culture

The National Theatre’s modern, militarised take on Antony and Cleopatra – ‘the greatest of Shakespeare’s history plays’ – offers a flat production but fine performances from Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo.

Ben Stiller’s small-screen directorial debut, Escape at Dannemora, a dramatisation of a real-life prison break, invites viewers’ sympathy for two violent criminals and then churns it into a grim vision of Trump’s America.

Pharrell Williams thrust Maggie Rogers and her song ‘Alaska’ into the spotlight. Now, with her debut album, Heard It in a Past Life, she’s taking a more rootsy, spiritual and sedate path to long-lasting success.

What starts as a dance film to rival Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz switches to giallo horror as the diverse cast of Gaspar Noé’s Climax descend into a lysergic hell.

The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane eschews the Western art world’s reliance on checkbox diversity in favour of genuine immersion in our region.

Tracking four boy-band-obsessed young women over several years, a new Australian documentary, I Used To Be Normal, turns the spotlight off the stars and onto the fangirls in an effective and sensitive paean to blind infatuation.

The final season of House of Cards may have lost every plot save for the one the former president is buried in, but with Robin Wright’s perfectly costumed and coiffured Oval Office connivances it remains a delight to the eye.

Two exhibitions recently opened at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art highlight the ability of works to create new hypotheses. They also prompt viewers to ponder fiscal imperatives and the so-called ‘MONA effect’.

STC’s production of Patrick White’s darkly comic A Cheery Soul shows that the story of ‘monstrous’ nursing home resident Miss Docker is a still-relevant examination of the loss of agency in old age.