Australia
Adam Sweeting
This latest outing from the astonishingly prolific Jack and Harry Williams (The Missing, Baptiste, The Widow, Strangers etc) gives itself a huge leg-up by exploiting the epic lonely spaces of the Australian Outback.The opening sequence of episode one was a blinder, a self-contained mini-drama about a motorist stopping at a decrepit service station to use the facilities, then finding himself pursued by a malevolent articulated truck, looming ever larger in his rearview mirror as he sings along to "Bette Davis Eyes" on the car radio.The cat-and-mouse pursuit was shot with filmic grandeur, as Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Just as love's downward spiral can deconstruct a lover's sense of self, so SJS's plangent post-modern prog deconstructs itself as it ebbs and flows toward gorgeous but muted crescendos.On the band's second album The Unlikely Event, lovely melodies stop dead and mutate. Electronic interjections – like leaks from a nerve centre or a super-computer – fizz, throb and splutter out. A searing guitar solo, bent on rockist glory, suddenly falters, chokes and has to regather itself. Uncertainty and impermanence rule.In 2017, English musician-producer-engineer Stuart Stawman launched his Australia Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ann Turner’s 1989 feature debut Celia is one of the great coming-of-age films, an enthralling tale of pre-pubescent angst set against a backdrop of post-war Australian social and political history.Contemporary distributors did not know how to promote it; the first British publicity poster suggested a crude exploitation film, and US distributors crassly renamed it Celia – Child of Terror. In Victoria, Australia in 1957, nine-year-old Celia Carmichael is first seen discovering her beloved grandmother dead in her bed; she later endures a visceral nightmare where a scaly creature tries to enter Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” The warning’s an unusual one, passed along conscientiously by the stewards at the door of the tiny Orange Tree Theatre.The hole in question is long and angular and will soon be filled with water, stretching around one side of the pristine white set of Rice, a new play by Australian-Hmong writer Michele Lee. It’s an intimate two-hander about immigration and belonging, directed ably by Matthew Xia – but, like its characters, it’s suffering an identity crisis.Our heroines are two women of colour: Nisha (Zainab Hasan, pictured below), a young executive at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A joint production between Channel 5 and Australia’s Network 10, the four-part mystery Lie With Me didn’t do itself many favours by kicking off with its least persuasive episode. However, if you stuck with it, hidden layers began to reveal themselves, and the final instalment delivered a satisfyingly malevolent twist.Channel 5’s press pack for journalists supplied some background detail about the characters which wasn’t seen on screen and would have added some helpful light and shade to the story, so maybe it was originally planned as a longer series. There were also a couple of characters, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Chet Faker is Melbourne-born musician Nick Murphy’s alter ego, an avatar he has stepped in and out of with gentle grace over more than a decade of finding a voice that's very much his own. Once described in The Guardian as a purveyor of “mellow-electronic-pop”, he is actually something else, closer to the sensuality and slow drag of soul, lilting along to very relaxed beats that have an almost trip-hop feel.“Hotel Surrender” is an apt title for an album that has that otherworldly insouciance found in the well-scrubbed anonymity of a hotel. There is also the soothing quality that comes from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This writer has often pleaded to move away from vocal homogeny in pop. The current value placed on technical skill and hackneyed vulnerability-signifying has become a bore. It’s limiting that Chris Martin-meets-Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé-meets-Whitney Houston are primary templates. That said, the voice of Aussie singer Toni Watson – AKA Tones and I – is a challenge, a cloyingly cute teen-squeak of an instrument (although capable of taking flight). In the end, though, her music represents her bountiful character, and her voice suits it just fine.Debut album Welcome to the Madhouse will be a test- Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Lake Mungo (2008) is a dread-laden Australian Gothic thriller that masquerades as a straight-faced documentary.It’s also an analysis of grief that questions who or what it's for; a disquisition on representation that emphasises our psychological need to be deceived by simulated images instead of accepting what’s patently real; and a meditation on the spirit of place and collapsibility of time. Anyone chilled and perplexed by the 1921 photo that concludes The Shining should find Lake Mungo intoxicating – so, too, fans of David Lynch’s oneiric inquiries into moral decay in the suburbs Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sequin is the screen name for the questing 16-year-old at the slowly awakening heart of Sequin in a Blue Room, a 2019 Australian film only now reaching the UK. The graduation project of its New Zealand-born director and co-writer Samuel Van Grinsven, the 80-minute movie charts a mostly compelling path from multiply meaningless gay hook-ups through to something at least resembling a connection, if the image of shared popcorn at the end offers any indication of happier times ahead. Structured across a series of apartments that count down from ten to zero, the screenplay (co-written with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Heard now, InnerSpeaker sounds as it did when it was issued in 2010. Tame Impala’s debut album was crisp, fizzing; a pithy collection of psychedelic rock nuggets which made its case instantly. This was modern psychedelia, infused with a dash of Sweden’s Dungen, which still sounds fresh. Despite brushing the borders of freak-out territory, it was direct. Tuneful too. Fantastic.Up to this point, the Perth-based Kevin Parker had used the name Tame Impala to release an EP and single, the second of which was recorded in 2009 at London’s prime garage rock set-up, Toe Rag Studios. Travelling there, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Man’s strange relationship with other species haunts this freaky simian horror film from Psycho II director Richard Franklin. Terence Stamp is Dr Phillips, an archetypal, lab-coated mad scientist, grumpily testing the limits of ape intelligence, and Elisabeth Shue zoology student Jane, unwisely offering help at his remote Gothic mansion, where the most developed ape, Link, is his besuited butler and begrudging factotum.There’s something of The Island of Dr Moreau in Phillips’ arrogant, eventually overthrown genetic tyranny. “He’s missed the bus by a lousy 1%!” he rails at the apes’ shortfall Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The debut album by Australian-Ghanaian artist Genesis Owusu is so musically restless it’s exhilarating. What’s clear is this guy doesn’t want to be placed in a box, marked hip hop or anything else. Over a wild variety of music, he adopts multiple vocal styles, reminding of beatbox genius Reggie Watts (most especially his recent Wajatta project with John Tejada). The album cover encapsulates the cinematic, occasionally garish persona that comes across during the 15 tracks. What’s clear is that Genesis Owusu is no wall flower.Running through Smiling With No Teeth is the theme of a “black dog”. Read more ...