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By Anders Furze
In volume 2 of his Melbourne International Film Festival diary, critic Anders Furze takes in films including the hot ticket of the festival: French period drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and a restoration of 1990’s Return Home, starring a young Ben Mendelsohn. * Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an
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“…when Antony and Dolabella were accused of plotting revolution, Caesar said: ‘I am not much in fear of these fat, long-haired fellows, but rather of those pale, thin ones,’ meaning Brutus and Cassius” – Plutarch, ‘The Parallel Lives‘ Plots and Prayers by Niki Savva is a fast-paced chronicle of the events that led to the ousting of
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Down our road and around the corner, people have recently built a tiny house on what was once grazing land. It’s on my drive into town, so for the past year or two, I’ve been checking out their progress. First, up went a very large shed, with solar panels on the roof. Then, in went
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There were too many stars at the Byron Bay Writers Festival (August 2 to 4) to mention, but let’s mention Mellissa Lucashenko, for winning the Miles Franklin Prize two days the fest opened, AC Grayling (below) for drawing the biggest crowd while also being a white-haired old white man, and all those African-Australian writers who introduced
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By Raymond Gill
You’ve heard apocryphal stories about people making movies on their maxed-out credit cards, but this remarkable story of bringing a full-length feature film on a shoestring to fruition is not fiction. On a sudden whim, Melbourne visual artist Tom Alberts decided in 2008 to make a film that celebrated the kind of screwball comedies and
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Rob Reid’s production of The Bacchae (a co-production of Melbourne’s La Mama, and Monash University Student Theatre) at the La Mama Courthouse last month was epic, writes Toby Manderson-Galvin… It was a production,”the likes of which has not appeared in Melbourne, at the very least, in the past couple of decades – but truly, I dare
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By Anders Furze
My experience of the Melbourne International Film Festival veers wildly from year to year. One year I’ll focus on retrospectives, the next I’ll see 30 films. The next, two. At a festival this large, it’s impossible to craft a comprehensive survey, at least for somebody who can’t spend two-and-a-half weeks watching four films a day.
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Subtle notes of angst, despair and deep yearning defined a powerful union of the work of musicians Nick Cave and Warren Ellis with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in several shows at Hamer Hall at the weekend. The unique pairing showcased six of Cave and Ellis’s notable film scores as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival,
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Australian theatre lovers would understandably get excited if a play’s title has the bonus of “written and directed by Joanna Murray-Smith” attached to it, so you go into this production with hopes high. Commissioned by Queensland Theatre, the world premiere production at QPAC’s cosy Cremorne Theatre hits most of the right notes and definitely doesn’t
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The recent ABC TV Four Corners two-;part special Hero or Villain: The prosecution of Julian Assange had many serious fails: here are four of them: (1) In almost an hour of reporting, reporter Michael Brissenden barely mentioned the crucial stories Assange published, which were and still are the reason he’s America’s most-wanted: * exposing US interference in the
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