While vastly different in tone, scope, and geography, El 47 and Through Rocks and Clouds (titled Raíz in Spanish) offer complementary visions of resistance – one overtly political, the other quietly poetic. Together, they provide a rich entry point into contemporary Spanish and Indigenous language cinema, balancing crowd-pleasing drama with subtle, art-house storytelling.

Operas come in all shapes, sizes, and venues. Having just returned from a visit to New York’s Metropolitan Opera House to see the final performance of an outstanding production of American John Adams’s new opera, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, it was quite an adjustment to see fellow American Nico Muhly’s latest opera, Aphrodite, commissioned and staged by Sydney Chamber Opera at their usual venue, Sydney’s Carriageworks. Adams’s opera calls for many soloists, supplemented by a large chorus and orchestra; Muhly’s work involves two singers and seven instrumentalists. The Metropolitan is the largest opera house in the world; Carriageworks is rather more intimate.

We are perhaps finally within sight of the superhero genre’s demise. Declining box office, scandal, oversaturation, and ill-advised reboots have all contributed to a sense that, as one notable trade magazine recently put it, ‘super burn out’ is upon us

Long before the concept of autofiction entered the conversation, Helen Garner was confronting the messy chaos of existence in a manner that managed to be at once analytical and empathetic. In novels like Monkey Grip (1977) and in-depth reporting like This House of Grief  (2014), she balanced her clear-eyed observance of facts with an almost clinical dissection of her feelings arising from them. 

Now in its fifth year, Melbourne’s RISING has entrenched itself in Australia’s festival calendar. Emerging from the ashes of the Melbourne Festival and White Night, it has survived two Covid-19-aborted iterations to become, alongside Sydney’s Vivid and Hobart’s Dark Mofo, a key midwinter arts and culture assembly. 

‘Who wants to hear Samson et Dalila?’ Bernard Shaw asked rhetorically (in typically lordly fashion) after a concert version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera in 1893, the first time it was presented in Britain. ‘I respectfully suggest, Nobody.’ So Shavianly sure was the comic-curmudgeon that he left after Act Two.

Readers who encountered Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ when it was first published in 1952 (as part of her short story collection The Apple Tree) would have heard in the story an echo of the German assault on Britain during World War II, images of rural England under attack from aggressive birds an apt metaphor for everything the country had recently endured. Yet what lifted the story from being merely an allegory of a past war to a tale that resonated – and continues to resonate – beyond its time is the cyclic nature of the birds’ incursions.

The Surfer opens with its Australian-American protagonist, played by Nicolas Cage, giving his teenage son a surf-inspired pep talk: the ocean, he says, is ‘pure energy’. And like life, either you learn to ride it ‘or you wipe out’. These words could well have come from Cage himself, an actor known for his self-described ‘nouveau shamanic’ performance style, whose late-career oeuvre seems designed to repeatedly bring the sixty-one-year-old to the brink of spiritual oblivion.