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Arts

Film  |  Theatre  |  Art  |  Opera  |  Music  |  Television  |  Festivals

Welcome to ABR Arts, home to some of Australia's best arts journalism. We review film, theatre, opera, music, television, art exhibitions – and more. To read ABR Arts articles in full, subscribe to ABR or take out an ABR Arts subscription. Both packages give full access to our arts reviews the moment they are published online and to our extensive arts archive.

Meanwhile, the ABR Arts e-newsletter, published every second Tuesday, will keep you up-to-date as to our recent arts reviews.

 


Recent reviews

The Alliance Française French Film Festival continues to be one of the cultural highlights of the Australian arts calendar. In 2024, the festival attracted a record-breaking audience, eclipsed only by the Taylor Swift tour. ... (read more)

Henry 5 

Bell Shakespeare
by
06 March 2025

Is Henry V Shakespeare’s worst play? No, that unhappy honour goes to The Taming of the Shrew, an anti-comedy that grows more rancid with each passing year.

... (read more)

Whither (or whether) Opera Australia?

by Robyn Archer, Michael Shmith, John Allison, Peter Tregear, Michael Halliwell
06 March 2025
These are challenging times for Australia’s national opera company, and not just because many critics and operamanes question whether Opera Australia is in fact remotely ‘national’ in terms of programming. Since 2020 the company has recorded consecutive operating losses. Recently, it lost its artistic director (Jo Davies) and its CEO (Fiona Allan). Reviews of some of its 2024 productions were lukewarm at best. ... (read more)

Innocence 

Adelaide Festival
by
05 March 2025

Ever since its beginnings in the late sixteenth century, opera has been preoccupied with death. Illness, murder, and suicide stalk countless libretti, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Puccini’s Tosca to Berg’s Wozzeck and Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves. To the litany of horrific fates which have historically befallen the medium’s protagonists – stabbings, immolations, death by snake bite, poison and toxic mushroom, to say nothing of various wasting diseases and literal descents into hell – can now be added that most contemporary and shocking of demises: death by mass shooter.

... (read more)

Krapp’s Last Tape 

Adelaide Festival
by
04 March 2025
At a desk dimly lit by an overhead lamp sits a rumpled figure with a shock of black hair. He is dressed in white shirtsleeves, dark waistcoat, and slacks, and from beneath the desk peek a pair of grubby, off-white boots. He checks the time on a pocket watch. He yawns. Finally, he produces a set of keys and dangles them in front of his face until he locates the one he is looking for. ... (read more)

Mahler Resurrection Symphony 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by
28 February 2025

One consequence of the popular success of Bradley Cooper’s biopic Maestro (2023) may well be that it helps to reinforce the cultural significance of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony (Resurrection) for another generation. In the film we witness a faithful recreation of the final moments of Leonard Bernstein’s legendary performance of the Resurrection in Ely Cathedral in 1973. 

... (read more)

Inside 

Bonsai Films
by
24 February 2025
Guy Pearce always seemed like the odd man out among the Australian actors who became Hollywood leading men at the turn of the century – slighter, less conventionally rugged than Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, or Eric Bana. Even Heath Ledger was initially typecast as the kind of swashbuckling rogue with the dimpled smile that Australians have been playing since Errol Flynn cast the mould. But there was never anything twinkle-eyed about Pearce. Hot off Memento, Disney offered him the title role in The Count of Monte Cristo. He turned it down – and asked to play the villain instead. ... (read more)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig 

Sharmill Films
by
21 February 2025
Shortly before The Seed of the Sacred Fig premièred in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize, and well before it became Germany’s entry for Best International Feature at this year’s Academy Awards, Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison, plus a flogging and a hefty fine, for ‘collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the security of the country’. ... (read more)

Truth 

Malthouse Theatre
by
20 February 2025
Silence is the central theme of Patricia Cornelius’s latest play, a theatrical documentary about the life and times of Julian Assange, focusing especially on his persecution following the publication of classified US military and diplomatic documents in 2010.  ... (read more)

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

Melbourne Opera
by
17 February 2025
There is something inherently self-defeating in the famous quote about Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg being ‘the longest single smile in the German language’. Certainly, in some productions I have seen over the years, that smile has curdled into a rictus of silent suffering that comes when something is taken too seriously, thereby depleting the opera’s natural musical and dramatic energy. ... (read more)