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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. Reviews remain open for one week before being paywalled.

Sign up to ABR Arts and receive longform arts criticism to your inbox every fortnight on Tuesdays. And if you are interested in writing for ABR Arts, tell us about your passions and your expertise.

 

Recent reviews

Die Frau ohne Schatten (★★★★) and Tosca (★★ ½)

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24 October 2023
Die Frau ohne Schatten © Wiener Staatsoper (photograph by Michael Pöhn).

The ABR/Academy Travel Vienna tour, now drawing to a close, has revealed some of the riches in this monumental city – the architecture, the art collections (especially the mighty Kunsthistorisches Museum and the brilliant, newish Leopold Museum, with its host of Schieles and Klimts), Emperor Franz Joseph’s Ringstrasse, the general ambience of the city, not to mention the Kardinalschnitte at Gerstner Konditorei.

... (read more)

The Visitors 

Victorian Opera
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24 October 2023
The cast of The Visitors (photograph by Charlie Kinross).

The birth of a new opera is always exciting. Unlike a play or a sonata, an opera brings together a variety of art forms, with performers and creatives drawn from many different backgrounds. The libretto of Christopher Sainsbury’s The Visitors draws on a new, more gender-balanced version of an existing play, Jane Harrison’s The Visitors (2020), currently running in Sydney and Wollongong.

... (read more)

Photography: Real and Imagined

National Gallery of Victoria
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24 October 2023
Man Ray Kiki with African mask 1926 National Gallery of Victoria © MAN RAY TRUST / ADAGP, Paris (licensed by Copyright Agency and photograph by Helen Oliver-Skuse / NGV).

Photography has held humanity in its thrall since its nascent years. Celebrated and contested, the photograph is said to have inherent power, making it both a vital, and also dangerous, medium. This exceptional and ambitious new exhibition at the NGV, Photography: Real and Imagined, illuminates why we have an unwavering fascination.

... (read more)

Killers of the Flower Moon 

Paramount
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17 October 2023
Janae Collins as Reta, Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle, Cara Jade Myers as Anna Brown, Jillian Dion as Minnie (photograph by Melinda Sue Gordon and courtesy of Paramount).
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon begins and ends with a ceremony, starting with a ritual of mourning and concluding with affirmation of community. In between, over the course of 206 minutes, it is a story of murder, manipulation, and survival, an engrossing, deliberate work that also has expansive, unexpected moments and disconcerting juxtapositions. It is packed with vivid cameos and has three striking performances at its centre. ... (read more)

The Makropulos Case 

Opéra National de Paris
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10 October 2023
Pavel Černoch as Albert Gregor, Karita Mattila as Emilia Marty and Károly Szemerédy as Dr. Kolenaty (photograph by Bernd Uhlig and courtesy of Opéra National de Paris).
A week in Paris (Billy Strayhorn’s moody panacea) gave ABR Arts a perfect opportunity to savour some of the city’s abundant musical life. We’ll start with an important revival at the Opéra National de Paris, performed at the Bastille. ... (read more)

Mozart and Beethoven Concertos 

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra
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10 October 2023
Photograph by Lucien Fischer and courtesy of Melbourne Chamber Orchestra.

Sophie Rowell’s first year as Melbourne Chamber Orchestra’s Artistic Director continues to impress with its attractive and intelligent programming and strong musical leadership on stage.

... (read more)

Caravaggio's Shadow 

Italian Film Festival
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02 October 2023
Riccardo Scamarcio as Caravaggio.
Visceral, extreme, beautiful, disturbing, genial, blasphemous, sacred, moving: these are just some of the words commonly used to describe Caravaggio’s art. Viewers will find the same qualities in L’Ombra di Caravaggio (Caravaggio’s Shadow, 2022), the latest film by Italian actor and director Michele Placido, screening nationally as part of the Italian Film Festival. ... (read more)

Earth. Voice. Body 

Sydney Chamber Opera
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02 October 2023
Celeste Lazarenko as Elle in La Voix humaine (photograph by Daniel Boud).
French philosopher and literary critic, Catherine Clément, in her influential and, for some, highly controversial book, L’Opéra ou la Défaite des femmes (Opera, or the Undoing of Women) (1979, trans. 1986), explores many examples throughout the history of the operatic form where the major female characters are inevitably the victims, often dying to the strains of beautiful music. ... (read more)

Sick of Myself 

Static Vision
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02 October 2023
Kristine Kujath Thorp as Signe (©Oslo Pictures).
Over the course of the past five years, the Norwegian-born, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli has acted in many of the films he has directed, more often than not playing a thinly veiled version of himself. In shorts such as A Place We Call Reality (2018), The Loser (2019), and Willem Dafoe (2023) – all available online – Borgli portrays, respectively: a director who has lost his way; an interviewer who cannot think of any questions to ask his idol; and an artist who cannot remember a famous actor’s name. ... (read more)

My Sister Jill 

Melbourne Theatre Company
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02 October 2023
Zachary Pidd, Lucy Goleby, Angourie Rice, Benjamin Nichol, and James O'Connell in My Sister Jill (photograph by Sarah Walker).
Some of Australia’s most enduring plays have dealt with war and its legacy. Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year (1960), John Romeril’s The Floating World (1974), Dorothy Hewitt’s The Man from Muckinupin (1979), Kate Mulvaney’s The Seed (2008), and Tom Wright’s Black Diggers (2015) have, each in their own way, interrogated the baptisms of blood upon which much of our national mythology, our national identity, has been built. ... (read more)
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