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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

Bones and All 

Universal Pictures
by
22 November 2022
Timothée Chalamet, sharp of jaw and dark of eyebrow, found fame due to his starring role in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), a languorous evocation of semi-closeted first love set in the sun-drenched Italian countryside, with a tender and judicious screenplay by that veteran filmmaker of suppressed emotion, James Ivory, of Merchant Ivory. Being all of twenty when that film was shot, Chalamet produced the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle performance that only a young and very green actor can: unaffected and genuinely heart-rending. Half a decade on, his gracile person causes red-carpet mayhem worldwide; he’s Timmy now, the internet’s boyfriend and Vogue magazine cover star. Watching his stilted, wary performance as a cannibal – yes, really – in Bones and All, which reunites him with director Guadagnino, I could only conclude that the real wrongdoer is fame, which eats young talent and is never satisfied. ... (read more)

Barbara Hepworth: In Equilibrium

Heide Museum of Modern Art
by
22 November 2022
‘I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air,’ quipped the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 1934. What Hepworth meant by this cryptic statement is that she did not wish to be an artist making figurative sculptures of recognisable subjects but instead to distil her deep sensitivity to the natural world into a language of living things that could themselves breathe, palpitating with a sense of their own inner vitality. ... (read more)

She Said 

Universal Pictures
by
21 November 2022

There is a scene in Maria Schrader’s film She Said where two New York Times journalists debate the merits of pursuing an investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse, given, as one of them says, that actresses already have a voice. ‘Are there other women to be looking at?’, she asks.

... (read more)

William Shakespeare is hiding behind a set of drapes. Wearing baggy black breeches, he is a buffoon, waggishly stalking his prey. His prey is Emilia Bassano, the young and (unusually for the times) educated daughter of a musician at the court of Elizabeth I, a woman who longs to be recognised for ‘how brilliant [her] mind is’. She wants to write and be published ...

Here is a list of things you won’t see the great American writer Joyce Carol Oates doing in this documentary: looting, detonating a bomb, strangling children, having sex, eating, eating human flesh, sleeping, kissing, cussing, masturbating, masturbating over a corpse, screaming, lobotomising a lover, shedding tears (though she comes close), or being murdered.

...

How rare an experience it is to be in an exhibition where you feel you are in the presence of the artist at work. It is as if you are watching the artist’s hand and eye moving swiftly in perfect unison as he outlines the object of his intense looking, repeating contours, making corrections, starting afresh, appearing to breathe life into his subjects, and thinking all the while.

... (read more)

RBG: Of Many, One 

Sydney Theatre Company
by
07 November 2022
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020), the late and great associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, was notoriously difficult to decipher. She was shy, enigmatic, and unused to clamour. Her career was distinguished by her sharp arguments and belief that due process – not reactivity – is the route to a fairer society. How, then, do you represent the interiority of a person who made herself inscrutable; understand why she made the choices she did? According to RBG: Of Many, One, the new play by Suzie Miller, author of the acclaimed Prima Facie, it is hidden emotion – a deep well of quieted outrage – that propelled Ginsburg’s life work. ... (read more)

Armageddon Time 

Universal Pictures
by
31 October 2022

After the uneven space operatics of Ad Astra (2019), American writer–director James Gray returns to Earth – specifically to Queens, New York, 1980 – with Armageddon Time, a burnished, contemplative, and astutely observed autobiographical coming-of-age tale. This is a rapidly escalating micro-trend in cinema; it seems that every auteur with enough critical clout will soon be expected to churn out their very own childhood memoir movie, from Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) and Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (2021) to the upcoming self-told Steven Spielberg origin story, The Fabelmans.

... (read more)

The Requiem 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by
31 October 2022

When Alessandro Manzoni died on 22 May 1873, it was an event of major significance in Italy. The poet, novelist, and philosopher – an early proponent of Italian unification – was a hero of the Risorgimento. His novel I promessi sposi (1827), with its appeal to Italian patriotism, was (and remains) one of the most famous Italian novels.

... (read more)

Music for the Sistine Chapel 

Melbourne Recital Centre
by
26 October 2022

Two sold-out concerts in the Melbourne Recital Centre by the London-based vocal ensemble The Tallis Scholars will be music to the ears of Australia classical music promoters. Audience numbers may be returning to something close to pre-Covid levels. In this case, however, I suspect the box-office success also reflects the peculiar drawing power of The Tallis Scholars themselves.

... (read more)