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. 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
Tate Modern excelled itself with its Giacometti retrospective. It’s not easy to take a familiar modern master and return a new and compelling view of his work. Many years ago, MoMA in New York failed the challenge abysmally. They had nothing new to say about the artist and ...
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An account of the life of Emily Dickinson can, like that of a saint, be reduced to its elements of spiritual and physical suffering. She was acutely sensitive, frequently ill, and when she died she left behind thousands of unpublished poems. It would be easy to portray her as a ...
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In this fortnight's Update: Hamlet at Glyndebourne, Vale Jeffrey Tate, The Hispanic Society at the Prado, Cunning Little Vixen and Katja Kabanowa, The SSO plays Harry Potter, Christian Thompson, The Eisteddfod, Silence at Dark Mofo, Andrew Brook at The Substation, NLA Creative Arts Fellowships, and giveaways from Victorian Opera and Black Swan State Theatre Company ...
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Does anyone read Daphne du Maurier (1907–89) these days? An immensely popular novelist for some decades, she was much filmed, for screens large and small, most famously by Alfred Hitchcock, who filmed Jamaica Inn and Rebecca in 1939 and 1940 respectively, and ...
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It is a truism that great novelists rarely make great playwrights; Henry James tried to conquer the boards to disastrous effect with Guy Domville (1895), and writers from Virginia Woolf to James Joyce have failed to translate their genius for interiority to the stage. Charles Dickens, whose ...
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The Sense of an Ending is an intelligent and thought-provoking adaptation of Julian Barnes’s novel of the same name, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Director Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox) and screenwriter Nick Payne (Constellations) have created a sensitive film ...
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In this fortnight's Update: 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, ABR partners with AFTRS, Red Room Poetry Fellowship, Two major appointments at The Sydney Opera House, 2017 Sidney Myer Fund Ceramic Award, Corranderk national tour, Tidelands, Noises Off, Coraline the opera, and giveaways from Queensland Theatre and Studio Canal ...
... (read more)What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow/Annapurna Interactive) ★★★★ and Little Nightmares (Tarsier Studios/Bandai Namco Entertainment) ★★★★
The rise in popularity of so-called ‘walking simulators’ in recent years propagated an existential crisis in the gaming world. In video games like Dear Esther (2012), Firewatch (2016), and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2016), the absence of an overriding purpose troubled gamers used ...
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In 1948, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and Chilean senator, Pablo Neruda, proud member of his country’s Communist Party, accused his government of treason for forging an alliance with the United States. Shortly after, Neruda went underground to escape arrest. For thirteen months ...
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With unrelenting cheerfulness, bright orange lights shine on a simple set: a row of straight-backed chairs, a tall flower display, and a painting of an elderly woman, prominently displayed. Are we about to witness a funeral? Indeed we are. Slowly, painfully, the ambulant residents ...
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