Australia
The Test: A New Era for Australia's Team, Amazon Prime review - how ball-tampering scandal forced a cricket revolutionSaturday, 14 March 2020
It was in March 2018 that Australia’s cricketers were caught ball-tampering during a Test match in Cape Town. The resulting public outcry and sanctions against the guilty players and assorted backroom staff shook the Australian game to the core.... Read more... |
Sean Shibe, Wigmore Hall review - mesmerising journey from light to darkSaturday, 07 March 2020
"All true spiritual art has always been RADICAL art": thus spake the oracular Georges Lentz, composer of the pitch-black odyssey for electric guitar that took everyone by surprise last night. In that vein, why not add that all the greatest... Read more... |
True History of the Kelly Gang review - anarchy in OzMonday, 02 March 2020
“Nothing you’re about to see is true,” this adaptation of Peter Carey’s novel about Australia’s iron-clad Victorian outlaw Ned Kelly declares. Justin Kurzel’s wild investigation of the Kelly myth, Australian manhood and nationhood carves out its own... Read more... |
Albums of the Year 2019: Angie McMahon - SaltMonday, 16 December 2019
Appearing on NPR Music’s legendary Tiny Desk Concert series back in autumn, Taylor Swift talked about how, in interviews over the years, she’d been asked a thousand variations on “what would you write about if you ever get happy?” “Would I not be... Read more... |
The Nightingale review – revenge without redemptionMonday, 02 December 2019
Writer-director Jennifer Kent knows that Australia’s colonial past shouldn’t be beautified, and she drives that fact home in every gloom-drenched shot of The Nightingale (her second feature after The Babadook from 2014). This is an immensely... Read more... |
CD: U-Bahn - U-BahnMonday, 02 December 2019
Despite their name, U-Bahn are from Melbourne. Instead of looking to Germany for their musical inspiration, their minds are on a vintage band from Ohio. “Beta Boyz”, the first track on their eponymous debut album, reassembles the key elements of... Read more... |
Tim Minchin, Eventim Apollo review - fabulous triumph of rhyme and reasonSaturday, 09 November 2019
Is there anything Tim Minchin cannot do? He sings his own songs, plays hot bar-room piano and tells jokes about the existence of God. He composes musicals, performs in Lloyd Webber and Stoppard, writes a multimillion-dollar Hollywood cartoon which... Read more... |
My Life is Murder, Alibi review - whimsical tales of detection from Down UnderWednesday, 25 September 2019
Lucy Lawless achieved cult status in the Nineties fantasy classic Xena: Warrior Princess, and later became a regular in such disparate creations as Battlestar Galactica and Parks and Recreation. In My Life is Murder, she joins the ever-expanding... Read more... |
The Secret River, National Theatre review - turbulent tale of Australia's pastWednesday, 28 August 2019
Neil Armfield’s resonant, turbulent production of Kate Grenville’s classic Australian novel The Secret River sing out from the stage of the Olivier like an epic, with its conflicts, culture clashes, and quest for new territories. But there are no... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The Chant of Jimmie BlacksmithTuesday, 20 August 2019
Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) was the Australian New Wave film that most rigorously confronted the cataclysmic effect of British and Irish colonisation on the country’s Aboriginal people. It helped pave the way for such 21st... Read more... |
Blu-ray: My Brilliant CareerTuesday, 11 June 2019
Revisiting Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career for the first time since I saw it in its year of release, 1979, is a mixed experience. I was close in age to its heroine and it was one of the first mainstream feature films I’d ever seen... Read more... |
Gravity & Other Myths: Backbone, Brighton Festival 2019 review - eyeboggling and very human circus showSunday, 19 May 2019
Shows by Gravity & Other Myths fall into the realm of “contemporary circus”. It’s an off-putting moniker, bringing to mind a performance where there’s no clowning but quite possibly much “thought-provoking” interpretive dance. The decade-old... Read more... |
