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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. Reviews remain open for one week before being paywalled.
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Recent reviews
The new Blade Runner doesn’t surpass the original, contra some breathless early reviews, but what could? Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic is a remarkable feat of design, the perfect vehicle for a director who received his training at the Royal College of Art, and a streamlined thriller with existential heft. It features a haunting score from ...
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Song to Song is writer and director Terrence Malick’s cinematic version of the modernist literary experiment: multiple internalised viewpoints, stream-of-consciousness narrative, chronological fragmentation, and a reality apprehended through symbolic or metaphoric conjunction. He is abetted in this project by ...
... (read more)Maria Callas Live: Remastered recordings 1949–1964 (Warner Classics) ★★★★1/2
Some singers – a gifted few – have voices that are so sumptuously individual that even one note instantly identifies them to the listener. In opera, Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti have that status, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in lieder, Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong in rock and jazz. But none more so than Maria Callas ...
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In this fortnight's Update: Marriage equality, Sydney Theatre Company's 2018 season, The complete recordings of Herbert Karajan, American Song, Brett Dean returns to the SSO, In Cahoots, Pine Gap, The Australian Dance Awards, Dec' Arts Spectacular, Fred Williams in the You Yangs, Metanastes at fortyfivedownstairs, OperaQ's 2018 season, and theatre and film giveaways ...
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When this production of Henrik Ibsen’s most controversial play was programmed, no one could have guessed how pertinent it would appear in Australia at this moment. On the surface, this account of a bourgeois woman whose attempt to escape from a loveless marriage ...
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September has seen the premières of two much-loved operas at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. A new production of Puccini’s La Bohème and a revival of the David McVicar production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). Both works featured in their leading female roles two of Australia’s most promising and ...
... (read more)Woyzeck In Winter (Landmark Productions / Galway International Arts Festival) ★★★★
The jukebox musical is a fairly recent phenomenon on theatre stages, but has proven to be a popular, and lucrative, method of stringing together a group of popular songs loosely held together by a sometimes attenuated narrative. Mamma Mia! – the collection of ABBA hits that has been running in London since 1999 – is one of the most ...
... (read more)Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (The Australian Ballet) ★★★★★
The Australian première of Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, created on the Royal Ballet’s brightest talents, was one of the happiest nights of ballet on record. It boosted The Australian Ballet’s small repertoire of full-length narratives in which all the elements ...
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In this fortnight's Update: The Coming Back Out Ball, An Octoroon giveaway, Sweet Country, Archibald returns to Geelong, Maria Callas Live, Crush Festival, You Know We Belong Together, the Abbotsford Convent, Australian Dance Awards, Oddlands, The Nettelbecks at fortyfivedownstairs, and giveaway tickets to Mountain (Madman Films).
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Mother!, the new film from Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky, premièred a week ago at the Venice Film Festival. It was met with a smattering of boos, followed by mostly rapturous reviews. Aronofsky’s earlier films – Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Noah – were ...
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