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Recent reviews

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

Mahler Resurrection Symphony 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by •
28 February 2025
‘Mahler Resurrection Symphony: An ecstatic vision of a generous deity’ by Peter Tregear

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 as Warren and Vincent Miller as Mel
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
Missagh Zareh as Iman and Soheila Golestani as Najmeh.
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
'Truth: A theatrical documentary about Julian Assange' by Andrew Fuhrmann
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
Warwick Fyfe as Hans Sachs and Christopher Hillier as Sixtus Beckmesser (courtesy of Melbourne Opera)
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)

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)
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