Australia
Nick Hasted
“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 truths anyway.Kelly grows up in an impoverished, outback Irish family led by necessarily feral mother Ellen (The Babadook’s Essie Davis, pictured below left). This maternal Lady Macbeth is glamorous, cunning, hopelessly defiant and fearsomely vicious. First recalled by Ned pragmatically giving a blowjob to the local policeman, she later violently Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
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 able to do my favourite thing in the world anymore?” she mused. “I love breakup songs!” Happily for Swift – and for the rest of us who love breakup songs – falling in love didn’t affect her ability to craft heartbreak poetry. “Death by a Thousand Cuts” – which, in “I dress to kill my time”, features perhaps my favourite ever of her lines – is, she Read more ...
Tom Baily
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 ambitious film and an unrelenting long haul of suffering that confronts themes of sexual violence and Indigenous dispossession.Set in 1825 during the genocidal British colonial rule in Tasmania, the film follows Irish convict Clare (Aisling Franciosi) who launches a personal revenge mission against the colossally sinister Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 Devo’s version of “(I Can’t Get no) Satisfaction”. The chicka-chicka tick-tock guitar is present. So too are the throat-swallowing Mark Mothersbaugh vocals, the rotating tin-can drums and primitive synth.Next up, “Turbulent Love” does a similar job by hybridising Devo’s “Mongoloid” and “Whip it”. “War of Currents” borrows from the de-evolutionist's “ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 he is allowed to direct – until he isn’t. As he explains in this riveting new show, the sell-off of a chunk of DreamWorks, the consequent nixing of his Aussie animation Larrikins in 2017 and his retreat to Sydney, brutally slapped a glass ceiling on his manic multitasking.The film’s cancellation plunged Minchin into a period of morbid self-pity. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 ranks of TV ‘tecs as Melbourne-based investigator Alexa Crowe.We learned that Alexa used to be on the police force, but now spends her time making bread with a complicated German gadget called a Loobenschwegen (some fun was had with pronouncing the German instructions in a lubricious manner). Screenwriter Matt Ford must have a fetish for wacky brand Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
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 heroes in this tale of sound and fury, which details a tragedy of mutual incomprehension as an eighteenth-century petty London criminal fights to assert dominance over the Aboriginals of New South Wales.The play – which has been adapted by Andrew Bovell – gained an ardent following when it opened in Australia in 2013. This year its triumphant Read more ...
Graham Fuller
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 century racial dramas as indigenous director Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country and Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale.Schepisi adapted it from Thomas Keneally’s 1972 novel, which looked beyond the Aboriginal genocide to the tragedy of attempted black assimilation in the whitefellas’ culture. Jimmie was based by Keneally on Jimmy Read more ...
Saskia Baron
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 directed by a woman. At the time, it seemed incredibly exciting and inspiring and while the film is still impressive and enjoyable, it’s somewhat less radical than I remembered. The film’s glorious costumes, ornate interiors and repetitive piano score threaten to obliterate its relatively subtle feminist message: I remembered it as more Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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 troupe from Adelaide, Australia, appearing tonight in Brighton’s Dome Theatre, deliver a show that is certainly contemporary circus, but they reinvent the term in in a riveting, entertaining way.Proceedings begin with the house lights coming up to reveal the stage cluttered by a rack of clothes, a line of steel buckets, a suit of armour and more. It’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For Brits below a certain age Leo Sayer is the curly haired middle-aged chap who swearily walked out of the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2007 and disappeared. However, for those around in the 1970s his diminutive dancing form, ever-ready grin and wild coiffure were a constant presence as he had pop hit after pop hit, notably the contagious, disco-friendly “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”. He’s taken a couple of shots at returning this century, notably on the chart-topping club remix of his own “Thunder in my Heart”, but Selfie has a particularly personal sense of engagement.This is because Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Stella Donnelly does not suffer fools gladly. On her debut LP, she calls out all manner of bad behaviours, from crappy bosses to creepy guys, annoying family members to disappointing boyfriends. Donnelly’s very much a part of the new guard of songwriters who aren’t going to sit in silence, and aren’t afraid to stand up for themselves and others. And yet, angry music this is not. There are no pounding drums, no squealing riffs, no hateful growls. Rather, a quiet confidence and self-assuredness defines Beware of the Dogs. Album opener and first single "Old Man" sets the tone with Read more ...