culture

His first feature film, Lion, took movie-goers on an emotional journey across the world. Now director Garth Davis lends his visual poetry to the tale of one of history’s most famous women. “If you look into it, Mary Magdalene was a very significant apostle, and was present in all of the key elements, and sometimes mentioned more than other apostles. So she must have been a very significant person, and not the one that we’re learning about in Catholic school growing up. I thought it was amazing that it hadn’t been told.”

Where once viewers tuned in fondly to breakfast television, personality-driven dross and offensive opinions now make some wish the format – and its Cash Cow – would be put out to pasture.

Kristen Bell and Ted Danson’s satirical comedy The Good Place portrays a middle-managed afterlife where inauthentic goodness makes for a kind of hell.

Where once the contrary but charming banter of David and Margaret was an authoritative guide to modern cinema, the ABC has replaced it with uninsightful postmodernism and lame jokes.

In Suburbicon, George Clooney’s latest turn behind the camera, the foibles of American society are again in the spotlight. Here, the actor–director talks about gun laws, the sanctity of the fourth estate and how failure breeds success. “No one wants to look at someone with a string of hits and a string of right decisions. You have to make bad decisions and … you have to make mistakes. You only learn from mistakes. You never learn from success.”

Following the success of her Glass Menagerie with Eamon Flack, Pamela Rabe reunites with the director to explore the knottiness of Ibsen’s Ghosts. “I’m never one to sit around and wait for the phones to ring,” she says. “I love working in the theatre, and I work a lot in the theatre.”