Arts and culture
We won’t see the likes of Robert Redford again
In the end, the Sundance Kid died in his sleep. The death of the actor, director and Sundance Film Festival…
Please let this be the end of Downton Abbey
The third and supposedly final Downton Abbey picture released in American cinemas this Friday. Ominously subtitled The Grand Finale –…
Turning your brain to mush
The appointment of Dean Bryant as head of the Malthouse Theatre took some of us by surprise. He had just…
The blood goes cold
Isn’t it weird the way our newspapers seem suddenly to have discovered the obituary. David Stratton, loved and revered for…
What has Hollywood done to Wuthering Heights?
‘Come undone’, the billboard reads. Two hands are clasped together. On another a blonde-haired woman lies prone on a fuzzy…
Dark and ravaged places
Destiny was the first work commissioned under Anne-Louise Sarks’ directorship of the Melbourne Theatre Company and it’s appropriate that it…
A world away
Remember Gus the Theatre Cat in T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats? He says that he has acted…
Shaggy dog tale
I thought it would be impossible to make a bad film about a dog but the production team for The…
Getting down and dirty
It’s splendid to be sitting at the very front of the Playhouse watching a new musical from the Melbourne Theatre…
Unparalleled strangeness
How strange it is to be transported back to some version of the world of Lena Dunham. Remember Girls, that…
A touch of the unthinkable
The other night we watched one of the greatest American films ever made. Network was directed by Sidney Lumet to…
The transcendence of style
Paula Vogel’s Mother Play: a play in five evictions is a superlative piece of theatre and it demonstrates unambiguously that…
Bush noir
Barry Jones likes to allude to the fact that John Adams declared that he had to study agriculture and warfare…
Last days, spare room
In a world of international horrors and hopes it is weird to have one of the weirdest true-life crime stories…
Russians greats
The house was awash with the Russians this week – first because someone was reading George Saunders’ A Swim in…
Dial Q for Cold Case
By the time this is published, your columnist will have seen the students of the National Theatre perform their chosen…
A deadly sweetness
One of the greatest documentary filmmakers who ever lived died last week at the age of 97. He is the…
Craggy man of integrity
Sometimes you’re just too clapped out to attend the most sparkling bit of theatre and so it was for your…
In ambiguity, Tancredi Di Carcaci finds inspiration
The narratives we tell ourselves about the past are hardly set in stone. It’s in this ambiguity where Tancredi Di…
Beautifully played
Who would have thought? The arena concert version of Les Miserables, Claude Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s sung-through extravaganza is…
Dark lowering road
Bill Henson, the greatest Australian photographer, has a show at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery at 6pm Friday 16 May. It’s…
A need for abasement
We sometimes forget how much opera provides a captivating alternative to classic drama but this was written all over Opera…
A wonder to behold
The National Gallery has been gifted Edvard Munch’s Man with Horse and its acquisition brings to mind James Mollison, the…
A passable Antipodean
Isn’t it strange the way the popular and high art aspects of our culture keep connecting and intersecting. A friend…
The way the imagination works
Easter was almost on us when the suggestion came. There was talk of a new Narnia film underway and of…
