After is a film that knows its audience and delivers to it. Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) is a dedicated student and dutiful daughter to her single mother Carol (Selma Blair). She’s a loyal girlfriend to her high school sweetheart Noah (Dylan Arnold). When Noah and Carol drop off Tessa for her first year of college,…
Over the years, a number of well-known names – like John Hurt and Harold Pinter – have performed Samuel Beckett’s one-person, one-act play, Krapp’s Last Tape. Now the indefatigable Max Gillies joins them I’m a Gillies fan. He certainly doesn’t let you down as he takes on the persona of a 69-year-old man who looks…
Annabelle Comes Home is the third film featuring the sinister doll from the Conjuring universe. Gary Dauberman, the screenwriter of the Annabelle films, makes his directorial debut. Determined to keep Annabelle from wreaking more havoc, demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) drive the possessed doll to the locked artifacts room in…
My 1953 edition of Webster’s Dictionary provides this definition of diplomacy: “dexterity; skill; tact; shrewdness in managing affairs of any kind”. And these are exactly the qualities which writer Cyril Gély has so cleverly enshrined in his masterpiece play Diplomacy. Originally written in French, the translation and adapted version by Julie Rose I’m sure has…
When I wrote about Burning earlier this year, I mentioned that East Asian cinema was having something of a “moment”. Well, that “moment” continues with Joon Ho Bong’s Palme d’Or (2019) winner, Parasite. A veteran of Korean cinema, Bong is probably best known here for 2013’s Snowpiercer. Sci-fi has been his forte, so Parasite is…
Malthouse Theatre’s production of Wake In Fright is no less harrowing than when the eponymous novel was first published in 1961. But the play will make far more sense if you have an appreciation of the story before you walk in. Otherwise, I think you might understand the pieces, but not the full play in…
Brilliant staging and puppetry mark the MTC’s Storm Boy; a theatrical adaptation of Colin Thiele’s 1964 novel of the same name. The book has also been turned into two feature films, one in 1976 and the other earlier this year. This version remains faithful to the original. Youngster (Conor Lowe) lives in isolation in a…
Epic in scope and set against the backdrop of the Cold War, Never Look Away spans some thirty years of German history and dramatic social change. It is loosely based on the life of renowned German artist Gerard Richter, widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary artists. The film opens in Dresden in…
Wild Rose asks whether personal ambition should take a back seat to more immediate responsibilities. This feel-good story about a country music singer in the making features a stellar performance by Jessie Buckley in the lead role. In her early twenties, Rose-Lynn (Buckley) – single and with two kids under 9 – has just spent…
Prima Facie is a one-person play by Suzie Miller. It won the Griffin Award for Best Play in 2018. Tessa is a feisty young woman from a working-class background who finds her talent in the practice of law. In the journey of this play Tessa experiences what it is to be on both sides of…
