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….
This is the third and climactic chapter in the recent trilogy about apes versus humans. There was Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in 2014 and now War for the Planet of the Apes. But Planet of the Apes goes back to 1968, when Charlton Heston was…
Is there really nobody else wondering why the female characters in a King Kong movie are so attracted to this giant ape? Honestly, I’m always asking myself the same question. Is it because Kong “King of all places he appears in” is such an impressive appearance, radiating power and protection? Or is it its primitive…
Superbly acted and directed, the theatrics and dramatics in the richly intelligent Australian premiere of Incognito are compelling. The experience begins as you walk through the narrow passageway into the theatre. That’s when you notice a thin, taut, crisscrossed black rope along one wall and then liberally strewn throughout the theatre itself, dropping down to a…
An intense and visceral experience, Dunkirk is war up-close and personal like few films before it. Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) writes, directs and co-produces the action-packed drama. The picture opens as hundreds of thousands of British and Allied troops are surrounded by German forces. Trapped on the beach at Dunkirk in northern France with their backs to…
Let’s begin at the top. This is the BEST production I have seen at the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) for many a long year. Get your self a ticket ASAP. This production of Cloud Nine – a play by Caryl Churchill written in 1979 – is an absolute “knock out”. Directed for the STC by Kip Williams (their…
Luke is a young man in his 20s who is a true believer – in God that is. He’s a committed Christian and a man who prays. He falls for a 40-year-old hypochondriac, Adam (Darren Redgate), who is an atheist. Next Fall, by American playwright Geoffrey Nauffts, is set in New York and portrays the ups and…
The outsider looking in is one of Sofia Coppola’s directorial trademarks. From Scarlett Johansson’s bewildered American in Tokyo in Lost in Translation to the teenagers breaking into millionaires’ homes in The Bling Ring, she seems to have an affinity for the “other”. In The Beguiled however, she takes the concept in a very different direction….
