Menu
By Daily Review
Mitch Cairns has been announced as the winner of the 96th annual Archibald Portrait Prize for his portrait of his partner, artist Agatha Gothe-Snape. The Sydney-born artist had been considered a front-runner by many industry experts. Cairns and Gothe-Snape have collaborated previously, and their work was both seen in this year’s The National: new Australian Art.
Read More
By Daily Review
We like to think our readership is a fairly forward-thinking crowd, but today’s comment of the week comes to us directly from the future. On Monday, Helen Razer posed the question: What will future generations make of Sam Newman and his quest for free speech? As you’d expect, plenty of free speech debate followed, but
Read More
On Wednesday night in Sydney the Australian journalism Walkley Foundation Awards were held and included two new categories – Best Arts Journalism and Best Arts Criticism. The irony is that these awards have finally arrived as arts journalism is disappearing in Australia. While the internet is awash with ticket information and promotion of events, the forums
Read More
By Ben Neutze
In 2007, tenor Alfie Boe and musical theatre star Michael Ball appeared together in an English National Opera production of the classic musical Kismet, now famous for being particularly awful. It might well have been a low point in both of their careers — the London Evening Standard declared “A terrible fate should befall this Kismet” — but it
Read More
For the comfortable middle class of the western world, politics is usually conscripted for a verbal tournament. It’s rarely a matter of life or death, more a jousting tool over dinner parties or a dance of metaphorical sabre thrusts around the garden barbecue. For 24-year-old Édouard Louis, the most compelling novelist to emerge from the
Read More
By Ben Neutze
Michele Lee’s new play Rice is a complex narrative concoction, combining broad political questions about race, power, socioeconomic classes in Australia, international food politics, and labour. But its focus is on two women who find an unlikely connection: the young Indian-Australian work-obsessed Executive Officer Nisha (Kristy Best) and the older Chinese-Australian Yvette (Hsiao-Ling Tang), who cleans Nisha’s
Read More
With whom do we empathise in the Planet of the Apes movies: ape, or human? Full marks if your answer factors in a case-by-case approach, taking into account the many dramatic complexities conjured by the franchise’s rather outré screenplays, which have a habit of painting bizarre visions that seem perfectly normal in context – like
Read More
*** WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD *** It was perhaps inevitable that with the final stages of the great game approaching that various story threads would begin to fold upon each other, and Stormborn is predominantly an exercise in smoothing out the rough, overlapping edges. Stormborn is perhaps the most exposition heavy episode the show has ever
Read More
In the cinema where I watched writer/director Christopher Nolan’s breathtakingly intense new film, the WWII action-drama Dunkirk, the sound was loud. I mean, loud. Utterly, staggeringly, face-meltingly loud. At one point, as Nolan whooshed planes above his characters’ heads for the nth-hundredth time, I wondered whether it might be unrealistically noisy: that is, whether war
Read More
Thanks for joining me for another seasons of Game of Thrones, my fourth for Daily Review. As always SPOILERS LIE AHEAD! *** “Shall we begin?” – Daenerys Targaryen Premiere episodes of Game of Thrones’ series usually forsake the grandstanding moments the show has made its hallmark, and instead set out the tensions that act as
Read More
