– Churchill – Only in cinemas from 8 June 2017 We have 5 double in-season passes thanks to Transmission Films. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE CHURCHILL follows Britain’s iconic Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the days before the infamous D-Day landings in June 1944. As allied forces stand on the south…
The contrast between the haves and have-nots is starkly evident in The Viceroy’s House, a historical drama based on fact. When the English wanted out of India, the country was deeply divided along religious and cultural lines. Indians were literally killing each other and the man tasked with orchestrating a smooth handover was the highly regarded Louis…
The Rasputin Affair is a new Australian play by Kate Mulvany. The play is concerned with the assassination, in December 1916, of Rasputin; a Russian peasant, semi-literate monk and mystic, who exercised extraordinary power over the last of the ruling Romanoff family: Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra. There is a note in the…
I knew very little of the Shakers before I read The Visionist … and if you’d asked what I knew, I would have said furniture. Yes, the Shakers are well known for their simple, practical but beautifully made furniture, but less is known about the religious movement itself. Reading The Visionist provided me with some insight into the movement,…
After the overthrow of Nicholas II in 1918 the Russian peasants of the Ukraine thought they would be better off under the Bolsheviks. But it was not to be as the socialist ideal of collectivisation decreed that they had to cede a certain percentage of their harvest to feed the country. The peasants eventually rebelled…
History was made – not by grandstanding or with vitriol … all but in a matter of fact manner, without too much fuss or bother. In this regard, Loving is different to most other equal rights movies, which play on showcase trials, eloquent speeches and virulent campaigning. It is a slow burn film from acclaimed…
Natasha Lester’s A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald was one of my favourite reads of 2016. Her commitment to writing inspires me, so I was more than a little keen to read her next novel, Her Mother’s Secret. Here’s the blurb: 1918, England. Armistice Day should bring peace into Leonora’s life. Rather than secretly making cosmetics…
One of several recent movies that play on nostalgia, Allied is a kind of Casablanca-lite for the undemanding viewer. Of course, director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump) is an old hand at this type of film, but no amount of direction could have saved this film from its clunky – and at times incomprehensible – script….
Three time Oscar winner Oliver Stone’s (Platoon) latest outing, Snowden, is a look at one of the most polarising figures of the 21st century. He is the man responsible for what has been described as the most far-reaching security breach in US intelligence history. In 2013 Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) quietly leaves his job at…
This queen of the desert is not a bus named Priscilla. Rather she is a modern thinking, fiercely independent, headstrong and intelligent British woman named Gertrude Bell who is apparently right up there with the famed T E Lawrence as an important figure in contemporary Arab history. An explorer, writer, archaeologist and traveller, she had…
