tue 19/03/2024

Australia

The New Boy review - a mystical take on Australia's treatment of its First Peoples

This is writer-director Warwick Thornton’s third feature film, his first since 2017's excellent Sweet Country, and it took him 18 years to bring it to the screen. He describes it as “a really special one” with “a lot to say”, though viewers may find...

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Next Goal Wins review - football's lamentables

For those who ever wonder if soccer scoreboards, or score-line captions on TV, can ever be made to reach three figures, consider the match between AS Adema and SO l’Emyrne, two teams in Madagascar, in 2002. It ended 149-0, but that was only because...

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A Stitch in Time review - feelgood Aussie indie with an undernourished script

There’s a faint whiff of Strictly Ballroom about Sasha Hadden’s Australian indie A Stitch in Time, another tale of people in later life rekindling lost dreams and a long-buried love while nurturing younger folk with the same passions. Here, though,...

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The Royal Hotel review - sexual malice in Australia

The jitters-inducing first feature directed on home soil by the Australian filmmaker Kitty Green is named after The Royal Hotel, the only pub in an Outback mining community removed from civilised society. To suggest all the blokes who drink there...

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The Confessions, National Theatre review - rich mix of the personal and the epic

How to describe Alexander Zeldin’s latest, The Confessions? It is almost a kitchen-sink drama, but also a picaresque trawl through the life of an Australian woman that’s verging on epic, spanning most of her 80 years. And it’s stirring stuff,...

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Album: Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers - I Love You

Canberra band Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers continue the recent tradition of Australian indie bands having unwieldy comedy names. However, their music, as laid out on their debut album, has higher aspirations, bridging their scuzzy punkin’ roots...

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The Red Shoes: Next Step review - teen dancer's crisis

Fans of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's timeless classic The Red Shoes shouldn’t rush to The Red Shoes: Next Step expecting a sequel. This sentimental Australian teen drama is more of a step-change than a follow-up.At least its American...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Maureen / Common Dissonance

Maureen, House of Oz ★★★★Make yourself comfortable – we’ll be here for a while. That’s what our host, 80-something Maureen, advises us several times during the course of her unhurried, hypnotically vivid reminscences of a life lived to the...

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Album: Genesis Owusu - Struggler

There’s been a sense of anticipation around Ghanaian-Australian Genesis Owusu ever since his ebullient 2021 debut album Smiling with No Teeth. He won a bunch of Arias, Australia’s Grammys, but could he break internationally? He’s toured the US with...

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Talk to Me review - teens tempt fate in Aussie alienation allegory

Keeping up with viral teenage trends is nearly impossible – they travel at the speed of light – but here’s a new one, or ancient one given an electronic makeover.In Talk to Me, the new horror movie directed by twins Danny and Michael Philippou...

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The Great Escape Festival 2023, Brighton review - a long, hot, messy Day Three

“stay with the beer. beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.” So said Charles Bukowski in his poem “how to be a great writer”. Who am I to argue. It’s a bright day and 11.50 AM. The sun isn’t past the yard-arm but the beer is cold and good....

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Hannah Gadsby, Netflix special review - shaggy dog story of marital bliss

Hannah Gadsby had a memorable lockdown; it was when the Tasmanian comic got together with producer Jenney Shamash. And it's their courtship that forms the basis for Something Special, the wonderful new show by Gadsby which is now a Netflix special,...

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