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
In this fortnight's Update: The winners of the Helpmann Awards, Der Rosenkavalier, Stuart Skelton's début album, John Bell in The Miser, a Bette Midler caberet, Geoffrey Rush pulling out of Twelfth Night, the Tarrawarra Biennial, the Melbourne International Film Festival program, and some giveaways ...
... (read more)
Strange and terrible events unfold around us. Conflicts erupt; catastrophes occur; a billionaire reality television performer reminiscent of a snake oil merchant is elected president of the United States. Following these destabilising forces, a chorus comprised of dissonant tones of reproach and plea often emerges ...
... (read more)Parsifal ★★★★1/2 and The Flying Dutchman ★★★★ (Bavarian State Opera)
... (read more)
In this fortnight's Update: Anne Sophie-Mutter, a major new Indigenous art exhibition, the World Cup of chamber music, the Louise Crossley Conducting Workshop, glitter at MWF, ACMI and Film Victoria's Series Mania, the Archibald Prize in Geelong, the $30,000 Ursula Hoff Fellowshop, the Art Music Awards announcement, Brook Andrew, and giveaways from MSO, the Queensland Theatre, and Transmission Films ...
... (read more)
The two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) has given rise to a predictable slew of new reflections and reappraisals offering a twenty-first-century context to this seminal work. None was written with more erudition or acuity than ...
... (read more)
One would have hoped that in the four years since Jada Alberts’s fine début play Brothers Wreck premièred at Belvoir Street that its concern with the issue of Indigenous despair would have come to feel less vital, and yet the problem is as acute as ever. This week we learned that every child in detention in the Northern Territory, where Brothers Wreck is set, is Indigenous ...
... (read more)
For its first Original film, Stan could have opted for a cleanly prescribed, commercial genre piece, as per its Wolf Creek series – clearly pitched at millennials. But the trailer that emerged in late 2017 for The Second promised something unusual: a psychological thriller defined by a love triangle between a novelist, her publisher, and an enigm ...
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. First performed in 1991, Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins has sadly lost none of its topicality regarding gun culture or the ‘disenfranchised’ lunatics who wield such weapons. As Roger Hodgman, who directs this brilliant new production for the Black Swan State Theatre Company ...
... (read more)
Following the end of the 1733 London opera season, George Frideric Handel headed to Oxford with his first two oratorios, Esther and Deborah and the newly composed Athalia. While the first two were well enough received, Athalia was a triumph, with newspaper claims that 3,700 people attended the performances ...
... (read more)
