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
Ah, Will Eno. The poet of the people, chronicler of twenty-first century angst, humorist, satirist, famously labelled ‘a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation’, is back in dazzling form. The Realistic Joneses showcases Eno to the power of ten as he holds up a mirror to ...
... (read more)In this fortnight's Update: Once in Royal David's City, Anna Netrebko, Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Clunes Booktown, Awakening at fortyfivedownstairs, Blood and guts, Noel Tovey at La Mama, Pulitzer and Man Booker Prize winners in Adelaide, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, SALA’s twentieth anniversary, and giveaways from the Hong Kong Philharmonic and fortyfivedownstairs.
Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a married professor of philosophy, with two adult children, a sunny, book-lined Parisian apartment, and several published works to her name. Success has granted her self-assurance, at least in public. Early in Things to Come (or L’Avenir, to ...
... (read more)There is something more than a little ersatz about Three Little Words, the latest play by Joanna Murray-Smith. It has all the usual parts, but it doesn’t feel like a real play ...
... (read more)Australian director Cate Shortland has made three feature films about young women who find themselves out of their depths. Her first, Somersault (2004), set in wintry Jindabyne, featured Abbie Cornish in an early and memorable role as a troubled teenage runaway ...
... (read more)Not As the Songs of Other Lands: 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting (Ian Potter Museum of Art)
Opportunities to see nineteenth-century American art are rare in Australia. This beautiful small exhibition offers fascinating parallels between Australian and American landscape painting of the period, both popularly admired as expressions of a national psyche, revealing ...
... (read more)In this fortnight's Update: Vale John Clarke, Baiba Skride at the SSO, La Sonnambula, The Avengers in Australia, Tasmania’s Tarkine, The man in the iron mask, Black Swan Production Fund, and giveaways from Victorian Opera and Entertainment One ...
... (read more)William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), about a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island during a nuclear war, has been adapted for radio, stage, and screen. Acclaimed theatre director Peter Brook’s austere, 1963 black-and-white film, with a superb cast, is by far ...
... (read more)The opening scene is a stunner. David Irving (Timothy Spall), top of the pile of Holocaust deniers, is giving a lecture. He is framed by darkness, we do not see the audience. ‘I say to you quite tastelessly,’ he says, ‘that more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car ...
... (read more)Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment) ★★★★1/2 and The Walking Dead (Telltale Games) ★★★★
The worlds of literature and video games appear at first glance to be distinctly at odds. Book lovers may feel that playing video games is puerile, a waste of time that could be better spent improving oneself by reading. Some gamers regard books as old hat, a stuffy waste of time that ...
... (read more)