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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

Grand Tour 

Potential Films
by •
06 February 2025
'Grand Tour: Miguel Gomes’s lavish historical drama' by Jordan Prosser
In the weeks since David Lynch’s death, much of the conversation around his legacy has focused on the dream-like quality of his work, a quality ephemeral enough that long ago it necessitated the coining of its own eponymous adjective: ‘Lynchian’. But without the ease of such brand-name recognition, how might we define what makes a film ‘dream-like’? Is it the absence of hard logic and traditional storytelling beats? ... (read more)

Follies 

Victorian Opera
by •
03 February 2025
(L-R) Adam Murphy, Marina Prior, Alexander Lewis, Antoinette Halloran (photograph by Jeff Busby).
A year after their production of Bernstein’s Candide, Victorian Opera has made another winning foray into the masterworks of American musical theatre with this finely wrought and brilliantly executed new staging of Follies at the Palais Theatre in St Kilda. ... (read more)

Babygirl 

A24
by •
29 January 2025
‘Babygirl: Milk break in corporate America’ by Jordan Prosser


Right now on the website for A24 – the reigning enfant terrible of indie American film distribution – you can buy a ‘Babygirl Milk Tee’ for $40, a T-shirt prominently featuring an image of a tall glass of milk. This is an allusion to one of the more memorable moments in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, when upstart intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) surreptitiously purchases a glass of milk for his much-older boss, Romy (Nicole Kidman), at a work function, then watches her drink it in a single gulp; a semi-public display of psychosexual domination. 

... (read more)

The Brutalist 

Universal Pictures
by •
21 January 2025
Adrien Brody as László Tóth in The Brutalist
Brady Corbet made his first film, The Childhood of a Leader, when he was twenty-four. A former child actor, he came to directing after years as the Zelig of the arthouse, acting in films by auteurs such as Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier. When The Childhood of a Leader premièred at the Venice Film Festival in 2015, Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), serving as the president of the Orizzonti jury, likened Corbet to Orson Welles, an invocation so sacrilegious it was sure to provoke the ire of certain American critics, who have had Corbet in the gun ever since. ... (read more)

A Complete Unknown 

Searchlight
by •
20 January 2025
Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown
The famous backlash against Bob Dylan’s switch to playing electric music in the mid-1960s is often misunderstood. It was not an objection based on musical aesthetics. Folk purists, such as the audience at Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and the man who shouted ‘Judas!’ at a Manchester show in 1966, were not enraged by the simple fact of the volume, rhythms, and brashness of rock and roll. Dylan’s adoption of what many saw as a popular fad was more a social question of the artist-audience relationship. ... (read more)

Ethel Carrick and Anne Dangar

by •
24 December 2024
Ethel Carrick, Christmas Day on Manly Beach (1913), also known as Manly Beach – summer is here, Manly, Manly Art Gallery & Museum Collection (courtesy of National Gallery of Australia)
These paired exhibitions do great credit to the National Gallery of Australia’s program promoting the fortunes of women artists in Australia: Know My Name. After the initial selective survey show that included 150 artists, the Gallery is ‘drilling down’ to heavily researched presentations of historical figures. ... (read more)

2024 Arts Highlights of the Year

by Anna Goldsworthy et al. •
January–February 2025, no. 472
Arts highlights
To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.   ... (read more)

Radical Textiles

by •
10 December 2024
Installation view: Radical Textiles featuring Nell’s NELL ANNE QUILT, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (photograph by Saul Steed)
Radical Textiles, the home-grown summer blockbuster at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA until 30 March 2025) is ebullient, celebratory, rewarding and responds to a rapidly growing interest: over the past two decades, textiles as an artistic medium, and textile practices as forms of cultural expression, have become increasingly important in contemporary art museums and exhibitions, part of an explosion of artistic media that speaks to women’s lives and work, and to subcultural energies. ... (read more)

My Brilliant Friend: The Story of the Lost Child 

SBS On Demand
by •
06 December 2024
Irene Maiorino as Lila and Alba Rohrwacher as Elena Lenù (courtesy of SBS On Demand)
The previous season of My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale) ended with a moment of fairytale-like transformation, with the protagonist Elena (Lenù) Greco staring at herself in the mirror of an aeroplane bathroom. She has torpedoed her marriage to run away with the man she always loved. Looking at the glass, she ages decades in the space of a heartbeat: the cherubic, adolescent features of Margherita Mazzucco replaced with the face of Alba Rohrwacher. Her eyes glimmer with a wry intelligence. ... (read more)

Beethoven Festival 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by •
29 November 2024
Jaime Martín with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Laura Manariti)
Ein Mißgriff – a mistake, a blunder. That was Beethoven’s own assessment of that great crowd-pleaser, the finale of his Ninth Symphony. The composer Vaughan Williams, avowedly not a Beethovenian, was with the crowds on this one, claiming the movement as one of the four great choral works of all time – and since he was a Bachian, we can take from this that he is putting the movement alongside the Mass in B and the Passions according to Matthew and John. ... (read more)
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