culture
review
music March 23, 2019
The appeal of Dean Lewis’s debut album, A Place We Knew, is that the earnest musings on broken relationships can be moulded to anyone’s story. But what his formulaic songwriting gains in popularity, it lacks in depth and insight.
art March 23, 2019
Hans and Nora Heysen: Two Generations of Australian Art
While father and daughter Hans and Nora Heysen both became renowned Australian artists – he for bush landscapes, she for portraits and still lifes – their work had become, until recently, somewhat overlooked.
art March 16, 2019
Displayed in a historic homestead built on the cusp of Federation, Those Monuments Don’t Know Us examines colonisation and cultural expression and challenges ingrained assumptions of what fits where.
music March 16, 2019
Karen O and Danger Mouse’s ‘Lux Prima’
Karen O and Danger Mouse’s collaboration has delivered in Lux Prima a brilliant album of dark pop, with a hint of Pink Floyd grandeur.
music March 9, 2019
Fremantle psych band Pond’s latest album, Tasmania, acts as a springboard for frontman Nick Allbrook’s piercing take on Australia’s treatment of the environment and First Nations people.
film March 9, 2019
After a shift in setting to Spain for Everybody Knows, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi squanders a brilliantly tense kidnapping drama in an attempt to provide social commentary.
television March 2, 2019
The haze of chain smoke in Russian Doll does little to obscure the time-slipping drama’s lightweight psychoanalysis or the failure of its pretensions to feminist interrogation.
theatre March 2, 2019
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child succeeds in furthering J. K. Rowling’s remarkable canon, with a greater dramatic thrust than the films but all the heart of the books that seduced young and old alike.
music February 23, 2019
Julia Jacklin’s new album Crushing has moments when her lyrical directness perfectly complements its dark folk-rock sound, which excuse some of the experimental missteps elsewhere.
art February 23, 2019
Curated with an eye for slogans and messaging, the new Artspace exhibition Just Not Australian interrogates the mythic language of nationalism that continues to permeate the art world.
theatre February 16, 2019
Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Mary Stuart shares with the recent film starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie a desire to portray rival monarchs Mary and Elizabeth I as sisters pitted against each other by the patriarchy.
