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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
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)
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)
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)
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, 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 Jonathan Ricketson •
06 December 2024
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)
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)
A dominant seventh of F resolving onto an F major chord (a perfect cadence); a dominant seventh of C resolving onto an A minor chord (an interrupted cadence); a dominant seventh of G resolving onto a G major chord (another perfect cadence): thus begins Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major. ... (read more)
In 2013, Australian Book Review broadened its review content to include the arts. Since then we have reviewed theatre, film, opera, music, dance, and the visual arts – not just literature. This development was in response to the decline of arts criticism in our newspapers and in recognition of our readers’ eclectic interests.
... (read more)
When I was a young opera student in London many years ago, it became clear to me that there was a definite, if unwritten, vocal hierarchy. My performance interest was in the major composers of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, beginning with Mozart, but then Italian operas by Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini, culminating in Verdi and Puccini, with the occasional French opera as part of the mix. If one was lucky to have a voice with the capacity to sing these roles, this became the focus of all one’s attention. ... (read more)