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To say that Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix comedy special Nanette leaves a last impression is to put it very, very lightly. I’ve watched this extraordinary show twice, on both occasions fighting back tears in its final minutes, struck by a range of emotions: shame, shock, consternation, compassion, something resembling hope for a brighter future. Taking the
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By Helen Razer
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of ladies struggling to Lean In. This narrow principle informs the ABC’s newest “factual” blockbuster, Back In Time For Dinner, just as it has come to inform all entertainment aimed at the female viewer white and/or wealthy enough not to have noticed that the West
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By Bo Svoronos
Sydney’s Chinatown is a familiar place to me. I know most of the turns, food courts and spruiker scripts like a good friend thinks they know another’s sensibilities. It’s a place I’m accustomed to since I began truanting high school as a 14 year old in the mid-eighties. After dropping out of school I scored a
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The actor David Wenham’s feature film directorial debut, last year’s Ellipsis, is a love letter to Sydney in the form of a ‘night on the town’ story following two potential lovers, who spend an evening chatting and bonding. It is a classy and cultured affair, told in a wandering Richard Linklater or Woody Allen-esque style,
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Director Rachel Perkins’ six-part ABC TV series Mystery Road is the third instalment in the titular franchise, following two hardboiled movies from filmmaker Ivan Sen and star Aaron Pedersen – including the terrific, big thinking neo-noir/western Goldstone. Among Mystery Road’s many virtues is a gravitas-weeping performance from Pedersen as outback detective Jay Swan, the actor
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With the addition of the Pete Evans-produced health documentary The Magic Pill to its library, Netflix continue a slate of commissions and acquisitions that are either bold or tone deaf, depending on your perspective. See also: the second season to the controversial 13 Reasons Why, among the most socially irresponsible television shows of the 21st
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The arts are profoundly important to our society. Rewarding artists adequately is not only morally right, it is essential if the arts are to flourish. Supporting artists is bound up with the importance of the arts. The case for the importance of the arts is not difficult to make, but it is not often made.
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Anyone who has read Joyce Carol Oates’ remarkable novel Black Water which is narrated by the fictional version of Mary Jo Kopechne as she is drowning in the car driven by the drunk Ted Kennedy in summer 1969, need not see this film. The novelist’s ability to get inside the head of the young political
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A Russian couple are deep in the horror of divorce when their son goes missing from their apartment. This is virtually the entire plot of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Oscar-nominated film – its simplicity defying the intricacies of suspense which I would guess make this the most brutally suspenseful and beautiful film of the year. Behind a bathroom
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By Daily Review
The Bookshop starring: Bill Nighy, Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson is in cinemas from May 24 and Daily Review has 10 double passes to give away! Based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel of the same name; The Bookshop is set in 1959. Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a free-spirited widow, risks everything to open up a bookshop – the first
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