A peculiar backwards mutation
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
What a relief it was to see Parallel Mothers the new film by Pedro Almodóvar. There was the tediousness and…
Archangel of Italian film
Like yesterday, there’s the memory of William Weaver, the great translator from the Italian of Umberto Eco’s The Name of…
Mighty and majestic
There is nothing like a ghastly war, an inscrutable election and a great rush of entertainment high and low to…
A darkened stage lights up
An American in Paris was always a stage musical waiting to happen even though it is immemorially associated with Gene…
Not worth the price of admission
There are moments when you wish the theatre would just be swallowed up and be as if it had never…
Great musicals
It’s strange how literature finds its way into other mediums. The current French film festival includes a film of Balzac’s…
Tinkling irrevelancies?
So Opera Australia is in quest of a new artistic director to replace Lyndon Terracini. It’s a good moment to…
Richard Roxburgh
It’s not often that you get such a rapturous reception for a new show as Fun Home received and the…
Die Walküre
Chesterton said – and the poet Peter Porter loved to repeat – that if a thing was worth doing it…
Grace
Does anyone know where we are in the world of arts and entertainment as Omicron advances, boosters abound, RATS are…
Moulin Rouge
It seems an aeon ago, the press night of Moulin Rouge, on 26 November. Since then, there has been illness,…
Don’t Look Up
How strange it is to be in a supposedly opened-up world, even as the Omicron variety of the virus shuts…
Jeremy Irons in House of Gucci
Any attempt to fictionalise the Gucci story runs into the same difficulties as Ridley Scott’s handsome and absorbing film, House…
West Side Story
How strange to revisit the Nova in Lygon Street, Carlton, where a lifetime of films have been experienced, after an…
The Cardinal’s books
There are a thousand overtly artistic things to talk about at this summer moment including the new Sidney Nolan exhibition…
Sigrid Thornton
It was the thought of Stephen Sondheim’s death that made us watch Imelda Staunton in Gypsy. It’s the second musical…
Jane Campion
A new film by Jane Campion is always going to be a magnetsing prospect and the idea of it suddenly…
Nitram
Nitram is the Martin Bryant film which sent shivers down everyone’s spine at the mere prospect. Justin Kurzel’s film about…
As You Like It
As You Like It is middle Shakespeare, probably lateish 1590s. It’s not one of the earlier happy comedies like the…
Sean Connery
Anyone who cares about the theatre should rush to see Kendall Feaver’s Wherever She Wanders which Griffin Theatre Company is…
Bert Newton
And so the world finally bestirs itself in the direction of going out because it’s now allowable. A young millennial…
The Crucible
Sometimes you think the Apocalypse doesn’t go away. It just takes new and frightful forms. No sooner was the lockdown…
Keith Michell
So the lockdowns end, even in Melbourne, and we get a glimpse of what artistic performance may loom in a…
Bob Dylan
Only in Australia and perhaps only in Sydney, that cradle of the cons and the jailers, the Rum Corps and…
