The Coen brothers have given us some great films, like the brilliant Fargo and the Oscar winning No Country For Old Men, which is why their latest offering is a little disappointing by comparison. With Hail, Caesar! the filmmaking siblings return to the Golden Years of Hollywood in the 50s, which was the backdrop of…
A modern day satire, which tears our notions of morality to shreds, The Beast is an at-times-hilarious rant on urban culture, an organic lifestyle and infidelity. Written by Eddie Perfect and featuring him and six other actors – Heidi Arena, Peter Houghton, Alison Bell, Rohan Nichol, Toby Truslove and Christie Whelan Browne – it was…
In 2008, Philip Roth published his 29th novel, Indignation, a story that returned him to his own youth, growing up in Newark, New Jersey before attending a small liberal arts college. One of America’s most honored and accomplished writers – having received a Pulitzer Prize – Roth was 75 years old when he turned back…
The ultimate relationship conundrum, Longevity is a love triangle with a difference. Girl A, a student by the name of Lance (Bee Townsend), meets Girl B, Juliet (Fiona Scarlett), an artist and there is an immediate attraction. They begin a long-term relationship that keeps on keeping on for five years. In the fifth year Girl…
In this age of remakes, re-boots and re-imaginings, finding an original story on the big screen can be a hard ask. But if you find yourself craving something out-of-the-box; something that doesn’t feel like it’s been done a thousand times before, you should seek out Captain Fantastic. The writer and director of this road movie…
Betrayal, by Harold Pinter was written in 1978, and belongs to his great middle period, and along with other works like No Man’s Land (1975) and Old Times, is often characterised as one of his ‘memory plays’. Pinter was given the Nobel prize for Literature in 2005. This play uses reverse chronology, and so the…
The Disney Theatrical Productions arm of the Disney Company have brought to Sydney a spectacle of old fashioned musical theatre in a contemporary (new fashioned) post-modern, popular culture version of a tale of Middle Eastern origin, Aladdin. Disney had made an animated version of the tale in 1992, and it became a most successful member…
This tense, claustrophobic thriller cleverly inverts the premise behind such thrillers as Wait Until Dark and Blind Terror, in which a vulnerable blind woman was terrorised by killers until she fought back. Here though it is a blind person who is doing the terrorising. And it is a surprisingly effective thriller that grips until the…
After nearly a decade as a band, three albums and countless tours across Australia, the US and UK, beloved Brisbane band The John Steel Singers have announced that they will be going on hiatus following their national tour this month. In a letter to fans, the band wrote: Now that it sounds like we’re breaking up I…
A whodunit-murder-musical – an unlikely combination I grant you – Curtains is the Australian premiere of a show written by Broadway legends John Kander and Fred Ebb (creators of Cabaret and Chicago). A parody of backstage homicide mystery plots, Curtains – based upon the original book and concept by Peter Stone* – is set in…
