Culture

Louisa Lim The Saturday Paper’s podcast critic looks back at the highlights of 2023.

Andy Hazel Jessica Chastain’s acting career successfully straddles critically acclaimed arthouse projects and blockbuster stardom.

Tara June Winch I’ve written this letter many times in my life, in one way or another. This will be my last. There are holes in my story, sudden sweeps of time just missing. I still remember the lunch back home and all the bottles sweating and clinking together, swimming …

Shaad D’Souza The Saturday Paper’s music critic looks back at the highlights of 2023.

Christos Tsiolkas The Saturday Paper’s film critic looks back at the highlights of 2023.

Kate Holden Yiwarra Kuju was a major inspiration behind Shannyn Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs, which just won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History.

Jeff Sparrow The real Emma Herwegh lived an extraordinary life in a world very different to our own. The daughter of a prosperous merchant, she embroiled herself in the struggles to create a democratic Germany, alongside her husband, the poet Georg Herwegh, and her …

Anthony Carew The Boy and the Heron, released by Hayao Miyazaki at the age of 82, is a psychedelic and profound film that shows he remains a master of animation.

Cassie Tongue Andrew Upton’s thoughtful and affecting adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull traverses ideas of art, ambition, passion and change.

Geordie Williamson Marie-Hortense Cézanne sat for 29 portraits by her husband, Paul, the revered French post-impressionist painter. These were Marina Abramović-level feats of perseverance on her part, as well as testimony to the importance she held for Paul. And yet, …

Felicity Plunkett Bright Shining: how grace changes everything begins with a challenge “to recall the last time you saw a public act of grace or an unexpected, extraordinary decency.” At a glance, “the world seems to have been drained of it”. Any conversation …

Gregory Day In Our Strangers, Booker International Prize-winning writer Lydia Davis once again offers us a diverse range of story forms: creatures of the habitat of her mind, or her notebook, which often seem interchangeable. She is also an esteemed translator …