most rudimentary way. It concerns an official ghost. You know the ones,…
Since premiering in 1995, Nick Enright’s Blackrock has found a place in both the Australian drama canon and on high school drama syllabuses nationwide. And, 20 years after its first presentation of the play, La Boite Theatre Company’s 2017 production shows just how sadly still relevant its social themes of mateship, misogyny and violence are….
