Arts and culture
Take it easy on a long, hot summer
It’s a strange time, the summer holidays in Australia. Some people have riveting memories of Boxing Day tests, of Australian…
The most immodest thing
So they’re having another go at removing the varnish and the accumulated dark oiliness and other accretions from that most…
Drunk in a midnight choir
Biography can create the most heightened sense of drama. Just at the moment SBS On Demand is showing a streamer…
Such grandeur in the mind
There’s always something breathtaking about the prices great art can fetch but the sale of Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ at Christie’s…
Striving of the individual soul
The Australian Ballet seems to have had a smash hit with Oscar. Not only did the ballet, choreographed by Christopher…
Narrative robbery
So the silly season, the festive season when we celebrate the incarnation of the Good is looming, yet again, and…
The all-powerful hand of the director
When that writer of spare French prose André Gide was asked who the greatest French poet was he replied, ‘Hugo,…
What Fight Club got right
There are three great makers of popular man-art working in Hollywood today – Michael Mann, Christopher Nolan and David Fincher…
Such wild and tumultuous art
Jonathan Mills’ opera Eucalyptus based on the superbly designed novel by Murray Bail has left audiences dazzled and rushing to…
Paddington shouldn’t have been given a passport
Paddington has an official passport. The makers of the new Paddington film Paddington in Peru revealed this in passing to the Radio Times today.…
A level of grandeur
You can hardly complain about the state of classical music in this country at the moment. The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra…
Grave and terrible elements
There’s something horrifying about Monsters, the Netflix streamer about the Menendez brothers who, back in 1989, murdered their mother and…
Why Threads is still the most terrifying film ever made
As we inch ever closer to Halloween, the inevitable lists of the scariest films ever made have already begun to…
Paul McCartney never got over his filmmaking flop
Witnessing the recent imperial progress of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, it occurred to me how impossible it is to imagine…
Distinctive ambitions
It will be fascinating to see the retrospective of work by Jan Senbergs who died this year and who looms…
Maturity and tenderness
So now it is spring and that carnival season with its promise of Melbourne Cups and AFL grand finals hits…
And then there was the voice
It was at Cape Liptrap that the call came through. The setting was almost absurdly beautiful, the sea one way…
Tragedy and lighter things
Noni Hazlehurst’s performance in Daniel Keene’s The Mother is a thing of wonder and terror, overwhelming in its power and…
Purring with cynical affection
It’s one of those weird paradoxes of history that we think of the Elizabethan era as the zenith of our…
Zany streak of British humour
The fact that Kip Williams is leaving the Sydney Theatre Company to stage The Picture of Dorian Gray with Sarah…
A man of incomparable beauty
It was sad to see that great French actor Alain Delon had died the other day. He was a man…
The power of surprise
You would think that Andrew Bovell, the man who wrote Lantana, would not be subject to the petty indignities of…
The standard of beauty
Maxim Vengerov is touted as one of the world’s greatest violinists, the kind of musician who can fill Carnegie Hall…
Deranged and fantastic horrors
For a century King Lear has been thought of as the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies and the title role as…
Rescued from the Comanches
Isn’t it extraordinary how the new-style, super-arty balletic circus has transformed the old child-delighting world of Heffalumps and daring young…
