Peter Craven

Eye of a genius

24 September 2022 9:00 am

In a week dominated by the death of the Queen it’s a strange thing that Jean-Luc Godard, the man who…

A god of fury and destruction

17 September 2022 9:00 am

David Hare is the most eminent British dramatist of the generation that includes the man we have to learn to…

Just yesterday

10 September 2022 9:00 am

The death of Mikhail Gorbachev last week transcended politics because it was a reminder of how the culture of the…

Where art and pleasure collide

3 September 2022 9:00 am

The morality of art always seems like such a simple thing. The Greeks want back the so-called Elgin Marbles pilfered…

His lightning art

27 August 2022 9:00 am

The combinations and permutations of different forms of artistic activity are always weird. Stacks of people will want to see…

Don’t be routine

20 August 2022 9:00 am

It’s a marvellous thing that the great Indian conductor Zubin Mehta will be wielding the baton for that illustrious group…

Trash and treasure

13 August 2022 9:00 am

It’s cheering to see that the new head of Melbourne’s Arts Centre is Karen Quinlan. For years now, she has…

Primeval Voice

6 August 2022 9:00 am

So, Archie Roach is dead at 66. It’s hard to read of the artistic triumphs and the personal catastrophes without…

Neighbours no more

30 July 2022 9:00 am

It’s cheering to hear such good reports of the performance of Mahler’s second symphony by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under…

Call of the wild

23 July 2022 9:00 am

It’s fascinating to hear that Warwick Thornton––who took the world by storm some years ago with that knockout indigenous film…

Genesis of a Dreamcoat

16 July 2022 9:00 am

Just the other day came the announcement that a new production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat was to…

Enthralled

9 July 2022 9:00 am

The news that Germaine Greer had put herself into a retirement home in sight of the Queensland forest she had…

A very polished performance

2 July 2022 9:00 am

Sam Neill is one of those Kiwis we want to claim as we do everyone from Russell Crowe to Neill’s…

Time takes a cigarette

25 June 2022 9:00 am

June 16 was Bloomsday, the day we celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, and it was a special Bloomsday because 2022 is…

Tinkering with the masters

18 June 2022 9:00 am

It was sad to see Ray Liotta, that magnificent actor, had died the other week. He was most famous for…

Sheer erotic pulsation

11 June 2022 9:00 am

Anyone whose extreme youth was graced by the experience of watching the Nederlands Dans Theater is liable to be astonished…

Big glass slippers to fill

4 June 2022 9:00 am

It sounds like a wet dream of musical theatre, doesn’t it? A Cinderella by Rodgers & Hammerstein in a visually…

Wizardly wham-bam

28 May 2022 9:00 am

It’s an extraordinary thing in its way to revisit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child three years after its triumphant…

Great Tenor, shame about the bric-a-brac

21 May 2022 9:00 am

Lohengrin is early, just after Tannhäuser in the cavalcade of Wagner’s masterpieces, with a swan-drawn Arthurian hero in thrall to…

A dramatic dream of Australia

14 May 2022 9:00 am

1922 is the wonder year of twentieth century literature, the so-called annus mirabilis: T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, James…

Life from both sides now

7 May 2022 9:00 am

It’s a strange thing the way we keep interpreting and re-interpreting the different aspects of our culture that have become…

Anatomy of a forgettable scandal

30 April 2022 9:00 am

An evening of shorts, courtesy of Flickerfest, even at a lustrous cinema like the Kino in the Sofitel complex off…

A peculiar backwards mutation

23 April 2022 9:00 am

It’s not hard to sympathise with Christopher Allen’s recent column in the Review section of the Australian decrying the juxtaposition…

A remarkable film that gleams with mastery

16 April 2022 9:00 am

What a relief it was to see Parallel Mothers the new film by Pedro Almodóvar. There was the tediousness and…

Archangel of Italian film

9 April 2022 9:00 am

Like yesterday, there’s the memory of William Weaver, the great translator from the Italian of Umberto Eco’s The Name of…