Arts
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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. 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 his introduction to this year’s Melbourne Festival, Artistic Director Jonathan Holloway emphasised the need for people to step away from the hateful invective festering in public discourse and to note the bigger picture of humanity’s journey. ‘The last couple of years – globally – have not been our best’, he says in ...
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A rainy weekend heralded the opening of Gerhard Richter’s exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. Gerhard Richter is famous for achieving the highest auction price for a living European artist (Abstraktes Bild fetched US$46.3 million in 2015), but his importance as an artist is due to his commitment to painting during a postwar period when many ...
Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma elicits the ultimate rose-tinted nostalgia in ageing opera aficionados. Operagoers of my generation wax lyrical about Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé in their prime, while making disparaging remarks about present singers. We in turn were bored by ancients who admitted that La Callas ...
... (read more)On Country: Australian Aboriginal art from the Kaplan–Levi Gift (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is known for its large-scale, ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. These are usually impressive, often enlightening. But sometimes it can be even more rewarding (and less exhausting) to visit a show on a much smaller scale. Such is the case at the moment at The Met, where six paintings by modern ...
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In this fortnight's Update: British Film Festival, Kazuo Ishiguro, Victorian Opera's 2018 season, Tarnanthi, Gert and Bess at TheatreiNQ, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Russian Film Festival, Jill Bilcock, Anh Do's portait of Uncle Jack, Cans Film Festival, This is Desmondo Ray!, and theatre and film giveaways ...
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Tom of Finland is a worthy enshrinement of the life of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen (1920–91) into the cinematic pantheon of queer historical biographies. The World War II veteran and advertising art director best known as ‘Tom of Finland’ drew thousands of naked and leather-clad men with gigantic nipples and ...
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Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman’s humanistic, wheeling manifesto of the American destiny underpins Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith’s one-man play, American Song, and the collection of poems form the credo and frame the questioning of its central character, Andy. The poems’ exploration of a world of natural ...
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For my return visit to the exhibition Fred Williams in the You Yangs at the Geelong Gallery, I decided to take the train instead of driving, as I usually do. Although the creeping suburban sprawl, especially around Melbourne, has narrowed the area without housing or industrial estates, there is still just enough left of the flat ...
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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 ...
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