UPDATE, December 16, 2020: Richard Jewell is available to stream via Netflix, Binge, Foxtel Now, Google Play, YouTube Movies, iTunes and Amazon Video. All it took was a concert and a backpack for Richard Jewell's (Paul Walter Hauser) life to change forever. It's the summer of 1996, and the aspiring cop is thrilled to be working as a security guard at a gig during the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games. But as songs like the Staple Singers' 'I'll Take You There' fill the city's Centennial Park, Jewell spots an unattended bag under a bench. He swiftly informs the police on duty, who figure he's overreacting but evacuate the area anyway. As the crowd begins to disperse, the bomb explodes. While one person is killed, another suffers a fatal heart attack and 111 others are wounded, the toll would've been much higher if Jewell hadn't sounded the alarm. That's the real-life story that monopolised news headlines 24 years ago. It's also the tale that Jewell, with his desperate desire to work in law enforcement, was overjoyed to have attached to his name. And, it's the narrative that Richard Jewell tells, although Clint Eastwood's involvement should make it obvious that it doesn't end there. As demonstrated with gusto in the latter years of his five-decade directorial career, Eastwood is drawn to heroes. He's not just fascinated by people acting bravely, but by true tales of fortitude in the face of pressure, scrutiny, admonishment and even contempt by society, authorities and bureaucracy. American Sniper's flag-waving tribute to the deadliest marksman in US military history, Sully's recreation of the Miracle on the Hudson and subsequent investigation, and The Mule's account of an octogenarian forced to become a drug courier to make ends meet — they all fit the profile, as does Jewell's swift slide from saviour to suspect. Played with equal parts zealousness, assertiveness, awkwardness and friendliness by I, Tonya and BlacKkKlansman's Hauser, Jewell fit the FBI's profile, too. With no other real leads to chase, agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm) becomes certain that the security guard's demeanour, portly physique and obsession with cops makes him the culprit. That Jewell lives with his mother (Oscar-nominee Kathy Bates) doesn't help. Nor does the arsenal of guns in his bedroom ("it's Georgia," Jewell notes). So when Shaw slips his theory to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) — a woman happy to trade sex for tips and just as dubious in her ethics in general, the movie intimates, a perspective that's been refuted by those who knew her — Jewell's transformation from hero to accused perpetrator becomes official. With Jewell, his devoted mum and no-nonsense attorney Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) on one side and Shaw, Scruggs and the institutions they represent on the other, Richard Jewell becomes an us-versus-them battle — between an ordinary guy vilified instead of celebrated for doing an extraordinary thing, and the forces conspiring against him. With his threshold for subtlety waning over his past few films, Eastwood's feature is that blunt, as is the worldview that comes with it. His conservative politics are well-known, so lambasting the over-reaching government and decrying fake news should come as no surprise. Still, the lack of nuance with which Eastwood tells this tale — working with a script by Billy Ray (The Hunger Games, Captain Phillips and Gemini Man), and adapting a 1997 Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner — casts a shadow over the movie. Jewell went through something that no one should have to endure. Eastwood doesn't downplay that ordeal, including the fact that Jewell's status as a suspect was widely publicised — even though he was never charged — but the clearing of his name wasn't. And yet, when it comes to portraying the FBI and media, Eastwood does exactly what they both did to his protagonist. Law enforcement and the press are treated so simplistically in Richard Jewell, especially Scruggs, that Eastwood slants the film in one direction and doesn't care to look elsewhere. You could read the filmmaker's version of Scruggs as another of his celebrated working-class characters doing whatever it takes to get by. Wilde's brash, committed portrayal of the now-deceased journalist certainly aims for that interpretation. But there's just not enough depth, balance and empathy on Eastwood's part to support it. Scruggs is a clear villain here — so much so that Eric Rudolph, the actual perpetrator of the attack, barely rates a mention. If Richard Jewell proved bombastic across the board, then its treatment of Scruggs mightn't stand out as much as it does. But Eastwood takes great care to show the complexity of Jewell's situation, laying out the details in a manner befitting any weighty police procedural or 'wrong man' thriller. His staging of the bombing is as tense, gripping and superbly crafted as anything in his 38 films behind the lens — and he smartly anchors the movie around Hauser's multifaceted performance as a man teeming with contrasts. What lingers, though, is the glaring contradiction at the heart of the feature. Richard Jewell advocates against one-note judgements while flaunting its own. It champions the truth about someone unfairly pilloried by the media, yet spins its own questionable story about a real-life figure. Yes, this is a film about a hero, but it didn't need to be a movie about a cartoonish villain as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpbKh4FqR2g
UPDATE, March 13, 2023: Navalny is available to stream via Docplay, YouTube Movies, iTunes and Prime Video. Man on Wire did it with The Walk, The Times of Harvey Milk sparked Milk and Dogtown and Z-Boys brought about Lords of Dogtown. Werner Herzog went from Little Dieter Needs to Fly to Rescue Dawn, too, and the Paradise Lost films were followed by Devil's Knot. One day, Navalny will join this growing list. Documentaries inspiring dramas isn't new, and Alexei Navalny's life story would scream for a biopic even if director Daniel Roher (Once Were Brothers) hadn't gotten there first — and so compellingly, or in such an acclaimed way, winning the 2022 Sundance Film Festival's Audience Award for its US doco competition in the process. When you're a Russian opposition leader crusading against corruption and Vladimir Putin, there's going to be a tale to tell. Usually only Hollywood screenwriters can conjure up a narrative like the one that Navalny has been living, though, typically in a Bourne-style spy thriller. Actually, John le Carré, Ian Fleming or Tom Clancy might've come up with something similar; still, even the former, the author responsible for such espionage efforts such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager, could've struggled to imagine details this staggering. Creating a fictional character as complicated, captivating and candid as Navalny's namesake would've also been a stretch. Indeed, there are two key aspects to this engrossing doco: everything that it explores about its subject's life, especially in recent years, which is a dream for a documentary filmmaker; and the engaging pro-democracy advocate himself. Often Navalny chats to camera about his experiences, demanding and earning the viewer's attention. In a movie that doesn't overlook his flaws, either, he's equally riveting when he's searching for a crucial truth. Another stark fact haunts Navalny from the outset: it was never guaranteed that he'd be alive to see the film come to fruition, let alone reach an audience. The outspoken Putin critic, lawyer and dissident confronts that grim reality early on, giving Roher the holy grail of soundbites. "Let's make a thriller out of this movie,' he says. "And if I'm killed, let's make a boring movie about memory," he continues. In August 2020, Navalny nearly didn't make it, after all. In an incident that understandably attracted international headlines and just as expectedly sits at the core of this documentary, he was poisoned while flying from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. The toxin: a Novichok nerve agent. The instantly suspected culprits: the Kremlin, as part of an assassination plot that he survived. No matter whether you're aware of the minutiae from press coverage when it happened — or of his treatment by Russia prior or since, in a country that hasn't taken kindly to his campaign against its president — or you're stepping through his tale for the first time while watching, Navalny couldn't be more gripping as it gets sleuthing as well. Among other things, it's an attempted-murder mystery. That fateful flight was diverted to Omsk because Navalny was so violently and deathly ill due to the Soviet-era toxin. His stint in hospital was tense, and evacuating him to safety in Berlin was never guaranteed. Although the poisoning is just one aspect of his story, and of this astonishing and anger-inciting film, identifying the people responsible is firmly one of Navalny's quests and Navalny's focuses. With extraordinarily intimate access, befitting his central figure's frankness and determination, Roher shot the aftermath of the incident as it unfolded; one moment in particular must be seen to be believed. Navalny takes up help from Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist from Netherlands-based group Bellingcat (or "a nice Bulgarian nerd with a laptop" as he's called here). As the evidence mounts, they start contacting the men they've worked out were involved. Most calls end promptly. Then, when Navalny impersonates a Kremlin higher-up, phoning to get answers as to why the plot went wrong, answers spill (answers that involve Navalny's underwear, in fact). With apologies to the most skilled screenwriters and authors that've plied their trade in spy narratives, this is an exchange so wild that it can only be true, as Navalny's audience witnesses while perched on the edge of their seats. This is a compulsive, revelatory, fast-paced movie, as directed with agility by Roher. There's as much of a pulse to its early summary of Navalny's career, including what led him to become such a target, as there is to his to-camera discussions and the unravelling of the Novichok ordeal. News footage and imagery shot on mobile phones help fill in the gaps with the latter, but the as-it-happens calls — and the digging before it — are so suspenseful and so deftly shot by cinematographer Niki Waltl (In the Bunker) and spliced by editors Maya Hawke (Janis: Little Girl Blue) and Langdon Page (Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures) that it's hard to see how any dramatisation could top it. Composers Marius de Vries (CODA) and Matt Robertson (a music programmer on Cats) add a nerve-shredding score, too, as part of the doco's polish. Navalny doesn't need it, as seeing its subject's flight back to Russia in January 2021 after recuperating to Germany — a flight back to charges and imprisonment — also makes plain, but the whole package is expertly assembled. There's still more in the absorbing documentary's sights, such as Navalny's relationships with his ever-supportive wife Yulia and children Dasha and Zakhar; his social-media following and the well-oiled flair for getting his message out there, including via TikTok; the charisma that's helped him strike such a wide-ranging chord; and his fondness of playing Call of Duty. Navalny is a frightening portrait of Russia, an account of battling its oppressive status quo and a layered character study alike — and, smartly and astutely, that means looking at the man in its moniker's past approach to consolidating opposition to Putin as well. Navalny has previously thrown in with far-right groups to amass a cohort against the Russia leader, a move that warrants and gets a thorough line of questioning, resulting in frustration on his part. As it lays bare what it involves to confront authoritarian power, demand freedom and fight against the state while putting your life on the line — be it in inspiring or dubious-at-best ways — this film has to be unflinching: it couldn't be as complex as it is otherwise.
Local ceramic shop Elph Ceramics is currently putting on fun workshops so you can make your own little ceramic houses at home. The Australian brand of handcrafted homewares is run by sisters Sophie and Eloise, offering virtual classes guiding you through creating adorable ceramic houses. Originally, the tiny houses were created to test glazes and clay colours, but soon became a hit with customers. The duo hosts in-person tiny house workshops in their NSW Southern Highlands studio, but with Sydney in lockdown, have taken the classes online. The classes run every Thursday until Thursday, October 14, but you'll want to reserve your spot as they've been filling up fast. When you book yourself in for a class, you're sent everything you need to make four to six tiny houses (enough for one to two people to join in) including air-dry clay and a wooden clean-up tool. All you need to bring yourself is a bowl of water, a plastic mat and your drink of choice. You then log onto the zoom call and the Elph team will guide you through making your cute new decorations. The class will set you back $85 plus $15 to ship the items. While you're booking your session, take a look at what else Elph has on offer at its online store.
Fresh naan bread, beef vindaloo and daal on a cold night is one way to beat the winter blues. Renowned for its wide variety of dishes and flavours, Shaahi Tandoori has a massive selection of hot biryani rice, curries, bread and entrees to keep the fire in your belly going. For a Pakistani favourite, there's the slow-cooked goat korma with bones, while Indian specialities include chicken tikka masala and lamb rogan josh. Do you dare dive into its spiciest dish? It's the vindaloo, packed with traditional spices and your choice of lamb, beef or chicken. Just add a side of jeera rice to mellow out the heat and have a mango lassi on standby if things start to get a bit too much. The best part? You can order from DoorDash right up to 11.15pm, so your late-night chilli cravings are sorted. Image: Cassandra Hannagan
Dystopian thriller Snowpiercer is a difficult film to categorise. Adapted from a French graphic novel by celebrated South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Memories of Murder), it exists at a weird intersection between action film, arthouse movie and genre flick, merging violence with scathing social commentary. Released in Australia on just two screens, it's hard to imagine the film scoring big at the box office, despite the presence of Chris Evans, aka Steve Rogers, aka Captain America. But for anyone who likes their blockbuster with brains, Snowpiercer should definitely be sought out. The film takes place 17 years after a botched attempt to halt global warming plunged the planet into a new ice age. The last remnants of humanity live aboard an enormous, fast-moving train, perpetually circling the globe. The wealthy elite live at the front of the train, surrounded by the luxuries and comforts of the old world. The rest live in the rear carriages, in squalor and in fear. Evans plays Curtis, the de facto leader of the tail section, who leads his people in a revolt to try take control of the engine. Each carriage the rebels capture means another new environment, which brings with it new threats and new discoveries. In this way, Bong mirrors the structure of a videogame, allowing him to maintain an arresting sense of momentum. His visuals are expectedly stylish, while the set design is top-notch; the filthy metallic greys of the tail section soon give way to images of increasing extravagance and excess. The train is a microcosm; a reflection of the growing social and economic divide we see in the world today. The allegory is a grim one, and the violence similarly is uncompromising. Nevertheless, Bong and his co-writer Kelly Masterson inject plenty of moments of black humour. Alison Pill plays a fanatical primary school teacher who reminds her students in a sing-song voice that outside "we'd all freeze and die!" Taking even bigger bites out of the scenery is Tilda Swinton as a cruel, bucktoothed bureaucrat who parrots the party line that "everyone has their place". In comparison to some of the more over-the-top supporting players, Evans feels rather on the stilted side. He's got the brooding intensity figured out, but struggles with the more emotional stuff — there's one dramatic monologue in particular, towards the end of the film, that may cause unintentional laughter. Thankfully, he's ably supported by a cast that includes John Hurt, Octavia Spencer and Jamie Bell, as well as a regular Bong collaborator Song Kang-so. The film's ending may throw some people, but then again, that's part of its appeal. A confronting think piece wrapped in a bizarre and bloody thrill ride, the highest praise you can offer Bong's film is that it really is unique. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nX5PwfEMBM0
When Quentin Tarantino first formed a film production company back in 1991, its name came from movie history. With A Band Apart, the then-fledgling director paid tribute to filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, to 1964 picture Bande à part and to the French New Wave, and nodded to the imprints that cinema's past always leaves on its future. Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, Jacques Panijel, Jacques Rozier and company didn't need QT's ode to cement their greatness, or that of the movement they brought to life in the 50s and 60s, of course — but that recognition is just one example of how far their influences spread. Indeed, watch any film that falls into the Nouvelle Vague and you'll spy the inspiration for countless more from around the globe in the seven decades since it sprang up. That's the impact that the movement's group of French film critics and cinephiles-turned-filmmakers have had. And the Art Gallery of New South Wales wants you to watch, dedicating its latest movie season to these crucial and significant gems. Screening from Wednesday, July 9–Sunday, September 7, 2025 in the Domain Theatre, the venue's Nouvelle Vague lineup is packed with masterpieces that sparked more — from Truffaut's coming-of-age great The 400 Blows and ménage à trois flick Jules and Jim to Godard's crime drama Breathless, Varda's thoughtful Cléo From 5 to 7 and the technicolour wonders of Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. You can head along from 2pm on Wednesdays and Sundays for a middle-of-the-day movie, or at 7.15pm on Wednesday evenings. Whichever you pick, attendance is free, but those complimentary tickets can be booked online or collected at the door from one hour before each screening.
"Sixteen-year-old Billie's reluctant path to independence is accelerated when her mother reveals plans for gender transition and their time together becomes limited to Tuesday afternoons." So reads the synopsis for 52 Tuesdays, the striking debut feature from Adelaide-based filmmaker Sophie Hyde. A nuanced exploration of issues surrounding youth, gender, sexuality and family, the film is also remarkable for its unique method of production: shot chronologically, one scene every Tuesday, for the course of an entire year. Hyde and lead actor Tilda Cobham-Hervey have since seen their little indie scoop up awards at Sundance, Berlin and the Melbourne Queer Film Festival. It hits cinemas in Australia on May 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y5WcMzEYRGU STANDING OUT FROM THE CROWD "The rules came first," recalls Hyde. "In film now, there has to be something that helps you stand out, especially if you're coming at it from a low budget, and you're unknown …the truth though is that we're always interested in different ways of making something …and that's something I'd take into anything. Let's not do something because it's always been done. Let's do something because it feels right." "You can't hide the messiness of a year," chimes in Cobham-Hervey. "You're always going to have a pimple, or you've just had a fight with Mum, and you actually can't stop the real world from coming into the film, which I think inevitably drenched it in a reality and authenticity." BECOMING BILLIE With a background in theatre and circus, Cobham-Hervey's role as Billie marked her first time in front of the camera. "It didn't feel like a huge commitment at the beginning," says the fledgling actress, who was in year 11 when shooting began. "Then suddenly halfway through we all had that realisation that this is really massive!" "I felt very different before it started to what I did at the end," she continues. "It was that interesting thing of initially not feeling very much like the character, and then reaching that point in the middle where those lines were really blurred … I don't know what I'd be without it." QUESTIONS OF GENDER As impressive as Cobham-Hervey's performance is, equally memorable is the work of Del Herbert-Jane as Billie's mother. "Del identifies as gender non-conforming", explains Hyde. "Whereas the character is a transgender man and wants to be seen as a man. So they're really different. But I think there is an experience in Del, in feeling different from how people treat you, which is something that's hard to understand if you don't experience that." "It's one of the great things that I feel like I learnt making the film", Hyde continues, "realising that every single person I meet treats me as my gender, and I treat them as their gender, and we just make this assumption immediately. If you try and take gender out of a sentence, you have to change like thirty words." "I found it hard in the film," agrees Cobham-Hervey, "saying in the same sentence, 'Mum' and 'he'. That's really hard to do in your brain." GETTING PEOPLE TALKING Despite the film's festival pedigree, local success is by no means a guarantee. "It's a story about family. It's a story about queer issues. It's about young people. And it's got a very arthouse vibe. Those are really quite different audiences," muses Hyde. "People, when they've seen it, respond in a really personal way. But whether we can get to all of those people, I don't know. "The truth is Australian films don't attract huge audiences at the cinemas … most films that we see now have marketing budgets three times their film budget, and their film budgets are hundreds of times ours." Nevertheless, the director hopes people will go to the effort to see the film in a theatre. "[In Berlin] we were playing in a young person's strand, and talked to loads of teenagers, which was amazing," says Hyde. "These sorts of films are great to see with a cinema audience, where you might actually have a conversation afterwards." 52 Tuesdays is in cinemas on Thursday, May 1. You can read our full review of the movie here.
Crank up Hozier — you're heading to church for dinner on your next trip to Bathurst. Well, it's not church, exactly, but a former church schoolhouse. Known as Church Bar, this candlelit hideaway serves up cocktails and woodfired pizzas. It's got over 20 types of pie, including two dessert ones: the Rose ($20) with white chocolate, mixed berries and homemade crumble and the Charlotte ($20) with melted milk chocolate, vanilla ice cream, strawberries, bananas and choc fudge sauce. But, before you get your sugar hit, try the Russel ($23), with sautéed mushrooms, grilled asparagus, a poached egg and parmesan cheese, drizzled with white truffle oil. Or, there's the spicy Piper ($21) with spicy chorizo, capsicum, jalapeño and chilli, one wih slow-cooked lamb shanks, sweet potato, rosemary and feta ($25) or the simple (but delicious) Vale ($17) with Napolitana sauce, buffalo mozzarella and fresh basil. For drinks, expect classic such as a caipiroska ($16), french martini ($17), bloody mary ($17) and espresso martini ($18) alongside the bar's signature cocktails.
Bayswater Kitchenette has nailed classic Italian food, the way it should be: simple, delicious and surrounded by great friends, even if you're dining alone. Co-owners Glenda Lau (the woman who sparked A1 Canteen's Instagram hysteria with her muffuletta) and Alessia Bottini (formally at Italian institution, Fratelli Paradiso) have rewritten what it means to have a home-cooked meal in Sydney, with honest food, local ingredients and excellent company. "It's not fancy food" says Bottini, but her Mama's Lasagna ($22) needs a little more recognition than that. The four-hour beef bolognese ragu simmers throughout the day before getting layered with oozy béchamel and fresh pasta that will make you so nostalgic you wouldn't say no to ordering a second serve. Although the menu is not strictly regional to Bottini's hometown of Ferrara, she's still whipping up some classics recipes from the family archives including the three-cheese croquettes ($14) which are made the traditional way with bread (not potato) and slinging out plates of mouth-wateringly crisp parmesan crumbed lamb cutlets ($28). To finish off the meal you must find room for dessert as the options of a classically delicious tiramisu or a creamy, caramel filled banoffee pie. Both, at $12 a serve, are too good to resist. The space is snug and at total capacity seats 24, including the six stools along the bar which are quickly snatched up by the recurring locals. One thing you won't find leaving the doors is a food delivery service with a bag full of goods, as this food deserves the effort of leaving the house. Instead, swing by on your way home and pick up one of the take-home dinner boxes at just $15 a pop. The daily take-home meals are constantly changing with keen Instagram followers running to the doors at the end of the day to pick up a slice of slow cooked red wine beef and vegetable pie or potato gnocchi with pork and fennel sausage, broccoli and gorgonzola sauce. Images: Cassandra Hannagan
UPDATE, November 30, 2020: Upgrade is available to stream via Google Play, YouTube Movies, iTunes and Amazon Video. Watching Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is quite the sight to behold. Forget the terrible name, which sounds like it belongs to a Mad Men ad agency rather than a person — with his convulsive moves, the mechanic turned quadriplegic turned killing machine is positively hypnotic. Filmed by writer-director Leigh Whannell in a style that's somehow both twitchy and fluid, Grey dispatches with his enemies with super-human ease, combining the cool efficiency of John Wick with the technological flair of RoboCop and The Terminator. Indeed, alongside the body horror cinema of David Cronenberg and the thrilling science-fiction of John Carpenter, it's easy to spot Upgrade's action and sci-fi influences. Played with grim-faced precision by Tom Hardy-lookalike Green, Grey is not someone you'd want to mess with. But the character's flying fists aren't completely under his own control. Paralysed after a self-driving car crash and a subsequent attack by vicious thugs, he's now the recipient of a brain implant that has re-enabled his limbs. Called STEM, it's an experimental advancement designed by a young tech wiz (Harrison Gilbertson) who seems like he's up to no good, even though he's claiming he wants to assist. The fact that the secret chip has a mind of its own — or, rather, a voice (Simon Maiden) that compels Grey to hunt down the gang that killed his wife (Melanie Vallejo) — doesn't help matters. Bone-crunching, blood-splattered revenge is a dish best-served with an AI sidekick in Upgrade. Although the concept might sound more tired than wired on paper, it makes for a sharp, sleek and savage wander into genre territory. Every element that initially seems worthy of an eye-roll — pre-accident, Grey is vocal about his hatred for all things digital, for example — soon raises a smile thanks to the film's pulpy execution. Weapons immeshed into the human body? A villain that sneezes computer chips? A man virtually talking to himself for the entire flick? It all works. And while Upgrade comes from the mind of someone who has seen everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner to Her and Ex Machina, Whannell has dreamed their various parts into his own new creation. There's a scene, part-way through the movie, that couldn't better encapsulate Upgrade's charms — or its savvy ability to combine its numerous sources of inspiration into an engaging vessel all of its own. It's not the most inventive of the film's many set pieces, but it makes a firm and fitting impression nonetheless. Grey awakens from an operating table, STEM freshly inserted into his spine, and Upgrade has an "it's alive!" moment. Riffing on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is hardly new — nor is taking cues from James Whale's 1931 film that brought the novel to the screen. And yet here, it really couldn't be more apt. Upgrade is a thoroughly 21st-century incarnation of the 200-year-old tale about a man reborn from cobbled-together parts, this time including both flesh and circuitry. It's also a movie put together in the same dice, splice, borrow and reuse fashion. Furthermore, Upgrade proves a much more effective use of Whannell's skills than the Insidious and Saw flicks, the two franchises that brought him to fame after initially reviewing movies on ABC TV's Recovery. Instead of serving up by-the-numbers gore and spooks, there's smarts behind this gleeful mashup of genre staples — not to mention passion, personality, a swift pace, a gorgeous red and grey colour palette, and slick yet gritty futuristic visuals. To be fair, Whannell wrote rather than directed most of his previous hits (and also co-stars in the Insidious films), with the underwhelming Insidious: Chapter 3 his only other credit behind the lens. You'd never guess that Upgrade sprang from the same person, which might just be the biggest compliment you could pay this entertainingly schlocky cyberpunk action-thriller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEnRNIvEKu8
UPDATE, November 6, 2020: A Cure for Wellness is available to stream via Netflix and Prime Video. When you're sitting through a bland attempt to remake a decades-old radio series, or a spate of diminishing sequels in an average-at-best franchise, you can forget that filmmakers don't just make movies — they also watch them and love them. With The Lone Ranger and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean flicks on his resume, it's rather easy to do just that where Gore Verbinski is concerned, but every now and then he does something to remind you. Back in 2011, the Oscar-winning animated western Rango did the trick, ensuring every viewer knew just how fond Verbinski is of the genre. Likewise, with A Cure for Wellness, his first horror film since The Ring, Verbinski wears his inspirations on his sleeve. And while it mightn't stand out as a landmark scary effort, it still makes for intriguingly creepy viewing. For the record, the veteran filmmaker appears to have seen and adored Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, Shutter Island and Crimson Peak, as well as countless '30s gothic fright fests, '70s Italian giallo films, '80s body horror flicks and everything Alfred Hitchcock ever made. Over the course of 146 minutes, A Cure for Wellness plays like the kind of feverish dream you might have after marathoning all of your favourite spooky movies, with your brain trying to mash everything into one over-the-top package. A labyrinthian sanitarium filled with complacent patients, eerie lullaby-like singing, ravenous eels no one else seems to see, and a history of unrest and incest: you can already spot how some of those filmic influences come into play, can't you? Along with a mysterious young woman (Mia Goth), this is what Wall Street up-and-comer Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) finds when he makes the trip to a wellness centre in the Swiss Alps looking for his company's CEO (Harry Groener). Lockhart thinks that he'll be in and out within 20 minutes, but after an accident he's stuck in plaster and unable to head home, which seems to suit the water therapy-loving doctor-in-charge (Jason Isaacs) quite nicely. There's no missing the fact that all of the folks seeking some rest and relaxation are high-flying business executives. Verbinski, who came up with the story with his Lone Ranger screenwriter Justin Haythe, isn't particularly subtle with some of the movie's ideas — and that's without even getting into a subplot involving pure bloodlines. But he's also largely unconcerned with splashing around in anything other than H20 galore, a mood of dread and tension, and gorgeously unsettling visuals in pale, icy shades. Diving deep into all three results in the cinematic equivalent of a gloriously macabre synchronised swimming routine; an intricately choreographed sight to behold that keeps the most interesting parts on the surface. And what a surface it is. Mastering a tone of unease, serving up a sleek, sinister feast for the eyes, and throwing in a wealth of affectionate nods to genre greats mostly keeps the feature afloat. Mostly. Unsurprisingly, A Cure for Wellness struggles with thin characterisations, and even more so when the predictable yet twist-heavy plot tries to wrap up its stretched-out antics. Still, if you've fallen down its well of unhinged delights you'll probably find them part and parcel of the fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mcVodJmBlU
What has happened to that once glorious Hollywood staple, the romantic comedy? Even at its most saccharine, it was a dependable genre, the type that left you in a kind of terrible movie heaven of enjoyably unlikely plot premises, clueslessly fated lovers, and fairytale endings. Trashy, sure, but reliably trashy — carefree and frothy and silly. Beautiful people, overcoming mindlessly familiar cinematic hurdles and falling in love — it's comforting stuff for hopeless romantics like myself who get most of their life philosophies from Michel Gondry films. But a genre that focuses more on seduction and courtship and the happily-ever-after, bridal magazine moments eventually leaves viewers craving something a little more substantial. After all, anyone who lives in the real world knows that the real work in relationships begins at the point where rom coms usually end: the kiss, the wedding, the honeymoon period, the beginning. The reality and ridiculousness and complexity of relationships and sex and romance — surely this is the kind of thing that mainstream film should finally start getting right. That's why I Give It a Year should work. British director Dan Mazer has styled it as a renovated, thinking-person's rom com, one that starts at the wedding and explores the difficulty of staying in love. It's a worthwhile project, and one that The Simpsons creative director James L. Brooks has made into a career. Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment, and even the cruelly critically maligned How Do You Know? all subtly inverted the rom com rules by showing more realistic characters with more realistic relationships. And they were funnier for their closer collision with real life. Mazer has his work cut out for him by Brooks. Rose Byrnes' highly strung Nat and Rafe Spall's man-boy Josh are not meant to be — they marry too quickly and are obviously more suited to the two supporting characters, played by Simon Baker (on charismatic autopilot) and Anna Faris (on tedious autopilot. Why is she a thing?). But ultimately the film refuses to bust out of the conventional rom com template. Its plot remains face-punchingly implausible, its characters straitjacketed by stereotype, and its humour terminally planted in Mazer's familiar ground of extreme awkwardness and feeble frat-boy crassness. This is, after all, the man who produced Borat and Sacha Baron Cohen's other cinematic mis/adventures. Oddly enough for a love story, I Give It a Year fails to get to any kind of genuine emotional core for the characters or their relationships. Perhaps the highlight of the film is Rose Byrnes' wardrobe, a procession of pastel cashmere sweaters and tailored designer clothing this reviewer will never, ever be able to afford. Yes, Byrnes and Baker are lovely to watch, but it is frankly demoralising to see them wasting their presence on such an eye-rollingly unfunny project. The Office's Stephen Merchant is particularly misused given his considerable comedic talents. Despite its admirable aims, I Give It A Year is a 102-minute exercise in endurance. https://youtube.com/watch?v=3UgPWKPDlvA
Found on Clarence Street, Jet Cycles stands out from neighbouring bike shops by being the exclusive Sydney stockist for global bike brands Cannondale and Specialized. The store, which was opened in 2009 by a high performance coach, offers a fitting service to make sure your new bike matches your body and feels as comfortable as possible. [caption id="attachment_777010" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Cassandra Hannagan[/caption] The experienced team here believes a well-fitted bike can improve your speed and performance by up to 25 percent — and riders travel interstate for the store's two-wheeling expertise. The shop also offers comprehensive services and repairs, not to mention a range of premium gear, like Oakley sunnies, light-weight saddles and Body Geometry gloves. If you're new to cycling, you can also hire a bike to see how it feels; starting from $100 per day, you can take home a Specialized Tarmac Sport road bike to try for yourself. Images: Cassandra Hannagan
Need an excuse to put on your best dress and sip endless vinos all day? Well, come Saturday, September 28, western Sydney continues the spring racing activities with Everest Carnival's De Bortoli Wines Golden Rose Race Day at Rosehill Gardens. So, gather your friends, get frocked up and experience all of the food, fashion and entertainment of the day. Just one of seven events running on consecutive Saturdays until November 2, Golden Rose Day has festivities aplenty. Head on down to Rosehill Gardens Racecourse and you'll find the soothing sounds of a live music duo soundtracking your afternoon. Or, head to the main stage bar to catch DJ Kitsch 78. Plus, you'll be able to watch the 2019 AFL Grand Final playing on the big screen (so you can fittingly cheer on GWS while in their heartland). To keep you well soused throughout the day, there'll be plenty of pop-up bars. Fancy a Pimm's? Head to Pimm's Horse Float where you'll find the liquor on tap. Or, grab a beer from the Iron Jack Bar or a cocktail from the Canadian Club Cocktail Cart. And, to (suitably) line the stomach, you can grab a bite from Rosehill's food precinct Eats at the Garden. If you're having too much fun to call it a day as the sun sets, the nearby Rosehill Bowling Club will host the official afterparty.
Australian designer Marc Newson has placed his golden touch on everything from clothing to aircrafts, and now he has unleashed what may be his most awesome creation ever - the Riva Aquariva. Newson is renowned for his simple yet immediately recognisable work across a diverse range of spectrums. This time round, Newson collaborated with the very fancy-sounding Officina Italiana Design for a brilliant re-interpretation of the luxury speedboat. Although it made its initial appearance in 2010, the Riva Aquariva again pleased viewers at Arte-Fiera, an art fair in Bologna, Italy, earlier this year. Adding to the extravagance and opulence of these boats, only 22 were made and they sell for around $1.5 million. Featuring a traditional colourway with eye-catching turquoise accents, this vessel's distinct vibe will teleport you straight to the Port of Miami on a summer's day. Throw on a pastel button-up, some slim-cut khaki pants and bring your finest champagne before you climb on board. [via The Cool Hunter]
To be a part of Amadou & Mariam's Eclipse, you have to leave the sense upon which you probably feel most dependent — your sight — at the door of the Town Hall. For the entire show, the room will be immersed in pitch-black darkness. Performers Amadou and Mariam are a husband and wife duo from Mali who met in the 1970s at the Bamako Institute for the Young Blind. Through the course of their live show, they tell their life stories, beginning with when they first started making music together, combining African rhythms with blues and pop. Scents are also funnelled in to help evoke the environment of their homeland. After gaining star status in both West Africa and France, they became better known in the US and the UK following their 2005 release, Dimanche a Bamako. Since then, they've played some of the world's most famous festivals, including Coachella and Glastonbury; toured with the likes of Blur frontman Damon Albarn, Coldplay and the Scissor Sisters; and been nominated for a Grammy Award. Catch Amadou and Mariam at one of three immersive experiences at the Town Hall at part of the Sydney Festival — on January 9, 10 and 11. https://youtube.com/watch?v=-OBZY46-hb8
FOMO — Australia's clash-free, one-day summer festival — is back for a fourth year. This year, it's making its return to Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, and bringing the full festival to Melbourne for the first time ever. Leading the program is famed American-Trinidadian rapper Nicki Minaj, who released her high-energy, highly acclaimed fourth album Queen just last month — which features everyone from The Weeknd to Ariana Grande, Eminem and Lil Wayne. Hot on her heels is Mississippi's Rae Sremmurd, the hip-hop trio best-known for its chart-topping hit 'Black Beatles' made in collaboration with Gucci Mane. Meanwhile, Florida's Lil Pump is heading Down Under for the first time, bringing hits 'Gucci Gang', 'Esskeetit' and songs from his yet-to-be released album Harvard Dropout, and electro music producer Mura Masa will break up the hip hop and rap with his disco tunes. Also on the schedule is Kali Uchis, making her Australian debut and performing hits off her widely acclaimed album Isolation, along with the mononymous avant-garde Sophie, Australia's own Anna Lunoe, and Dutch experimental artist San Holo, among others. FOMO will take over Parramatta Park on Saturday, January 12. $1 from every sale is going to refugee charity Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and, if you can't afford your ticket in one fell swoop, you can opt for a payment plan, which lets you pay it off via monthly instalments. FOMO 2019 LINEUP Nicki Minaj Rae Sremmurd Lil Pump Mura Masa Kali Uchis San Holo Anna Lunoe Sophie Cosha Carmouflage Rose Just A Gent MIMI triple j Unearthed winners Image: Mitch Lowe
Every suburb needs the essentials. For most cities that would be a grocer, a coffee shop, a chemist and some form of semi-reliable public transport. But these days, Sydney is spoiling its residents — if not with an abundance of public transport options, then with a tonne of poke places. And Balmain is the latest Sydney 'burb to cop one with Bowl.R opening on Darling Street today. It seems like a poke joint opens every other week in Sydney at the moment, but this will be Balmain's first eatery to serve up the Hawaiian raw fish salad. Like most of its competitors, Bowl.R will give you the option to build your own bowl with ingredients like trout, tuna and miso cauliflower as well as all the regular toppings. From Saturday, October 28 the eatery will also be serving up breakfast on weekends from 8am. But what sets this poke place apart is its dessert option: vegan soft serve. Bowl.R's Vice Cream — which is dairy-, gluten- and refined sugar-free — will be available in a cone or a smoothie bowl. Bowl.R opens today — Saturday, October 21 — and to celebrate, the team will be giving the first 100 customers either a poke bowl or vegan ice cream cone. Store opens at midday, so get in quick. Bowl.R is now open shop one, 308 Darling Street, Balmain. It will be open daily from 12–8pm and, from October 28, all day from 8am–8pm on weekends. For more info, visit their Facebook page.
You can't stop the Boosh! First it was Dixon Bainbridge closing down the Zooniverse, then it was the army of nannas plaguing the Nabootique, and were it not for a regrettable run in with the crack-fox, I too would have been bouncing on the Boosh castle with 'The Doctor and the Pencil' (Noel Fielding and Dave Brown). Yes, the Mighty Boosh journey continues, this time Down Under with everybody's favourite shaman, Naboo the Enigma (Mike Fielding). Both brothers from the cult series have continued to tour with comedic acts, stage shows and DJ sets embracing their unique characters. So don't miss your chance to see Naboo as he mashes up indie-electro tunes with a mix of psychedelic classics, hopefully with Boosh flavour — "croutons, croutons, crunchy friends in a a land of broth". Supporting Naboo will be the Vines and Howling Bells DJs, Murray Lake, Sampology (Visual Set) and Sosueme DJs. Dressing up is encouraged, but remember, it's what's inside that counts! https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dh3NrphoASE
Whenever I jump on a bus, I stroll down to the back seat, pull out my old lenseless sunnies, and become privy to a moving stage of 43 licensed-to-sit actors (doesn't everybody?). Where else can you follow the story of Odysseus the drunk, on his way back home, admire the two seat-crossed lovers and feel secure knowing the bus will never go above 50km/h? Well, Stories from the 428 have gone one better. Over the past month, the show's writers have been gathering stories of their own, riding the 428 from Circular Quay to Canterbury, peering over your shoulder, reading your texts and listening in on your conversations, looking for the extraordinary in our ordinary rides. As a result, for two weeks over 50 actors will enact micro-dramas, monologues and even play the odd mp3 with humourous yet often sad effect from the lives that daily pass us by. So head down to Marrickville's Sidetrack Theatre for a comfortable and motion sickness–free ride on public transport's noble steed. Better yet, the bus stops right outside the theatre door, and with a new program for each week of the run, there's no reason not to pick up a travel ten and climb aboard. At $25, you almost certainly won't have to give up your seat to a stinking hobo. Image by Leah McGirr.
Coinciding with National Youth Week, The Smart ARTS Festival commences on April 8, bringing with it opportunity for dozens of Sydney's talented young artists to showcase their ideas. Founded in 2001, the festival is a collaboration of ideas and community, expressed through an array of mediums such as painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography. Running throughout April, the festival will include a variety of events such as career forums, talks, workshops and exhibitions. The festival will kick off with a launch party on April 8 at the Pine Street Creative Arts Centre — a night of live art exhibitions, projections, origami, interactive art and spoken word performances. Consider yourself artistically challenged? Not to worry, the program is not just for artists — it's an opportunity to learn more about art and celebrate the people who are at the forefront of our burgeoning art scene. With so many events to try out, you may even find your inner Kahlo or Picasso. Running from the April 8-17, the Smart ARTS festival will be held in different locations around Sydney. After April 17, the Smart ARTS exhibition and Artefiction will continue until April 28 at the Pine Street Creative Arts Centre. All events are free for people aged 15-26, but some will require bookings.
Cybersecurity might not be anyone's Roman Empire, but with a majority of our time spent online, it's highly likely that you or someone you know will eventually be a victim of a cybercrime (if you haven't already). Combine that with an inescapably popular topic of discussion — AI — and you have a complex interplay that's worthy of a Black Mirror episode. Who better to delve into the double-edged sword of AI in the workplace than Australia's largest financial institution and biggest corporate adopter of AI, Commonwealth Bank? As part of the SXSW Sydney Conference, CommBank will host a discussion on 'The Rise of AI in Cybersecurity' with two fascinating panelists: a reformed hacker and a tenured cop. [caption id="attachment_922153" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Yasmin London and Andrew Pade[/caption] CTRL Group Co-Founder Bastien Treptel has a unique, first-hand understanding of the dangers of cybercrime — as a teenager, he hacked into a major ASX 100 company just to order a pizza. Evolving from his unlawful ways, he founded an information security firm and currently hosts the CyberHacker podcast. Meanwhile, Qoria's Director of Digital Wellbeing, Yasmin London, has experience from the opposing side of the law — she was previously a tenured police officer for over a decade and, before that, a world champion swimmer. Rounding out the rest of the speakers are CommBank's General Manager of Cyber Defence Operations Andrew Pade, who has over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, and the CSIRO National AI Centre's Strategic Engagement Manager, Rita Arrigo, who is working on a collaborative network to implement the responsible use of AI in the commercial sector. 'The Rise of AI in Cybersecurity' will be presented by Commonwealth Bank as part of the SXSW Sydney Conference. The panel will take place from 12–1pm on Tuesday, October 17 at the ICC Sydney.
To make earth's natural world look beautiful takes no effort at all, but doing the same with Pandora requires immense computing power. Given the latter is an imagined realm in James Cameron's Avatar movies, it can only exist via those ones and zeroes, and the imagery they generate — and yet in 13-years-later sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, the extrasolar moon can be as breathtakingly immersive as anything IRL. Indeed, when this second dip in what's now officially a franchise is at its best, and has audiences eagerly awaiting its third, fourth and fifth instalments in 2024, 2026 and 2028, it's an absolute visual marvel. When that's the case, it's also underwater, or in it. Yes, The Way of Water takes its subtitle seriously, splashing that part of its name about heartily in as much magnificently detailed 3D-shot and -projected glory as its director, cinematographer Russell Carpenter (a True Lies and Titanic alum) and hard-working special-effects team can excitedly muster. For Cameron, darling it really is better down where it's wetter. It's also surprising that he hasn't made a version of The Little Mermaid, a Free Willy entry or a SpongeBob SquarePants movie, such is his flowing love for H20. Plenty on his resume makes this fondness plain, including 2014 documentary Deepsea Challenge that he didn't helm, but chronicles his own journey to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench — aka the deepest part of earth's seabed. To the detriment of The Way of Water, however, there's more to Cameron's latest than soaking in underwater joys. When this flick gets wet, it's a wonder to peer at. It stresses the franchise's love of nature implicitly, and its eco-friendly message about valuing and not exploiting it. It makes viewers wish that what they're seeing truly was genuine. When it surfaces to spin its by-the-numbers story, though, it's often lucky to be an average paddle. A movie that cost US$350 million-plus can't just swim and stare beneath the stunning CGI sea, sadly, as much treading water as The Way of Water does. This long-in-the-works followup to the highest-grossing film ever doesn't tell enough of a tale, certainly isn't concerned with sailing through new narrative oceans, and stretches out its slight plot to a lengthy-and-feeling-it 192 minutes. Over a decade has passed on Pandora, too, since Avatar's protagonist Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, Under the Banner of Heaven) made it his home as new member of the Na'vi, its inhabitants. In The Way of Water, the ex-solider, his Indigenous warrior wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña, Amsterdam) and their family are forced to swap their lush, leafy backdrop for the waves, turning Jake from a Marine into a marine-dweller. Why? Earth's armed forces are back, vengeful and still keen to colonise after ruining their own planet. Avatar viewers, so everyone given its box-office tally, will recall that Jake was originally human; "the sky people", the Na'vi call them. Audiences should also remember that he navigated Pandora plugged into a body resembling his blue-skinned, three-metre-tall hosts, which is why Avatar is called Avatar to begin with. That concept largely sinks away this time around, after Jake permanently embraced his adopted guise at the end of the last film — other than to bring back Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang, Don't Breathe 2) and his crew. With his memories paired with Na'vi anatomy, the saga's chief antagonist is now cerulean as well, and hellbent on tracking down Jake, Neytiri, their teenage sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters, The School for Good and Evil) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton, Ready Player One), younger daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Best Food Forward) and the adopted Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, Call Jane). Swiftly, seeking refuge with turquoise-hued water clans is the Sullys' only hope for survival. If anyone had forgotten that Cameron directed Aliens, The Abyss, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Titanic — or Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep, docos about deep-sea exploration — The Way of Water provides a hefty reminder. The filmmaker cribs liberally from his past work, as seen in all of the military might and technology. He does so to such an extent that a sinking ship plays a massive part, all in a movie that co-stars Kate Winslet (Mare of Easttown) as the queen of the aquamarine-coloured Metkayina reef people. No one hogs floating debris, but making Cameron's script with Mulan's Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver a Cameron greatest-hits package is comical. That said, that approach speaks to what's important to the director, and where he'd rather spend his time and energy. It was true of the initial film as well, with its FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Pocahontas and Dune nods. The Avatar flicks would prefer to be experiences than stories, plunging spectators in instead of doling out plot points. One day, Pandora will undoubtedly stun as a virtual-reality space. One day, the world that Cameron has created will welcome headset-wearing devotees slipping into their own avatars and roving around. With its use of 3D and a higher frame rate, The Way of Water snorkels as far in that direction as it can while tied to cinemas — and that hyper-clear submersion is what it leaves audiences wanting oh-so-much more of. Kudos to the director for going against the tide in a world saturated by 'content' (complete with that bland label lumping everything on-screen together), of course. More kudos to him for valuing cinema as an audiovisual form above all else. Still, that passion, focus and aim can't lift The Way of Water's soggy narrative or deepen its shallow dialogue. And, away from the sea, the feature's doubling of images per second can't overcome the same struggles The Hobbit movies and Gemini Man had. Sans water, that annoying motion-smoothing soap-opera look bubbles up, gimmickry sets in, and Pandora and the Na'vi appear far, far less visually spectacular. Conveying emotion isn't The Way of Water's struggle, however, with assistance from its state-of-the-art performance-capture technology. Gleeful earnestness and idealism is as ever-present as azure and ultramarine tones, especially in the movie's ocean-adoring middle third. That's when this sequel is a family drama above all else, as well as a coming-of-age drama. Forget Quaritch's revenge, even if that's what kicks the flick into its action-packed — and overlong — finale; when The Way of Water charts Lo'ak's journey as the Sullys' black sheep, particularly after he bonds with an also-outcast whale-like sea creature known as a tulkun, or when it hones on in Kiri's spiritual connection with underwater plant life, it's tender, heartfelt and personal. That's when the Titanic riffs, Weaver playing a teen and Quaritch's Na'vi form cheesily crushing his old human skull all get swept away, and when this uneven film floats.
UPDATE, December 20, 2022: Everything Everywhere All At Once is available to stream via Prime Video, Google Play, YouTube Movies and iTunes. Imagine living in a universe where Michelle Yeoh isn't the wuxia superstar she is. No, no one should want to dwell in that reality. Now, envisage a world where everyone has hot dogs for fingers, including the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon icon. Next, picture another where Ratatouille is real, but with raccoons. Then, conjure up a sparse realm where life only exists in sentient rocks. An alternative to this onslaught of pondering: watching Everything Everywhere All At Once, which throws all of the above at the screen and a helluva lot more. Yes, its title is marvellously appropriate. Written and directed by the Daniels, aka Swiss Army Man's Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, this multiverse-hopping wonder is a funhouse of a film that just keeps spinning through wild and wacky ideas. Instead of asking "what if Daniel Radcliffe was a farting corpse that could be used as a jet ski?" as their also-surreal debut flick did, the pair now muses on Yeoh, her place in the universe, and everyone else's along with her. Although Yeoh doesn't play herself in Everything Everywhere All At Once, she is seen as herself; keep an eye out for red-carpet footage from her Crazy Rich Asians days. Such glitz and glamour isn't the norm for middle-aged Chinese American woman Evelyn Wang, her laundromat-owning character in the movie's main timeline, but it might've been if life had turned out differently. That's such a familiar train of thought — a resigned sigh we've all emitted, even if only when alone — and the Daniels use it as their foundation. This isn't a movie that stays static, however, or wants to. Both dizzying and dazzling in its ambitions, the way it brings those bold aims to fruition, the tender emotions it plays with and the sheer spectacle it flings around, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a magnificent dildo-slinging, glitter cannon-shooting, endlessly bobbing and weaving whirlwind. Everything Everywhere All At Once is the movie version of a matryoshka set, too. While Russian Doll nods that way as well, the possibilities are clearly endless when exploring stacked worlds. Multiverses are Hollywood's current big thing — the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Extended Universe, the Sony Spider-Man Universe and Star Trek have them, and Rick and Morty adores them — but the concept here is equally chaotic and clever. It starts with Evelyn, her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom's Short Round and The Goonies' Data) and a hectic time. Evelyn's dad (James Hong, Turning Red) is visiting from China, the Wangs' daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) brings her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel, The Carnivores) home, and IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween Kills) is conducting a punishing audit. Then Evelyn learns she's the only one who can save, well, everything, everywhere and everyone. There's a great gag in that revelation, playing smartly yet savagely with perspective — because Everything Everywhere All At Once is all about how we choose to see things. Imagine trudging over to your local tax department, trolley full of receipts in hand and possible financial ruin in front of you, only to be told mid soul-crushing bureaucratic babble that it all means nothing since the very fate of the universe is at stake. But, at the same time, imagine realising that it's the simplest things that mean the most when space, time, existence and every emotion possible is all on the line. Although that isn't how a different version of Waymond puts it to Evelyn, it's what sparkles through as she's swiftly initiated into a battle against dimension-jumping villain Jobu Tapaki, discovers that she can access multiple other iterations of herself by eating chapsticks and purposefully slicing herself with paper cuts, and gets sucked into a reality-warping kaleidoscope. For Evelyn 1.0, everything the film throws her way is overwhelming, unsurprisingly. The Daniels have done a stellar job of ensuring viewers feel the same. Everything Everywhere All At Once splashes around more gleefully overstuffed absurdity than even a 139-minute-long movie can usually handle, but relentlessness is part of the point. When you're making Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse meets Inception meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets The Matrix meets Hong Kong marital-arts cinema, a notion few folks in any multiverse could dream up, havoc comes with the territory. As shot by Larkin Seiple (Swiss Army Man) and edited by Paul Rogers (Scheinert's solo flick The Death of Dick Long) with unfaltering flair that's 100-percent designed to overload the senses, that on-screen anarchy is what makes the movie so immersive and Evelyn's plight so relatable. And, it's essential to anchoring the feature's 'nothing matters, everything is fleeting, revel in the small stuff' mantra. While it was penned for Jackie Chan, Yeoh is the movie's chosen one well beyond the script. Her casting lets the Daniels see acting stardom in one of Evelyn's other lives, but it's her flexibility and grounding that's crucial. Everything Everywhere All At Once walks such a thin tightrope between the raucous and the ridiculous that plenty could've faltered. In another universe, it did. But always beating away at the centre of this film in this reality, amid the countless costume changes, hairstyles and all (with enormous credit due to the inventive behind-the-scenes teams), is Yeoh. She deploys the quiet ferocity that's marked her performances for four decades, and twists through everything from existential malaise and intergenerational trauma to the everyday struggle that is living a life, including as a mother and wife, that's worlds away from your hopes and dreams. Yeoh is a joy to watch in whatever is lucky to have her — including Last Christmas, Boss Level, Gunpowder Milkshake and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings recently — and her work here shakes her entire career to-date together, then lets the best, boldest and most bizarre possibilities shine. Everything Everywhere All At Once is a tribute to its lead as much as anything else, but it's also so much else: a marvellous calling card for Hsu, a glorious return for the exceptional Quan, and a movie that makes weird and wonderful use of Curtis, too. It's an anything-goes free-fall through interdimensional mania where everything does and can happen — as brilliantly choreographed — and a clear-eyed examination of the ties and troubles of family, of uprooting your existence to strive for a future that mightn't come, and of weathering the mundane and the sublime in tandem. It's a whirl, a swirl, a trip, a blast and a juggle as well and, in this universe, the Daniels wouldn't have it any other way.
Practise your Cockney accent, rehearse your favourite drunken London tale and prepare for high tea: the British Film Festival has arrived in Australia for the first time ever. There'll be a dozen contemporary features, five 20th-century classics (The Third Man and Lawrence of Arabia among them) and a chance to quiz Eric Bana during a live Q&A session, and a simply smashing opening night party. One film not to miss is Jump, a massive hit at the Toronto International Film Festival that captures the stories of three troubled individuals, who find themselves entangled by doomed romance, theft and revenge. Another much-talked-about feature is eccentric rock movie Good Vibrations, which comes to the British Film Festival following sold-out sessions at the 2013 Melbourne International Film Festival. Set against Ireland's Troubles of the 1970s, it follows the story of rebellious, maverick music lover Terri Hooley, Belfast's 'godfather of punk', and his determination to show the world the power of the seven-inch single. The star power is in Dom Hemingway, a gangster film in the style of Sexy Beast. It stars Jude Law as the outrageous, volatile Dom and Richard E. Grant as his best friend, Dickie. Following Dom's release after 12 years of imprisonment, the two travel from London to the south of France, encountering all number of misadventures along the way, from a car accident to an inevitable femme fatale. There's also the latest offering from Uberto Pasolini (producer of The Full Monty), Still Life, a drama in the British humanist tradition. The British Film Festival is on in Melbourne (November 20 to December 1), Sydney (November 21 to December 1), Brisbane (November 27 to December 8) as well as other cities around Australia. Thanks to the festival, we have 15 double in-season passes to give away. To be in the running, subscribe to the Concrete Playground newsletter (if you haven't already), then email us with your name and address. Sydney: win.sydney@concreteplayground.com.au Melbourne: win.melbourne@concreteplayground.com.au Brisbane: win.brisbane@concreteplayground.com.au
No one in Australia expects to feel cold in January. Summer is in full swing, after all. It's prime beach and pool season, obviously — and, even though the festive period is over and everyone is settling back into the year after the holidays, thoughts of lazing around by or splashing around in a body of water aren't ever too far from anyone's minds. Whether you're fond of cooling down with a refreshing dip, or you prefer to escape to the vicinity of the nearest fan or air-conditioner, you might want to put those plans into action across the rest of this week. From today, Thursday, January 21, temperatures are expected to be mighty hot all around the nation, according to the Bureau of Meteorology's latest major cities forecast. As per BOM's city-specific forecasts, some of those temps are due to stick around a bit longer than that, too. After an expected top of 27 degrees on Thursday, Sydneysiders can expect a few sweaty days, with temps staying at 30 or above from Friday until mid-next week. Still in NSW, Newcastle will hit 34 on Sunday, while Wollongong will get to 31. That isn't as warm as Canberra in the ACT, though — with the Australian capital forecast to hit 38 on Sunday and 39 on Monday. Sunday and Monday will be warm in Melbourne, too, with tops of 35 and 37 forecast. They'll come after a 31-degree Thursday, then expected maximums of 26 and 27 on Friday and Saturday. Thankfully, a drop to 22 is forecast for Tuesday. https://twitter.com/BOM_Vic/status/1351781371715477504 Brisbane will get to 27 on Thursday, 29 on Friday, and 30 from Saturday–Monday, and 33 on Tuesday and Wednesday — so it'll be warm, but also usual summer weather. In Adelaide, the mercury will rise to 35 on Thursday, dip down to 32 on Friday, then soar to 39 on Saturday and a whopping 41 on Sunday. Also in the centre of the country, Alice Springs can expect its maximum temperature to stay between 35–39 degrees for four days from Thursday, while Darwin's will sit at 32-33 across the same period. In Perth, it'll actually get a tad cooler over the weekend — starting with a 34-degree maximum on Thursday, then going up to 36 degrees on Friday, before dropping to 26 on Saturday and Sunday. And down in Hobart, a top temperature of 27 is forecast for Sunday, with 30 expected on Monday — following other maximums of 22, 23 and 25 in the days prior. Of course, while these are BOM's forecasts as issued at 6.05am on Thursday, January 21, conditions may change — so keep an eye on the Bureau's website for the most up-to-date information. For latest weather forecasts, head to the Bureau of Meteorology website.
The Concrete Playground team is out and about soaking up the Sydney Festival in January. Here's what we've found so far — this diary will be updated as the festival progresses. Bullet Catch January 17-20 at Carriageworks It might seem glib to predicate a show on a trick with a live gun. But that's only if you haven't seen Bullet Catch, written and performed by Scotsman Rob Drummond. It's part magic show, part theatre, and I'm in awe the whole time — not all because of the illusions. Maybe because of the insight into human psychology that allows him to perform acts of mind-reading and manipulation, Drummond has created a piece that is incredibly emotionally and intellectually involving — taxing, even (in the good way). I can scarcely imagine what it's like from the closest seat in the house; one audience member is picked for show-long participation that includes sharing personal memories, reading letters from an accused murderer and, eventually, shooting Rob in the face. At this performance, the strong-minded Liz is a total star. I hope, after a few drinks, she looked back on the experience fondly. -Rima Sabina Aouf, editor Hot Dub Time Machine January 10, 11, 18 and 25 at the Spiegeltent A few days ago my colleague Jasmine referred to Hot Dub Time Machine as a "glorified jukebox". I wouldn't say that statement is inaccurate so much as incomplete. Hot Dub Time Machine is a perfectly theatricalised glorified jukebox. The secret power source, 'hot dub', fuelled by your dancing; the special 'Hot Dub Power-Up Dance Move Multipliers' dedicated to each decade; DJ Tom Loud constantly hyping the crowd — they all combine to compel you to dance, particularly in a confined milieu like the Spiegeltent, and particularly with a crowd of true believers like these. Every minute, the song switches, and we receive it with screams and rapture as though it were the actual artist appearing live, and they had just started to play their most well-known and loved song. It's an incredible ride; either get on board or go home. -Rima Sabina Aouf, editor Bullet Catch one of the most amazing performances I've seen - and I don't just mean the magic. Emotional, thoughtful, involving. #sydfest — Rima Sabina Aouf (@rimasabina) January 19, 2014 I, Malvolio January 16-19 at Carriageworks Tim Crouch wants me to laugh at his naked butt. Me and everyone else in the room. He is wearing longjohns soiled in every possible way, covered with flies and utterly pathetic. His character, stuffy steward Malvolio, was in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night bullied, tricked into thinking his mistress was in love with him, publicly humiliated and institutionalised. Naked butts are funny. Victimising the weak is wrong. What's a theatre patron to do? This is just the kind of inner conflict and confusion Crouch wants to illicit. That he manages to do so during such an accessible, entertaining and well-constructed show is what marks him as one of the UK's most admired theatre makers. He's also just a terrific performer to witness, disarming even while pee-stained. -Rima Sabina Aouf Oedipus Schmoedipus January 9 to February 2 at Belvoir If you listen to many Sydney theatre reviewers, you'll believe there's something wrong with you if you enjoy the opening act of Oedipus Schmoedipus, apparently the festival's most divisive work. But I'm here to say it's bloody brilliant (emphasis on the bloody — it's basically writer-performers Zoe Coombs Marr and Mish Grigor killing each other and themselves in numerous vivid ways). The comedic timing, the ingenious weapon/blood-pack concealment, the improbable wailing of 'Love the Way You Lie' — it's impeccable. There are other highlights in the hour that follows (including creative use of a couple dozen new volunteer performers squirming on stage each night), though its persistent weirdness can get alienating and a bit tired later on. Oddly enough, considering the show's whole premise is riffing on the theatrical canon, it's fans of said canon who will likely hate the result. Intrepid arty genre-hoppers, your presence is required. -Rima Sabina Aouf, editor Amadou and Mariam's Eclipse January 9-11 at the Town Hall As a sighted person, it was hard not to become somewhat disoriented when the lights cut out at Amadou and Mariam's Eclipse. Once you adjusted to having lost a sense, however, it was really quite an amazing insight to, for at least an hour and a half, experience the world as a blind musician does. The joyful and vibrant performance is broken into 11 songs, each marking an important milestone for Amadou and Mariam's, woven together by narrative interludes written by Malian poet Hamadoun Tandina as well as elements of scent. Yes, you read that right: scent. This aspect of the performance was somewhat more subtle. If you were unaware that the fragrances were being piped into the hall purposefully, you would assume that the person sitting next to you had maybe been a little trigger happy with their new perfume. Did the performance benefit from this pleasant add-on? Not so much. But the idea of presenting the audience with a rich array sensuous experiences is certainly an interesting one. -Rebecca Speer, senior art writer Summer Sounds in the Domain January 11 Children, teens, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents converged on this year's Summer Sounds in the Domain. Maybe that's because Hot Dub Time Machine — a short history of chart-toppers since 1954 — promised something for everyone. Or maybe it’s because Chaka Khan's been doing her thing for so long that her music conquers generational divisions. We'll never know. But the first hour saw the 100,000 or so members of the Domain crowd on their feet, unanimously getting down to the likes of 'Let's Twist Again', 'Superstition' and 'I Will Survive'. Being amongst a Sydney crowd so decidedly uninhibited was definitely refreshing, but it was difficult to see Hot Dub Time Machine as anything much more than a glorified jukebox. The promised mixing and mashing were pretty minimal. Chaka Khan, on the other hand, delivered what you'd expect — a couple of hours of searing funk. Backed by a powerful band, she moaned, grooved and belted her way through all the classics, decked up in a sparkling silver and black jumpsuit. Of course, the favourite, 'I'm Every Woman', was saved up for the finale. -Jasmine Crittenden, writer Amanda Palmer January 9-19 at the Spiegeltent It's a rare artist that can have you nearly crying over the death of her step-brother and then laughing about, um, pubic hair (you guessed it!) — within the space of three minutes. It also takes someone special (if not extraordinary) to successfully challenge this reviewer's utterly uncharitable cynicism regarding amateur ukulele-ists. Amanda Palmer did it all during her first hour in the Spiegeltent on Thursday, January 9. As the opener for a ten-concert series, it was everything you'd expect of a Palmer extravaganza — funny, surprising, funnier, bizarre, hilarious, sad, over too soon — performance that's honestly, unashamedly interwoven with the fragility, confusion and the ecstasy of real life. New tunes ('Map of Tasmania', 'Vegemite'), Dresden Dolls classics ('Coin Operated Boy'), a chilling version of Australian ballad 'The Drover’s Boy', and two unexpected guests (one naked) all featured. Palmer promised that no two nights at the Spiegeltent would be the same. - Jasmine Crittenden, writer LIMBO January 8-26 at the Spiegeltent LIMBO is the latest in the dirty, artsy, mischievous Spiegeltent circus tradition, and it's a pretty great example, the best in some time. Charm is the strength of these performers from Strut & Fret. And actual strength is also a defining skill, as they hop around on their hands, balance their colleagues on their heads and swallow flame. They're jacks of all trades, including beatboxing and tap dancing. Although there's a little too much 'filler' in the first half, they work up to some breathtaking and theatrically finessed stuff — and the fact that all the music is created live by resonator guitar, tuba, pedals, mixing bowl and other sparse instruments just adds to the magic. -Rima Sabina Aouf, editor Chilling at @carriageworks for the @sydney_festival with a Hendricks G&T in preparation for #lavoixhumaine - perfect Friday evening — Jack Arthur Smith (@jackarthursmith) January 10, 2014 La Voix Humaine January 9-13 at Carriageworks There's no doubt La Voix Humaine — one of the festival's headline shows based on Jean Cocteau's 1927, self-destructive solo monologue of one woman’s fatally catastrophic mental decline post-relationship breakup — represents the hardships, both haunting and harrowing, of one of life's most relatable emotional disasters. However, at times, sadly, this modern adaption is a little confusing and somewhat inconsistent when translating to a 2014 audience. Overall, a deeply affecting performance — credit to Halina Reijn’s representation of a severely pathetic, broken woman — but, previously billed as one of the world's greatest solo plays, might leave you a little disappointed. Jack Arthur Smith, writer Turns out we love jumping. #sacrilege at #sydfest a big hit. -Concrete Playground Sacrilege January 8-26 at Hyde Park Sydney Festival might have cracked the Rubber Duck formula. For the second year in a row, they've found a showpiece with that special combination of factors that fills grown adults with childlike glee and small children with... their regular glee. Sacrilege is a 34m replica of Stonehenge by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller. A 34m inflatable replica of Stonehenge you can bounce on. They let on 100 people at a time in ten-minute blocks, and the crowds are loving it and loving Instagramming it. We grabbed the last bounce of the day just before 9pm, and it was 95 percent adults losing their shit (but still respectfully minding their manners). -Rima Sabina Aouf, editor #sydfest Village in full swing. The place to be for the next 2.5 weeks. -Concrete Playground Festival Village January 8-26 at Hyde Park First thoughts on the Festival Village? It is a big win for festival director Lieven Bertels and SydFest 2014. The fairy lights, the beach-ball lanterns, the Messinaweiners, the smoke peeling off the Food Society barbecue, the bars, the books, the seating options strewn all over — this is just the kind of city beer garden Sydney lusts for. With two major venues and the already much-loved inflatable Sacrilege in its bounds, the Village is a true festival hub — one that you don't need a ticket to enjoy. Is it massive and involving enough to surpass Festival First Night? Very nearly. -Rima Sabina Aouf, editor The big bouncy #sacrilege goes up in Hyde Park for #sydfest. -Concrete Playground
Okay, so you've heard about Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, you've even read about the top five artworks not to miss, but it's a huge, glorious beast of an exhibition and we're not done talking about it. From rare paintings to bespoke pastry to an audio guide set to the strains of a famous blind Dutch recorder maestro (true), we pick five reasons to make the trip to the Art Gallery of NSW for the first ever major exhibition of Dutch masters in Sydney before it wraps up on Sunday, February 18. THE ROOM OF REMBRANDTS Yes, there is literally an entire room dedicated to one of the most celebrated and innovative minds in the history of art, Rembrandt van Rijn. An artist who constantly experimented with style and technique, Rembrandt could do it all. Turning his hand to everything from portraiture to landscapes to biblical themes to animal studies, he kept audiences guessing right up until his death at 63, creating a legacy that influenced everyone from Rodin to Van Gogh to Goya — and he continues to inspire today. Wander your way around seven oils and 16 etchings dating from the early stages to later years of his career, depicting both biblical and secular subjects (including self-portraits). Speaking of which, a crowd will likely be gathered around the iconic Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul (1661), so hustle in, and secure a good vantage point to muse over the intriguingly ambiguous facial expression. Ask your companion (or if you're flying solo, be bold and ask the stranger next to you) what they read in it. We dare you. THE (FREE) AUDIOGUIDE If you've never experienced the indulgent escapism that comes from popping on a pair of headphones and blissfully wandering 'round a gallery for a couple of hours, now's your chance. Written by exhibition researcher Josephine Touma, the exhibition's audio guide will lead you around a carefully selected cross-section of 26 key paintings (note: there's a lot of information and you won't want to rush it, so have your secretary clear your schedule for a morning or afternoon). Narrated by renowned British actress and voice-to-die-for Miriam Margolyes, the guide also features a musical accompaniment to complement each room, featuring the major composers of the Dutch Republic as chosen by ABC Classics — think Jacob van Eyck, Sybrandus van Noordt and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Oh, and the great news? Unlike what is so often the case with an exhibition of this scale and prestige, the audio guide won't cost you a penny. THE VERMEER You may not realise it, but having a Vermeer in a Sydney gallery is kind of a big deal. There are only 35 known surviving Vermeer's in the world, so seeing one in the flesh is rare. The serenely luminous Woman Reading a Letter (1663) was painted at the height of the artist's powers and is unquestionably one of the most beautiful works in the exhibition. Ponder the painting's mysteries and start the inevitable conversation about whether the woman depicted is meant to be pregnant (FYI: according to Touma, given the historical context and the attitudes of the time, it's more likely that she's just wearing a really puffy/unflattering bed jacket). Also, take note of the interesting position of this work opposite Rembrandt's Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul — a decision that gave the visiting Rijksmuseum director and curator a big thrill. "There are very few places in the world where you can see those two artists really looking at each other," comments Touma, who also loves the way the inspired placement "brings Rembrandt and Vermeer together in a dialogue". THE TART Oh, how we love it when art and dessert combine forces. Created by Bourke Street Bakery specifically to celebrate the exhibition, The Rembrandt is a tart with spiced custard and crumbled macaroon. Like a delicious cross between a Portuguese custard tart and a crème brûlée — and with warm Christmas spices on top — the tart pays homage to the Dutch Golden Age, with ingredients inspired by the spice trade of the 17th century. Even better, there's a weekly Instagram competition to get involved in if you fancy winning free tickets to the exhibition. Step 1: Head to your nearest Bourke Street Bakery. Step 2: Buy tart. Step 3: Refrain from devouring tart for long enough to snap a photo of it (you'll get extra points for creativity). Step 4: Get custardy fingerprints on your phone as you upload to Instagram using the hashtags #RembrandtAGNSW @artgalleryofnsw and @bourkestreetbakery. If only every exhibition could have a bespoke pastry created in its honour. THE EXTRAS There's a whole host of lectures, workshops, live music, guided tours and performances programmed alongside the exhibition, designed to enhance your connection with both the artworks and the cultural vibe of 17th-century Dutch society. Our top picks? Combine fine art with comedy at The Bear Pack: Dutch Masters on Wednesdays until January 31 at 6.30pm. Sydney funny man Carlo Ritchie of improv duo The Bear Pack and special guests will be performing an improvised play using audience suggestions to 'tell the untold tales of the Dutch masters', to the accompaniment of cellist Ange Lavoipierre. There's also Conversations with ABC presenter James Valentine and guests, where you basically head along for a drink and a chat about the period. Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum runs until February 18 as part of the Sydney International Art Series 2017–2018.
Equal parts gin, vermouth rosso and Campari, the classic negroni cocktail is easy to make and its simple recipe means it's a popular go-to for aperitivo hour. When you're looking to shake things up, there are a number of cocktails created through the decades that take the classic Italian drink and give it a distinctive flavour transformation, from coffee combinations to bubbly versions that might appeal to your espresso martini and Aperol spritz loving friends. Together with Campari, we've picked out five easy-to-master cocktails that riff on a negroni — so you can introduce your favourite bittersweet cocktail to your pals, no matter the occasion. Once you've found your preferred tipple, head to the Campari website to download two recipe books that feature ten classic negroni recipes and 50 twists by leading Australian bartenders. Melburnians who are living with stage four restrictions are encouraged to bookmark this page for when you're ready to receive visitors once again. Until then, explore the recipes below and those in the Negroni Cocktail Book for inspiration. OLD PAL Is there a more fitting cocktail to serve to your besties? Aside from its endearing name, Old Pal is an elegant beverage that was invented in the 1930s and is traditionally served in a coupette glass. When you're having a couple of whiskey drinking mates over for dinner, this alternative drink brings in that full-bodied flavour profile into the mix. 30ml Campari 30ml Wild Turkey Rye Whiskey 30ml Cinzano Extra-Dry Lemon or orange Pour all the ingredients into a mixing glass. Add ice and stir for a few seconds to reach the desired dilution. Strain into a stemmed glass. Twist a peel of lemon to release the essential oils around the glass rim. If you prefer a rounder, smoother flavour, use an orange in place of the lemon. COFFEE NEGRONI When your preferred pep-me-up cocktail is an espresso martini, this coffee-flavoured negroni will give you a hint of the same smooth taste, but without having to faff with espresso coffee. The youngest member of the negroni family is easy to make and you only need four ingredients to get the party started. 30ml Campari 30ml London dry gin 15ml Cinzano Rosso 15ml coffee liqueur Pour all ingredients into a rocks glass over plenty of ice and stir to mix. Garnish with an orange wedge and three coffee beans. Don't have coffee liqueur? Amero or hazelnut liqueur are good substitutes. CARDINALE When you're looking to show off your skills, there's a negroni-style cocktail that has the elegance of a martini. The Cardinale is usually served chilled in a coupette, or another stemmed glass, for slow sipping over good conversation. Its name comes from the colour of the gowns worn by Catholic bishops, and you can punch it up in strength with two parts gin for a robust nightcap. 30ml Campari 30ml London dry gin 30ml Cinzano Extra-Dry Pour Campari, gin and Cinzano into a mixing glass. Add ice and stir for few seconds to reach the desired dilution. Strain in a coupette or stemmed glass. Express the essential oils of a lemon and use as garnish (optional). MILANO-TORINO A key ingredient of any classic negroni is Campari, and another is vermouth. This 1860s-born drink honours the birthplaces of both Campari (Milan) and Vermouth (Turin) in its name, which you might know better as a Mi-To. 45ml Campari 45ml Cinzano Rosso Pour both ingredients into a rocks glass over plenty of ice. The trick is to use large ice cubes that don't dilute the drink too quickly. Once mixed, garnish with orange or lemon peel. If you want to stick to a traditional style, opt for a coupette glass and serve chilled, without ice in the glass. NEGRONI SBAGLIATO One for the Aperol spritz fans. In 1972, at Bar Basso in Milan, bartender Mirko Stocchetto accidentally poured prosecco into a negroni, instead of gin. We can barely believe it either, but the bubbly creation has since become the bar's bestseller and a celebratory one at that. The Italian word 'sbagliato' translates to 'mistaken' and its honest name is a reminder that accidents can lead to beautiful things. 30ml Campari 30ml Cinzano Rosso 75ml prosecco Pour all three ingredients into a rocks glass over plenty of ice. Stir to mix. Garnish with a wedge of orange. Serve in a wine glass, which is how Stocchetto would have wanted it. Negroni Week runs from September 14–20. Download the free Negroni Cocktail Book for 60 different negroni recipes to try at home. Remember to Drinkwise.
If you're looking to do something a little different on your next trip to the Blue Mountains, book an adventure with Blue Mountains Glow Worm Tours. You'll be heading out at nightfall to see glow worms, without having to put up with noisy crowds. Your tour guide will meet you at a private property, then lead you along a rustic track, across footbridges and over boulders, before descending into a cool, mossy canyon. As soon as you catch your breath, you'll see that you're absolutely surrounded by glow worms. Along the way, learn all about how the little critters work — including why you shouldn't shine a torch in their faces — and, if you're lucky, see one up close. Each tour lasts an hour and costs $65 per person.
UPDATE: June 29, 2020 — Honeyland is available to stream via Movie Night, At Home and iTunes — and is currently screening in some Australian cinemas. In Honeyland's opening moments, Hatidže Muratova performs feats that wouldn't be out of place in an action blockbuster. Against the craggy, sun-parched North Macedonian landscape — vistas that could easily provide the backdrop to a Star Wars movie or Mad Max: Fury Road — she scrambles over rocks and creeps along ledges, making her way from her stone and mud hut to the cliffs near her otherwise desolate rural village. There, with her green floral headscarf contrasting against pale walls, she tends to a hive of bees. Hatidže doesn't always wear protective gear, but the insects don't sting her. Pulling out the gleaming honeycomb, she's careful and respectful as she goes about her task. That also comes through in the phrase she repeats like a mantra: "half for me, half for you". Hatidže is the main point of focus in Honeyland, a multiple award-winner at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival that also became the first-ever movie to receive Oscar nominations for both Best International Film and Best Documentary earlier this year. In this intimate observational doco, she's worlds away from cinema's big-budget spectacles — but she's still a daring superhero. Dedicated to traditional apiary methods, Hatidže is the last female wild beekeeper in Europe. That mightn't mean much when audiences start watching Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov's debut feature-length film, but it will when the credits roll. As will those words that Hatidže keeps mentioning, which sum up her approach. When she removes honey from her hives, to bottle raw and sell at markets four hours away in the capital city of Skopje, she leaves as much as she takes so that her bees still have something to feed on. Filmed over three years, with Kotevska and Stefanov's team recording more than 400 hours of footage, Honeyland steps into Hatidže's daily life — and the bees aren't the only things buzzing. At first, the film's indefatigable protagonist splits her time between harvesting honey and caring for her bed-ridden, partly blind octogenarian mother Nazife, their banter brimming with both honesty and affection. Then, in a wave of movement and noise that's an omen for things to come, a family of nine moves in next door. Together, the Muratovas and their new neighbours are the only inhabitants of their village. But the Sams have completely different tactics for working the land, whether they're tending to the cows they trucked in with them or — initially under Hatidže's advice — beekeeping themselves. With so many mouths to feed and, as the movie conveys in its bee-on-the-wall fashion, a struggling existence to begin with, Sam patriarch Hussein has no time or concern for Hatidže's "take half, leave half" methodology. Kotevska and Stefanov's obviously didn't know that this clash would arise when they started filming Hatidže. They couldn't have predicted that the Sams would show up at all, in fact. However, in demonstrating how age-old practices and modern tactics come into conflict, they couldn't have stumbled upon a more pertinent situation. Hussein needs cash, and as much as he can make, with selling honey for €10 a jar seeming like a gold mine. Hatidže needs her beekeeping to remain sustainable, so she can continue on as she has been year after year, and as many an apiarist has before her. Unsurprisingly, the two approaches hardly complement each other. Honeyland explores an overwhelmingly specific feud, but it speaks to a universal conflict — between the old and new, tradition and contemporary thinking, and living with nature versus exploiting it. Hatidže's life is all about balance with the planet around her, and yet it's so easily turned upside down by someone who couldn't care less because there's desperately needed money to be made. As a result, this distinctive snapshot also speaks to much of the modern world's current problems, with Hatidže's experiences filled with obvious parallels. Kotevska and Stefanov don't judge Hussein and the Sam family, but their whirlwind of chaos inherently sits in stark contrast to the Muratovas' modest setup. The juxtapositions keep coming, there for viewers to see frame by frame — in the boisterous kids lassoing unhappy cattle, the tender way that Hatidže sings to her hives, the mess and mayhem of the Sams' property, and the peacefulness of Hatidže and Nazife's humble abode. There's more to Hatidže's story on a personal level, as slowly and meditatively unfurled in a documentary with many purposes, including presenting a detailed character study. Audiences need to understand her work and the problems she's facing to understand who she is — to truly glean the weight of her choices and regrets, too — and both facets of Honeyland are as gripping as they are fascinating. This is a compelling, clear-eyed portrait of a woman who is just as frank and unflinching, and who has taken each facet of her existence as it comes. The filmmakers want viewers to do the same, of course. Taking in their stunning drone-shot views of Hatidže in her formidable surroundings, peering closely at bees going about their business, listening to her candle-lit chats with her mother and simply watching her face, it's impossible not to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dii0FMXXVvA&feature=emb_logo
Sometimes, pulling a Jamie or Nigella at the end of a long day is more of a struggle than anyone needs, particularly when the fridge is embarrassingly empty and especially when you don't have the budget to pull together a three-course feast that hits all the food groups. But, that's still no excuse to be a slave to the food hacks you've developed in order to save some dosh. Thanks to the abundance of great, cheap eateries in Sydney, you don't have to be bound to those instant noodles, Vegemite toast or bowls of cereal. Enter our partnership with American Express and our list of sweet spots everyone needs. If you're after delicious, high-quality food that won't kill your chances of owning a home, we know a place. Well, eight actually. And what's more, these places all take Amex, so if your wallet's currently a bit light on cold, hard cash, you're sorted. We'll take you all over Asia for curries, dumplings and roti, or you can opt to settle in for a couple of brews over an affordable pub meal. Whether you fancy an adventurous experience or a comforting favourite, there's no shortage of establishments to choose from and still keep your wallet jingling with possibility. Can't wait to start travelling the world again? American Express has the card for you. Sign up for the Qantas American Express Ultimate Card and you'll score 55,000 bonus Qantas Points, plus $450 of Qantas Travel Credit and two passes to the American Express Lounge every year. And you'll earn 1.25 Qantas Points for every dollar spent. T&Cs, minimum spend and eligibility criteria apply.
UPDATE, October 27, 2022: Bodies Bodies Bodies is available to stream via Google Play, YouTube Movies, iView and Prime Video. The internet couldn't have stacked Bodies Bodies Bodies better if it tried, not that that's how the slasher-whodunnit-comedy came about. Pete Davidson (The Suicide Squad) waves a machete around, and his big dick energy, while literally boasting about how he looks like he fucks. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Oscar-nominee Maria Bakalova plays the cautious outsider among rich-kid college grads, who plan to ride out a big storm with drinks and drugs (and drama) in one of their parents' mansions. The Hunger Games and The Hate U Give alum Amandla Stenberg leads the show as the gang's black sheep, turning up unannounced to zero fanfare from her supposed besties, while the rest of the cast spans Shiva Baby's Rachel Sennott, Generation's Chase Sui Wonders and Industry's Myha'la Herrold, plus Pushing Daisies and The Hobbit favourite Lee Pace as a two-decades-older interloper. And the Agatha Christie-but-Gen Z screenplay? It's drawn from a spec script by Kristen Roupenian, the writer of 2017 viral New Yorker short story Cat Person. All of the above is a lot. Bodies Bodies Bodies is a lot — 100-percent on purpose. It's a puzzle about a party game, as savage a hangout film as they come, and a satire about Gen Z, for starters. It carves into toxic friendships, ignored class clashes, self-obsessed obliviousness, passive aggression and playing the victim. It skewers today's always-online world and the fact that everyone has a podcast — and lets psychological warfare and paranoia simmer, fester and explode. Want more? It serves up another reminder after The Resort, Palm Springs and co that kicking back isn't always cocktails and carefree days. It's an eat-the-rich affair alongside Squid Game and The White Lotus. Swirling that all together like its characters' self-medicating diets, this wildly entertaining horror flick is a phenomenal calling card for debut screenwriter Sarah DeLappe and Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn (Instinct), too — and it's hilarious, ridiculous, brutal and satisfying. Forgetting how it ends is also utterly impossible. The palatial compound where Bodies Bodies Bodies unfurls belongs to David's (Davidson) family, but it's hurricane-party central when the film begins. That said, no one — not David, his actor girlfriend Emma (Wonders), the no-nonsense Jordan (Herrold) or needy podcaster Alice (Sennott), and definitely not Greg (Pace), the latter's swipe-right older boyfriend of barely weeks — expects Sophie (Stenberg) to show as they're swigging tequila poolside. She hasn't responded to the group chat, despite claiming otherwise when she arrives. She certainly hasn't told them, not even her childhood ride-or-die David, that she's bringing her new girlfriend Bee (Bakalova) along. And Sophie hasn't prepared Bee for their attitudes, all entitlement, years of taken-for-granted comfort and just as much mouldering baggage, as conveyed in bickering that's barely disguised as banter. When the weather turns bad as forecast, a game is soon afoot inside the sprawling abode. Sharing the movie's title, the fake murder-mystery lark is this crew's go-to — but, even with a hefty supply of glow sticks (handy in the inevitable power outage), it doesn't mix too well with booze, coke and Xanax. The essentials: pieces of paper, one crossed with a X; everyone picking a scrap, with whoever gets the marked sliver deemed the perpetrator; and switching off the lights while said killer offs their victim, which happens just by touching them. Then, it's time to guess who the culprit is. That's when the mood plummets quickly, because accusing your friends of being faux murderers by publicly checking off all their shady traits will do that. It gets worse, of course, when those bodies bodies bodies soon become literal and everyone's a suspect. "It gets worse" could be a life motto for Sophie and her clique; they're at that stage of adulthood where their whole lives are supposed to await — until Bodies Bodies Bodies, the game, happens — and yet a whirlwind of disappointment and uncertainty lingers. Their friendships are stormy yet stagnating, old scores and misdeeds clattering down, secrets spilling, and past romantic entanglements still causing hail. Tension and unhappiness rains over their fragile arguments about grudges and jealousies, hate-listening and the word 'gaslight', and why 40-year-old Greg is even there as well. No one is making great decisions, or wants to be making decisions at all, and insular couldn't describe better the atmosphere that greets the quiet, reserved, clearly-not-as-wealthy Bee. Initially blissfully head-over-heels in that newly smitten, six-weeks-in way, "it gets worse" also starts to echo for her as the dynamic with Sophie unsurprisingly changes. As the kills keep coming, twentysomething malaise, mania and stupidity gets worse, too — and Bodies Bodies Bodies relishes it all. The dialogue is as sharp as a blade, and yet also like eavesdropping on any cohort of potential horror-movie victims trying to stay alive when they're being picked off one by one in a fancy abode; again, by design. Yes, there's much in the screenplay that's easy to spot. Toying with those formulaic pieces is the other game within the feature's fast-paced and tightly wound game, however, as bloody mayhem ensues sans internet, electricity, sobriety, trust and common sense. Capitalising upon the sense that everything is in a hurry, plus the careening cinematography by Jasper Wolf (Monos) that stalks and roams around the house, to mirror Sophie and her friends' inner chaos is a shrewd touch. That's Bodies Bodies Bodies all over, with Reijn utilising every shot, claustrophobic use of torches and lit-up mobile phone screens to light scenes, mischievous note in Disasterpiece's (Triple Frontier) score, obvious plot inclusion and buzzword-heavy line to irreverently rip into the film's many genres and targets. Bodies Bodies Bodies unpacks us all, to be fair; who isn't a few unexpected shocks away from bedlam, from their flaws being exposed and their worst instincts kicking in (especially without wifi as a crutch, the film jokingly/half-jokingly posits)? This romp of a slasher-comedy shreds almost everything in sight but takes care not to tear its characters down — we've all stumbled, fumbled and fought to survive in our own ways, and life is uneasy for all of us. The cracker of a punchline conclusion is full of heartily dark laughs, not terrors, which is Bodies Bodies Bodies' entire approach to parodying and slicing everything it can. Managing all of the above with a killer cast, too? Especially with Stenberg playing it loose and mesmerising, Bakalova pitch-perfect as the wary but enterprising newcomer, Davidson doing his usual charismatically goofy thing, and Sennott and Pace stealing every moment they can with her lively ditziness and his hanger-on swagger, Bodies Bodies Bodies slays slays slays.
Right now, we're navigating the weird — and often glitchy — world of digital drinks. Instead of clocking off, going down to our local and ordering a pint with some colleagues, we're on Zoom calls and dancing at online nightclubs. But what to drink? By now, we're sure your kitchen either looks like a full-blown saloon or you've at least got some supplies stashed away. So, instead of reaching for the wine, why not take things up a notch with a cocktail? And not just any cocktail, but one worthy of a celebrity. Thankfully, the world has recently been blessed with a fair bit of celeb cocktail content of late — from cosmopolitan queen Ina Garten to suave Stanley Tucci and the ever-classy Meryl Streep. And, unlike Paris Hilton and her lasagne, you can trust these three celebs in the kitchen. So, if you're wondering what concoction to make this afternoon, look no further. INA GARTEN'S GIANT COSMOPOLITAN (SUITABLE AT ALMOST ANY HOUR) Serves one Ina Garten or a household Keeping cocktail hour alive — even though "nobody's stopping by" — is Ina Garten (Barefoot Contessa). And while her catchcry "it's always cocktail hour in a crisis" may not be advisable, it's pretty relatable. Plus, this is coming from a culinary icon. Her drink of choice during iso is the sophisticated cosmo, naturally. If you want to take a page out of the cocktail queen's cookbook, you'll need top-shelf vodka, Cointreau (or any orange liqueur), cranberry juice, limes and ice, plus a jug, novelty-sized cocktail shaker (with strainer) and an extra-large martini glass. Ingredients 2 cups vodka 1 cup Cointreau 1 cup cranberry juice 1/2 cup freshly squeezed lime Ice Method Pour vodka, cointreau, cranberry juice and lime into jug. Stir. Half fill shaker with ice and add in the cocktail mix. Depending on the size of your shaker, you may have to do this in batches. Shake for 30 seconds. Pour into martini glass(es). In the wise words of Garten: "During a crisis, you know, cocktail hour can be almost any hour." So, bottoms up. https://www.instagram.com/tv/B-cJUwUpxbM/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link STANLEY TUCCI'S UNLAWFUL — BUT INTRIGUING — NEGRONI UP Serves one If you can look past the incredibly sculpted biceps, you'll see The Devil Wears Prada actor shaking a negroni. Yes, shaking. While most like their negronis as they should be — on the rocks, with equal parts gin, sweet vermouth and Campari — Tucci's twist is intriguing. But again, it could be the arms. For what Tucci calls a Negroni Up, you'll need gin, sweet vermouth (good sweet vermouth, not that Martini brand he has such disdain for), Campari, an orange, and ice, plus a cocktail shaker (with strainer) and a glass, preferably a coupe. Now, throw whatever negroni-making knowledge you have aside. Ingredients 2 shots gin 1 shot sweet vermouth 1 shot Campari 1 orange slice Ice Method Half fill shaker with ice and add gin, sweet vermouth and Campari. Shake it up, as Tucci does so well. Pour into a coupe, martini glass, or whatever you want. Garnish with an orange slice. Really, a negroni is a simple drink, relying on balance and good liquor. Although Tucci's breaks all the rules, his confidence has us convinced. https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_NkcbTgVfy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link MERYL STREEP'S MARTINI (WITH A SIDE OF SHOW TUNES AND SCOTCH) Serves one Even Meryl Streep is getting around the quarantini — shaken, not stirred. But she doesn't just make a stiff drink and tell you how to do it, no. The award-winning actor takes her cocktail making to the next level — of course she does — leaving a little guesswork to the recipe. So, you can get creative with this one. As part of Stephen Sondheim's birthday celebrations, which saw celebrities the world over celebrate with a virtual concert, Streep shakes up a martini while singing Sondheim's show tune 'The Ladies Who Lunch'. She's joined by a red wine-drinking Christine Baranski and a bourbon-swigging Audra McDonald and if you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favour and watch it here, immediately. For Meryl's martini, you'll need gin, vermouth, lemon, ice, plus a cocktail shaker (with strainer) and martini glass. And a chic robe to wear while shaking and singing. Ingredients 50 millilitres gin 10 millilitres dry vermouth lemon twist Ice Method Half fill shaker with ice and add gin and dry vermouth. Shake for about 30 seconds — or the duration of singing: 'Here's to the girls that stay smart / Aren't they a gas?/ Rushing to their classes / In optical art / Wishing it would pass'. Pour into a martini glass theatrically and garnish with lemon twist while belting out 'I'll drink to that'. Once you've sung a bit more and polished off that martini, take a large sip of scotch straight from the bottle — be sure to do it with equal parts class and sass. Then, pour yourself another martini. https://twitter.com/michcoll/status/1254609437492461569
Last week, NASA announced that it would start rocketing into space from Australia. This week, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration has revealed plans to allow tourists to not only soar beyond the earth, but spend time on the International Space Station. If you've ever wanted to hang out in an artificial satellite that's orbiting the planet — and you have spare piles of cash secreted away — your dreams might just be about to come true. Possibly commencing as early as 2020, private astronauts will be able to spend up to 30 days on the ISS, with two tourists allowed onboard at any one time. But before you go getting too excited, it'll come at a cost, obviously. Visitors will need to pay US$11,250 a day for use of life support and bathroom facilities, plus an extra $22,500 per day for food, air and medical supplies — and also fork out for the presumably ultra-expensive trip to actually get there. NASA won't be running an off-planet bed-and-breakfast, unsurprisingly, or a space public transport system. Rather, the move comes as part of a broader approach, with the ISS opening to commercial ventures in general — including private tourist outfits. The latter will be able to arrange the privately funded, dedicated commercial spaceflights for eager visitors, using NASA-developed US spacecraft. They'll also be responsible for flight crews, as well as ensuring that private astronauts meet the necessary medical and training requirements. https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1137000745922957313 Overall, NASA's statement talks of accelerating "a thriving commercial economy in low-earth orbit" — with businesses able to operate out of the station. While more than 50 companies are already involved with the ISS, their work is currently restricted to research and development; however that'll no longer be the case. Expect to keep hearing more about the agency's commercial efforts, given that there's another aim in store as well: landing the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024.
Durex is about to launch its Naked Box project, a design competition that will let your work be seen by naked people everywhere. Specifically calling for young designers, the Naked Box competition offers a rare opportunity for emerging artists to work with a global brand and have their work showcased around the world. If you're quite keen on drawing, design, or otherwise have an arty bone in your body (pun gleefully intended), Durex wants you to help them out by designing their new condom pack, to be sold globally. This means your designs could be the first thing people turn to during critical moments in bedrooms from Brisbane to Bratislava. While you're not allowed to be too rude and have to mind your language, the Naked Box competition website offers tools like Vibrating Pencils and Ribbed Rollers to help you out in the design process. There's also a design gallery where weekly winners are announced so that you can see what you're up against. Aside from the grand prize, there's also a bunch of other assorted cool stuff you can get your hands on, including iPads, underwear, t-shirts and other non-specific Durex paraphernalia. To enter, all you need to do is submit your design through Facebook. Entries open on March 7 and close on April 17 at midnight GMT, so there's plenty of time to get designing. Punters can also vote on Facebook for their favourite designs and evaluate each entrant's hard work for themselves.
Here we go again. Fred again.. is currently on one of the most exhilarating and spontaneous tours of Australia we've ever seen. The UK sensation has performed at the Sydney Opera House, Rod Laver Arena and is currently in the middle of a run of shows at Qudos Bank Arena — plus, he's done surprise and pop-up sets at Club 77, Revolver, The Timber Yard, Hotel Brunswick and Doug Jennings Park. But he's not done yet, with another show just announced, this time taking over The Domain in Sydney on Saturday, March 16 for a night of DJ sets. "Okayyyy Sydney," Fred posted to his Instagram on Wednesday, March 13. "We're going to do a big fat sorta end of shows week party at the main on Saturday. Imma be DJing wit some friends." The beloved producer will be joined by his close friend JOY (ANONYMOUS), plus local superstars Sam Alfred and Dameeeela for the inner-city dance party. As with the first Sydney Opera House show, tickets have been dropped with no warning and are on sale now via Tiketek. The tour came out of nowhere, after a post to Fred again..'s Instagram showing him boarding a flight with JOY (ANONYMOUS), teasing that they'd be performing wherever the plane landed. Next thing we knew, he popped up on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, announcing that ultra last-minute performance at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall. Before now, Fred was last in town for Laneway 2023 alongside Haim, Joji and Phoebe Bridgers, at which time he created pandemonium by performing at a slate of pop-up DJ sets around Australia and New Zealand alongside his festival appearances. As with his famous Boiler Room set, and the DJ-style pop-ups he did while in the country for Laneway, Fred again.. will be hitting the decks with a USB filled with his own hits — from cult classics 'Delilah (pull me out of this)', 'Marea (we've lost dancing)' and 'Rumble' to his new single 'stayinit' with Lil Yachty and Overmono — as well as plenty of broader dance music bangers. Fred again.. Australia 2024 Tour Remaining Dates: Wednesday, March 12–Thursday, March 14 — Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney Saturday, March 16 — The Domain, Sydney Fred again.. is DJing alongside JOY (ANONYMOUS), Dameeeela and Sam Salfred at The Domain on Saturday, March 16. Tickets are on sale now. Live images: Maclay Heriot / Daniel Boud, Laneway 2023.
Turning a night in into a great night out, the ten finalists in the Hottest Hotel Bar category at the inaugural Smith Hotel Awards will quench any thirst. Night-owls, cocktail-connoisseurs and boutique-bar-hoppers rejoice: these top-shelf watering-holes have views worth Instagramming, barmen worth befriending and drinks worth remembering. Teetotallers beware. Winner, Hottest Hotel Bar: Ace Hotel New York Where: 20 West 29th St, New York What: Rock ’n’ roll retro Designed for the cool cats, the Ace Hotel New York has art-lined walls, a Gibson guitar and turntables for wannabe rock-stars in most rooms, as well as a dining den, the Breslin, helmed by Spotted Pig founders April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman. Decked out like a classic Park Avenue apartment, the hotel’s bar plies thirsty hipsters with craft beers and spirits, homemade pickle juice (yes, really) and tasty bar snacks. Cocktails — crafted by master mixologist Sasha Petraske, of Milk & Honey fame — are best enjoyed from the comfort of a distressed Chesterfield. Runner-up, Hottest Hotel Bar: The Zetter Townhouse Where: 49-50 St John’s Square, London What: Modish magpie’s nest More glam grande dame than Miss Havisham, The Zetter Townhouse is a fanciful find inspired by the fabulous (and fictional) Great Aunt Wilhelmina. From the intricate free-hand paintings that adorn lift doors to the repurposed vintage-magazine wallpaper and top-floor rooms with headboards crafted from Victorian carousel trappings, Wilhelmina’s ‘house’ delivers a hefty dose of eccentricity — much like the lady herself. Moonlighting as the reception desk, the Lounge has done away with run-of-the-mill menus and is bringing tinctures, bitters and herbal remedies back in vogue. Behind the apothecary-style bar, cocktail-maestro Tony Conigliaro uses home-made cordials and infusions to create wicked liquid delights, including the signature Master at Arms (named for Wilhelmina’s dalliance with a solider). Second runner-up: Fasano Rio Where: Av. Viera Souto 80, Rio De Janeiro What: Club tropicana Unleash your inner Gisele and strut supermodel-style into Fasano Rio. With a glass exterior, section of private beach and white marble pool on the roof, this bossa nova-chic stunner has long been seducing Rio’s model-elite and international jetset. Forgo your free flip-flops and dress to seriously impress at the hotel’s ground-floor bar, Baretto Londra: a sleek tribute to the hotel owner’s favourite city. This dimly lit watering-hole has low tables housing chilled bottles of premium vodka, cool leather chairs and glossy dark wood panelling. No wonder it’s a Rio institution. Hotel Omm Where: Rosselló, 265, Barcelona, 08008 What: Architect-designed dynamite In a city touched by the hand of Gaudi, Hotel Omm boasts an eye-catching façade: small, white rectangular slabs with slits for thin windows and small balconies protected from the blazing Barcelona sun. The rooftop terrace has a swimming pool and views perfect for armchair tourists; the spires of La Sagrada Familia and swirls of La Pedrera’s roof can be checked off without leaving the comfort of a sunlounger. Moo, the brainchild of the Michelin-approved Roca brothers, is an informal and health-conscious restaurant serving Catalan haute-cuisine with each half-portion dish accompanied by a carefully selected wine. Moo’s cocktail bar and lounge, OmmSession is sleek and sexy, graced with international and local DJs who play until sunrise. 101 Hotel Where: 10 Hverfisgata, Reykjavik What: Ice-cool metropolitan A monochromatic marvel, Reykjavik’s 101 Hotel has its own gallery, is dotted with cutting-edge art and proves a minimalist ethos is anything but dull. After a day’s worth of geyser-gazing and Blue Lagoon-paddling, the bistro-inspired favourites — think burgers and fresh fish — served in the spaceship-style 101 Restaurant & Bar are spot-on for weary Skidoo-sledders. In the sleek and glossy bar, elegant white stools line up like pale soldiers at the Starck-style long communal bench; for an intimate tipple, drinks can be taken in the cosy lounge where grand leather sofas are clustered around an open fireplace. Public Chicago Where: 1301 North State Parkway, Chicago, Illinois What: Mid-century reincarnation Once hosting paparazzi-attracting clientele — Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, don’t you know? — Public Chicago hasn’t lost its edge; it’s as cool as ever, has views worth leaving home for and a lively bar scene where the international glitterati congregate. All rooms at Public have floor-to-ceiling windows, but the rooftop suites are corkers, named for icons like Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra. At night, the Pump Room’s bar becomes bubbly and vibrant, offering tapas-inspired small plates, specialty cocktails and international draught or bottled beer. If ‘being seen’ isn’t your thing, mosey over to the mellow Library with its comfy couches, Vermeer-esque art and the same liquid offerings as its buzzier counterpart. The Standard Downtown LA Where: 550 South Flower Street at Sixth Street, Los Angeles, California What: High-rise hedonistic HQ A downtown playground in a mid-century architectural landmark, The Standard Downtown LA attracts the Golden State’s buff, bronzed and beautiful. With decor crying out to be a Sixties film set, all rooms are helpfully descriptive, from ‘Cheap’ to ‘Big Penthouse’, with ‘Gigantic’ and ‘Wow’ sandwiched in the middle. Weekends have a distinctive nocturnal energy as the young and hip flock to the lobby and bar for head-nodding beats and cleverly crafted cocktails. The rooftop is the beating heart of this pleasure dome: by day, curl up in the shaded waterbed pods or stretch out on a sunlounger by the come-hither pool; as the sun disappears over the red Astroturf deck, the dance floor fills and nightly DJs pump out hip-hop, crunk, disco, soul and Eighties hits. Park Hyatt Tokyo Where: 3-7-1-2 Nishi Shinjuku, Shinjuku-Ku, Tokyo, Greater Tokyo Area What: Celluloid sophisticate Play out Scarlett and Bill’s kooky courtship at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, a handsome high-rise that eyeballs an impressive city skyline and the white-capped peaks of Mount Fuji. Accountants will wince at the Shinjuku location; Shibuya’s shopping district boasts chicly dressed windows tricked out with designer labels. For your fill of people-watching, seek out the New York Bar & Grill, atop the hotel’s 52nd floor, and scroll through the menu’s roll call of coveted flavours: foie gras, Japanese kasumi duck and Oscietra caviar. Budding sommeliers can work through the 1,600 wines on offer — some exclusive to the hotel — or would-be Coppolas can sip a LIT (Lost in Translation), crafted from sake, sakura liqueur, schnapps and cranberry juice. Berns Hotel Where: 8 Näckströmsgatan, Stockholm What: Historic nightlife palace A beloved party pad, Berns Hotel has swanky Scandinavian style and deliciously cosy rooms. Berns has its own concert hall (recently graced by pop princess Rihanna) as well as Gallery 2.35:1, an electronica nightclub with pulsating bass. Berns Asiatiska is a gilded eatery with plush velvet chairs and dazzling chandeliers, serving sophisticated Asian-inspired fare and Asian brunch on weekends. For a night of liquid refreshment, float between the Terrace in summer for schnapps and the exclusive veranda on the second floor, or weave your way through the designer-clad revellers in the maze of happening bars. Karma Kandara Where: Jalan Villa Kandara, Banjar Wijaya Kusuma, Ungasan, Bali What: Cliffhanging couture With the azure Indian Ocean and an emerald jungle as its neighbours, Karma Kandara catapults relaxation into a higher stratosphere. Tucked away in lush tropical gardens, each villa has a plunge pool and pavilions set around a secluded courtyard. Dance barefoot at Karma Beach Bali’s barbecue beach parties or recline with a fruity concoction or ice-cold beer on the stretch of private beach. Have a hankering for a pinot or chardonnay? Veritas is the glass-clad wine bar that boasts Bali’s first Enomatic wine dispenser, dark-velvet club chairs and spectacular coastline views. Sitting on a sun-blessed rooftop, Temple Lounge & Bar is the dreamy Moroccan-inspired drinking hole, complete with shisha pipes and Middle Eastern grazing plates. Still thirsty? Head to Mr & Mrs Smith for more boutique hotels to whet your whistle.
You're probably familiar with Jurassic Lounge, the beloved after-hours mainstay that transforms the iconic halls and arches of the Australian Museum into a bustling extravaganza year by year – and always with a different theme. Past themes have included Heroes, Halloween and Robots vs Dinosaurs. Now, in 2023, the Australian Museum will join Sydney WorldPride celebrations with Jurassic Lounge: Pride Edition, an evening of inclusive celebrations for all. If you're unfamiliar with Jurassic Lounge and the after-dark metamorphosis of the museum, here's a taste of what to expect. The galleries and exhibits you know and love will be transformed with lights, music and entertainment. The main stage will be hosted by queer nightlife fixture Aunty Jonny, keeping an upbeat playlist of tunes that have underscored the LGBTQIA+ community for decades, plus best-dressed awards and a choreographed dance hosted by Sydney Drag Royalty. [caption id="attachment_884900" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] Lyndal Irons[/caption] There'll be a celebration of all things queer science hosted by the legendary Dr Alice Motion and scientific minds from across the LQBTQIA+ world, comedy-trained scientists from Scary Strangers taking you through everything from a T. Rex Autopsy to the science of spider orgies. On top of that, you can join drop-in drawing classes, anatomically-complex games of pin the tail on the donkey, a silent disco and drag show in the Wild Planet gallery, and participate in a beginner's guide to scientific experimentation hosted by the hilarious Nat Caro and AM's Martha Johnson. Jurassic Lounge: Pride Edition is on Saturday, February 18, from 6.30pm to 10pm. Tickets are $36 per person for members and $45 for non-members. To purchase tickets and find out more about the event, head to the website. Images: Diabolique Photography and Sarah Wilson
If golden, crunchy, juicy fried chook is your idea of a perfect meal then you probably have July 6 permanently marked in your diary. Each and every year, that's when the world's fried chicken-lovers celebrate their favourite food. We're not saying that the chook will taste better on that date, but if you just can't get enough of the trusty dish, it's definitely time to celebrate. This year, to mark the occasion, 50 restaurants across Australia are offering up to 50 percent off their take on the dish for two days via Deliveroo. On Monday, July 6 and Tuesday, July 7, you can get finger licken' good chook delivered straight to your home or office — or home office — for cheap. Lunch, sorted. Melburnians have 18 chook joints to choose from, including Hawker Chan, Seoul Hot Chicken, Oriental Teahouse, Hakata Gensuke and Carl's Jr, while Sydneysiders have 16, with the likes of Johnny Bird, Broaster, Chi Kim and Angry Tony's all getting on board. Brisbanites have six options for their half-price burger fix, including Seoul Bistro, Lord of the Wings and Cafe Etto. You can check out the full list below. To get your fix, all you need to do is jump on to Deliveroo and find your closest chook favourite and order. [caption id="attachment_659902" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Johnny Bird[/caption] WORLD FRIED CHICKEN DAY RESTAURANTS SYDNEY Angry Tony's - Darlington Rooster and Grill Inferno Grill Inferno Grill Pyrmont Chi Kim WingBoy - Bondi Junction WingBoy - Parramatta WingBoy - Eastgardens WingBoy - Macquarie It's Time for Thai Newtown Manoosh Pizzeria (Enmore) Manoosh Pizzeria (Marrickville) Manoosh Lebanese Pizza - Waterloo Manoosh Pizzeria - Caringbah Johnny Bird Broasters Fried Chicken MELBOURNE Hakata Gensuke QV Hakata Gensuke Yatai Carlton Hakata Gensuke Hawthorn - Ramen Professional Hakata Gensuke Tonkotsu Ramen Seoul Hot Chicken Chicken Episode Oriental Teahouse Little Collins Chicken Episode 2.5 Slap Burger - Editions Collingwood Angry Birds Burger Joint - Editions Collingwood Peach's Fried Chicken - Editions Collingwood Bao Wow - Editions Collingwood F.A.T - Fried & TastyCarl's Jr (Docklands) Carl's Jr - Knox Carl's Jr - Altona Hawker Chan Hawker Chan - Chadstone Hawker Chan Box Hill BRISBANE Seoul Bistro Lord of the Wings Indooroopilly Lord of the Wings Carindale Cafe Etto Brisbane Chop Chop Changs Wilde Kitchen Top image: Lord of the Wings
Even with all the specialty bars in town, Champagne has not yet had its chance in the spotlight. Does it have the dedicated Sydney fan base to carry the show? Or will we get confused drinking it with no nuptials to toast or New Year to welcome? All questions will be answered with the opening of the Champagne Room, coming to The Winery's upper floor in late September. Visitors will be able to enjoy city skyline views while sipping on their flute of Perrier-Jouet's Belle Epoque 2006, which will only be available by the glass in Sydney at this venue (and which would ordinarily set you back a cool $200 a bottle). A bevy of other choices from luxury Champagne producers will also be available, alongside cocktails and Australian and international wines. "Surry Hills nightlife is about to house one of the most exciting new bars in Sydney," says Paul Schulte, creative director of the Keystone Group. "We've created a seeming synthesis of comfort and a unique escape for Sydney's champagne lovers." Inside, the bar will be fitted with private booths with 'Champagne bells' which light up whenever you need your drink refilled, forgoing the torturous process of always trying to catch the waiter's eye. While the Champagne Room will come with The Winery's usual food options, on the weekends visitors are invited to splurge on a seafood brunch, including freshly shucked oysters, Harvey Bay scallops and Cloudy Bay prawns. Bless my poor wallet. The Champagne Room will be open every evening 5pm until late and from 11am on weekends.
Folks heading to Finland's Ruisrock festival won't have to worry about paying to get there — but they will have to be willing to belt out a few tunes. Once, singing in your car was something everyone did when they were alone or enjoying an epic road trip with friends. In recent years, it has become an overdone late-night talk show comedy bit. Now, it's the only form of payment accepted by the Fortum Singalong Shuttle, which won't be taking cash, cards or funds via app when it hits the Turku streets between July 6–8. On the way to and from the three-day fest — which features N.E.R.D. and The Chainsmokers among its headliners — punters can hop in at designated stops, pick a tune from an in-car tablet and start unleashing their inner pop star. According to the shuttle website, the vehicle keeps on moving as long as its passengers keep on singing; however, given the cars will come with drivers, we're guessing that there'll be some discretion about how much singing is really required. As gimmicky an idea as you're likely to hear, it's actually an attempt by clean-energy company Fortum to get people thinking about its alternative energy solutions, with the Singalong Shuttle fleet populated solely by electric cars. "The silent electric cars make it possible to enjoy singing without background noise and emissions," says the outfit's brand manager Jussi Mälkiä.
In Dune, Josh Brolin jumped wholeheartedly into one of the best sci-fi subgenres there is: the space opera. When a movie follows a spice-war fought by feuding houses on far-flung planets, no other description fits the bill. And, the 2021 big-screen hit — and 2022 big-time Oscar-nominee — firmly did its slice of science fiction proud. But, as well showing up for next year's sequel Dune: Part Two, Brolin definitely isn't done with sci-fi just yet. Making a rare small-screen appearance — his first ongoing episodic role since 2003, in fact — the Milk Oscar-nominee leads Outer Range, the next trippy streaming series that you'll want to add to your queue. That recommendation is based on the just-dropped first teaser trailer for the eight-part series, which'll hit Prime Video from Friday, April 15, and promises quite the mind-bending supernatural western. The setup: on a ranch in Wyoming, Brolin's Royal Abbott is trying to keep his land, and ensure that his family stays together, after his daughter-in-law Rebecca goes missing. His neighbours, the Tillersons, are after his parcel of turf, and strange things start happening — including an eerie black void in the middle of the Abbotts' west pasture. So far, the show is keeping most of its small town-set storyline close to its sci-fi/western/thriller/mystery chest — but the sneak peek certainly sets an unsettling tone. And yes, it's shaping up to be a big year for unnerving stories set in vast expanses of US land, with Jordan Peele's latest horror epic Nope covering the same terrain. Outer Range will drop two episodes per week, so you'll spend around a month soaking in its mysteries, turf wars and wild revelations. If you've currently got a Yellowjackets shaped hole in your viewing schedule, this might just fill it. On-screen, Brolin is joined by an impressive cast that includes Imogen Poots (The Father), Lili Taylor (Perry Mason), Tamara Podemski (Run), Tom Pelphrey (Ozark) and Noah Reid (Schitt's Creek). Check out the trailer for Outer Range below: Outer Range will start streaming via Prime Video Down Under on Friday, April 15.
The Oxford Tavern's Handball Comp is back. As at the event's first edition, held back in March, the overall champ will score his/her height in cheeseburgers. But this time, a pool comp has been added to the program. And for that, the stakes are even higher. The winner of the singles category is promised his/her height in slabs of tinnies and the winning doubles team the same, but in tequila. The comp is happening on Monday, September 21, as part of Bar Week 2015, with the pool comp starting at 3pm and the handball kicking off at 7pm. It's not only open to industry professionals — members of the general public are invited, too. That's even if you're only going along to cheer/boo/take advantage of seriously reduced drink prices/recover from your dunce-square complex via schadenfreude. All afternoon, tinnies will be $4 a pop and cocktails $10. See yourself grinning smugly from atop a beer/tequila/burger tower? You'd better get your entry in quick. Email forbes@theoxfordtavern.com.au.
FBi Radio has been on air for two decades now. The beloved Sydney community radio station has been spotlighting the best of Sydney's music, arts and culture since 2003 — and, in celebration, it's throwing a huge Marrickville block party. The part-music festival, part-station fundraiser will take over two bustling Inner West venues and the alleyway between them on Saturday, December 9. A 30-strong lineup of musicians, performers and DJs will be popping up at the Marrickville Bowlo, The Red Rattler and the outdoor stage, with a blockbuster program spanning pop, hip hop, punk, R&B and dance music. Leading the lineup is a pair of reunions. Hoops, the DJ project of trio Anna Lunoe, Bad Ezzy and Nina Las Vegas, is getting back together for the party, throwing things back to their storied sets at Sydney clubs of yesteryear like Goodgod Small Club. And, hip hop fans will be delighted to see Western Sydney duo and FBi Radio royalty Slim Set reunite for a special Slim Set + Friends performance. [caption id="attachment_929382" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Anna Lunoe, FBi Dance Class[/caption] Some of the other names you may recognise on the lineup include 1300, Milan Ring, Party Dozen, Ninajirachi, Babitha, Marcus Whale and Becca Hatch. Plus, if you're looking to catch the next big thing, this is your chance. Dust, Friday*, Juice Webster, Teether and Zion Garcia have all released stellar projects this year, and will all hit the stage at the FBi Turns 20 Fundraiser and Block Party. Rounding out the lineup is a selection of some of the city's top tastemakers. If you missed out on Boiler Room tickets (or you went along and want to back things up), you can catch the likes of Simon Caldwell, Isa, Crescendoll and Johnny Lieu on the decks. [caption id="attachment_921971" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Friday*[/caption] Top image: Tim da-Rin
Whenever projectors have whirred in 2023, it has sometimes been thanks to seasoned filmmakers at the top of their games. Whenever silver screens have come alive with new sound-and-vision delights, it's sometimes been due to new voices making glorious debuts, too. Both are hallmarks of an exceptional year at the movies, as the 15 best films of 2023 show — because when beloved greats are delivering the goods and the next generations are making instant masterpieces, the state of cinema as an artform is glowing. The one caveat to the above, and a reminder that's worth repeating each and every year: thanks to the hundreds of titles that make their way to picture palaces across each annual calendar, there's no such thing as a bad 12 months of films. Still, each year's crop is boasts its own wonders, surprises and thrills — and 2023 was no different. Not all movies can be stunners, of course, but this year brought electrifying takes on Frankenstein, plus both Martin Scorsese and Hayao Miyazaki's new masterpieces, swooning love stories, blasts into the past, haunting documentaries and pink-hued playtimes our way. They're all among our 15 best films of 2023 — and most unforgettable — complete with excellent company. POOR THINGS Richly striking feats of cinema by Yorgos Lanthimos aren't scarce. Sublime performances by Emma Stone are hardly infrequent. Screen takes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein couldn't be more constant. For Lanthimos, see: Dogtooth and Alps in the Greek Weird Wave filmmaker's native language, plus The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite since he started helming movies in English. With Stone, examples abound in her Best Actress Oscar for La La Land, supporting nominations before and after for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and Lanthimos' aforementioned regal satire, and twin 2024 Golden Globe nods for their latest collaboration as well as TV's The Curse. And as for the best gothic-horror story there is, not to mention one of the most influential sci-fi stories ever, the evidence is everywhere from traditional adaptations to debts owed as widely as The Rocky Horror Show and M3GAN. Combining the three results in a rarity, however: a jewel of a pastel-, jewel- and bodily fluid-toned feminist Frankenstein-esque fairy tale that's a stunning creation, as zapped to life with Lanthimos' inimitable flair, a mischievous air, Stone at her most extraordinary and empowerment blazing like a lightning bolt. With cascading black hair, an inquisitive stare, incessant frankness and jolting physical mannerisms, Poor Things' star is Bella Baxter in this adaptation of Alasdair Grey's award-winning 1992 novel by Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara (The Great). Among the reasons that the movie and its lead portrayal are so singular: as a character with a woman's body revived with a baby's brain, Stone plays someone from infancy to adulthood, all with the astonishingly exact mindset and mannerisms to match, and while making every move, choice and feeling as organic as birth, living and death. In this fantastical steampunk vision of Victorian-era Europe, London-based Scottish doctor Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, Asteroid City) is Bella's maker. Even if she didn't call him God, he's been playing it. But curiosity, the quest for agency and independence, horniness and a lust for adventure all beckon his creation on a radical, rebellious, gorgeously rendered, gloriously funny and generously insightful odyssey. So, Godwin tries to marry Bella off to medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef, Ramy), only for her to discover masturbation and sex, and run off to the continent with caddish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law). Read our full review. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Death comes to Killers of the Flower Moon quickly. Death comes to Killers of the Flower Moon often. While Martin Scorsese will later briefly fill the film's frames with a fiery orange vision — with what almost appears to be a lake of flames deep in oil country, as dotted with silhouettes of men — death blazes through his 26th feature from the moment that the picture starts rolling. Adapted from journalist David Grann's 2017 non-fiction novel Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, with the filmmaker himself and Dune's Eric Roth penning the screenplay, this is a masterpiece of a movie about a heartbreakingly horrible spate of deaths sparked by pure and unapologetic greed and persecution a century back. Scorsese's two favourite actors in Leonardo DiCaprio (Don't Look Up) and Robert De Niro (Amsterdam) are its stars, alongside hopefully his next go-to in Lily Gladstone (Reservation Dogs), but murder and genocide are as much at this bold and brilliant, epic yet intimate, ambitious and absorbing film's centre — all in a tale that's devastatingly true. As Mollie Kyle, a member of the Osage Nation in Grey Horse, Oklahoma, incomparable Certain Women standout Gladstone talks through some of the movie's homicides early. Before her character meets DiCaprio's World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart — nephew to De Niro's cattle rancher and self-proclaimed 'king of the Osage' William King Hale — she notes that several Indigenous Americans that have been killed, with Mollie mentioning a mere few to meet untimely ends. There's nothing easy about this list, nor is there meant to be. Some are found dead, others seen laid out for their eternal rest, and each one delivers a difficult image. But a gun fired at a young mother pushing a pram inspires a shock befitting a horror film. The genre fits here, in its way, as do many others as Killers of the Flower Moon follows Burkhart's arrival in town, his deeds under his uncle's guidance, his romance with Mollie and the tragedies that keep springing: American crime saga, aka the realm that Scorsese has virtually made his own, as well as romance, relationship drama, western, true crime and crime procedural. Read our full review, and our interview with Martin Scorsese. PAST LIVES Call it fate, call it destiny, call it deeply feeling like you were always meant to cross paths with someone: in Korean, that sensation is in-yeon. Partway through Past Lives, aspiring writer Nora (Greta Lee, Russian Doll) explains the concept to fellow scribe Arthur (John Magaro, Showing Up) like she knows it deep in her bones, because both she and the audience are well-aware that she does. That's what writer/director Celine Song's sublime feature debut is about from its first frames to its last. With Arthur, Nora jokes that in-yeon is something that Koreans talk about when they're trying to seduce someone. There's truth to her words, because she'll end up married to him. But with her childhood crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo, Decision to Leave), who she last saw at the age of 12 because her family then moved from Seoul to Toronto, in-yeon explains everything. It sums up their firm connection as kids, the instant spark that ignites when they reunite in their 20s via emails and Skype calls, and the complicated emotions that swell when they're finally in the same place together again after decades — even with Arthur in the picture as well. Song also emigrated to Canada with her parents as a pre-teen, but achieves that always-sought-after feat: making a movie that feels so intimately specific to its characters, and yet resonates so heartily and universally. Each time that Nora and Hae Sung slide back into each other's lives, it feels like no time has passed, but that doesn't smooth their way forward. Crafted to resemble slipping into a memory, complete with lingering looks and a transportingly evocative score, this feature knows every emotion that arises when you need someone and vice versa, but life has other plans. It feels the weight of the roads not taken, even when you're happy with the route you're on. It's a film about details — spying them everywhere, in Nora and Hae Sung's lives and their faces, while recognising how the best people in anyone's orbits spot them as well. Lee, Yoo and Magaro are each magnetic and magnificent, as is everything about this sensitive, blisteringly honest and intimately complex masterpiece. And, in one specific shot, waiting for a car has never felt so loaded and conflicted. Read our full review, and our interview with Celine Song. AFTERSUN The simplest things in life can be the most revealing, whether it's a question asked of a father by a child, an exercise routine obeyed almost mindlessly or a man stopping to smoke someone else's old cigarette while wandering through a holiday town alone at night. The astonishing feature debut by Scottish writer/director Charlotte Wells, Aftersun is about the simple things. Following the about-to-turn-31 Calum (Paul Mescal, Foe) and his daughter Sophie (debutant Frankie Corio) on vacation in Turkey in the late 90s, it includes all of the above simple things, plus more. It tracks, then, that this coming-of-age story on three levels — of an 11-year-old flirting with adolescence, a dad struggling with his place in the world, and an adult woman with her own wife and family grappling with a life-changing experience from her childhood — is always a movie of deep, devastating and revealing complexity. Earning the internet's Normal People-starring boyfriend a Best Actor Oscar nomination, and deservedly so, Aftersun is a reflective, ruminative portrait of heartbreak. It's a quest to find meaning in sorrow and pain, too, and in processing the past. Wells has crafted a chronicle of interrogating, contextualising, reframing and dwelling in memories; an examination of leaving and belonging; and an unpacking of the complicated truths that a kid can't see about a parent until they're old enough to be that parent. Breaking up Calum and Sophie's sun-dappled coastal holiday with the older Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall, Vox Lux) watching camcorder footage from the trip, sifting through her recollections and dancing it out under a nightclub's strobing lights in her imagination, this is also a stunning realisation that we'll always read everything we can into a loved one's actions with the benefit of hindsight, but all we ever truly have is the sensation that lingers in our hearts and heads. Understanding why the adult Sophie is scouring VHS tapes and her mind's eye for far more than mere nostalgia involves doing what everyone on a resort getaway does: hanging out. Aftersun spends much of its time in the simple holiday moments, including by the pool, at dinner, singing karaoke, day tripping, and in Sophie and Calum's room — and lets these ordinary, everyday occurrences, and the details that flow from them, confess everything they can. Read our full review, and our interview with Charlotte Wells. OPPENHEIMER Cast Cillian Murphy and a filmmaker falls in love. Danny Boyle did with 28 Days Later and Sunshine, then Christopher Nolan followed with Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception and Dunkirk. There's an arresting, haunting, seeps-under-your-skin soulfulness about the Irish actor, never more so than when he was wandering solo through the empty zombie-ravaged streets in his big-screen big break, then hurtling towards the sun in an underrated sci-fi gem, both for Boyle, and now playing "the father of atomic bomb" in Nolan's epic biopic Oppenheimer. Flirting with the end of the world, or just one person's end, clearly suits Murphy. Here he is in a mind-blower as the destroyer of worlds — almost, perhaps actually — and so much of this can't-look-away three-hour stunner dwells in his expressive eyes. As J Robert Oppenheimer, those peepers see purpose and possibility. They spot quantum mechanics' promise, and the whole universe lurking within that branch of physics. They ultimately spy the consequences, too, of bringing the Manhattan Project successfully to fruition during World War II. Dr Strangelove's full title could never apply to Oppenheimer, nor to its eponymous figure; neither learn to stop worrying and love the bomb. The theoretical physicist responsible for the creation of nuclear weapons did enjoy building it in Nolan's account, Murphy's telltale eyes gleaming as Oppy watches research become reality — but then darkening as he gleans what that reality means. Directing, writing and adapting the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, Nolan charts the before and after. He probes the fission and fusion of the situation in intercut parts, the first in colour, the second in black and white. In the former, all paths lead to the history-changing Trinity test on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexico desert. In the latter, a mushroom cloud balloons through Oppenheimer's life as he perceives what the gadget, as it's called in its development stages, has unleashed. Read our full review. EO David Attenborough's nature documentaries are acclaimed and beloved viewing, including when they're recreating dinosaurs. Family-friendly fare adores cute critters, especially if they're talking as in The Lion King and Paddington movies. The horror genre also loves pushing animals to the front, with The Birds and Jaws among its unsettling masterpieces. Earth's creatures great and small are all around us on-screen, and also off — but in EO, a donkey drama by Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski (11 Minutes), humanity barely cares. The people in this Oscar-nominated mule musing might watch movies about pets and beasts. They may have actively shared parts of their own lives existence the animal kingdom; some, albeit only a rare few, do attempt exactly that with this flick's grey-haired, white-spotted, wide-eyed namesake. But one of the tragedies at the heart of this adventure is also just a plain fact of life on this pale blue dot while homo sapiens reign supreme: that animals are everywhere all the time but hardly anyone notices. EO notices. Making his first film in seven years, and co-writing with his wife and producer Ewa Piaskowska (Essential Killing), Skolimowski demands that his audience pays attention. This is both an episodic slice-of-life portrait of EO the donkey's days and a glimpse of the world from his perspective — sometimes, the glowing and gorgeous cinematography by Michal Dymek (Wolf) takes in the Sardinian creature in all his braying, trotting, carrot-eating glory; sometimes, it takes on 'donkey vision', which is just as mesmerising to look at. Skolimowski gets inspiration from Robert Bresson's 1966 feature Au Hasard Balthazar, too, a movie that also follows the life of a hoofed, long-eared mammal. Like that French great, EO sees hardship much too often for its titular creature; however, even at its most heartbreaking, it also spies an innate, immutable circle of life. Read our full review. CLOSE When Léo (debutant Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (fellow first-timer Gustav De Waele) dash the carefree dash of youth in Close's early moments, rushing from a dark bunker out into the sunshine — from rocks and forest to a bloom-filled field ablaze with colour, too — this immediately evocative Belgian drama runs joyously with them. Girl writer/director Lukas Dhont starts his sophomore feature with a tremendous moment, one that's arresting to look at and to experience. The petals pop; the camera tracks, rushes and flies; the two 13-year-olds are as exuberant and at ease as they're ever likely to be in their lives. They're sprinting because they're happy and playing, and because summer in their village — and on Léo's parents' flower farm — is theirs for the revelling in. They don't and can't realise it because no kid does, but they're also bolting from the bliss that is their visibly contented childhood to the tussles and emotions of being a teenager. Close's title does indeed apply to its two main figures; when it comes to adolescent friendships, they couldn't be tighter. As expressed in revelatory performances by Dambrine and De Waele, each of whom are genuine acting discoveries — Dhont spotted the former on a train from Antwerp to Ghent — these boys have an innocent intimate affinity closer than blood. They're euphoric with and in each other's company, and the feature plays like that's how it has always been between the two. They've also never queried or overthought what their connection means. Before high school commences, Close shows the slumber parties, and the shared hopes and dreams. It sits in on family dinners, demonstrating the ease with which each is a part of the other's broader lives amid both sets of mums and dads; Léo's are Nathalie (Léa Drucker, Custody) and Yves (Marc Weiss, Esprits de famille), Rémi's are Sophie (Émilie Dequenne, An Ordinary Man) and Peter (Kevin Janssens, Two Summers). The film adores their rapport like a summer day adores the breeze, and conveys it meticulously and movingly. Then, when girls in Léo and Rémi's grade ask if the two are a couple, it shows the heartache and heartbreak of a boyhood bond dissolving. Read our full review. ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED With photographer Nan Goldin at its centre, the latest documentary by Citizenfour Oscar-winner Laura Poitras is a film about many things, to deeply stunning and moving effect. In this Oscar-nominated movie's compilation of Goldin's acclaimed snaps, archival footage, current interviews, and past and present activism, a world of stories flicker — all linked to Goldin, but all also linking universally. The artist's bold work, especially chronicling LGBTQIA+ subcultures and the 80s HIV/AIDS crisis, frequently and naturally gets the spotlight. Her complicated family history, which spans heartbreaking loss, haunts the doco as it haunts its subject. The rollercoaster ride that Goldin's life has taken, including in forging her career, supporting her photos, understanding who she is and navigating an array of personal relationships, cascades through, too. And, so do her efforts to counter the opioid epidemic by bringing one of the forces behind it to public justice. Revealing state secrets doesn't sit at the core of the tale here, unlike Citizenfour and Poitras' 2016 film Risk — one about Edward Snowden, the other Julian Assange — but everything leads to the documentary's titular six words: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. They gain meaning in a report spied late about the mental health of Goldin's older sister Barbara, who committed suicide at the age of 18 when Goldin was 11, and who Goldin contends was just an "angry and sexual" young woman in the 60s with repressed parents. A psychiatrist uses the eponymous phrase to describe what Barbara sees and, tellingly, it could be used to do the same with anyone. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is, in part, a rebuke of the idea that a teenager with desires and emotions is a problem, and also a statement that that's who we all are, just to varying levels of societal acceptance. The film is also a testament that, for better and for worse, all the beauty and the bloodshed we all witness and endure is what shapes us. Read our full review. THE BOY AND THE HERON For much of the six years that a new Hayao Miyazaki movie has been on the way, little was known except that the legendary Japanese animator was breaking his retirement after 2013's The Wind Rises. But there was a tentative title: How Do You Live?. While that isn't the name that the film's English-language release sports, both the moniker — which remains in Japan — and the nebulousness otherwise help sum up the gorgeous and staggering The Boy and the Heron. They also apply to the Studio Ghibli's co-founder's filmography overall. When a director and screenwriter escapes into imaginative realms as much as Miyazaki does, thrusting young characters still defining who they are away from everything they know into strange and surreal worlds, they ask how people exist, weather the chaos and trauma that's whisked their way, and bounce between whatever normality they're lucky to cling to and life's relentless uncertainties and heartbreaks. Miyazaki has long pondered how to navigate the fact that so little while we breathe proves a constant, and gets The Boy and the Heron spirited away by the same train of thought while climbing a tower of deeply resonant feelings. How Do You Live? is also a 1937 book by Genzaburo Yoshino, which Miyazaki was given by his mother as a child, and also earns a mention in his 12th feature. The Boy and the Heron isn't an adaptation; rather, it's a musing on that query that's the product of a great artist looking back at his life and achievements, plus his losses. The official blurb uses the term "semi-autobiographical fantasy", an elegant way to describe a movie that feels so authentic, and so tied to its creator, even though he can't have charted his current protagonist's exact path. Parts of the story are drawn from his youth, but it wouldn't likely surprise any Studio Ghibli fan if Miyazaki had magically had his Chihiro, Mei and Satsuki, or Howl moment, somehow living an adventure from Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro or Howl's Moving Castle. What definitely won't astonish anyone is that grappling with conjuring up these rich worlds and processing reality is far from simple, even for someone of Miyazaki's indisputable creative genius. Read our full review. SALTBURN Sharp, savage and skewering, plus twisted in narrative and the incisive use of genre tropes alike: as a filmmaker, Emerald Fennell certainly has a type. With the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman and now Saltburn, the Barbie and The Crown actor-turned-writer/director takes aim, blazes away giddily and blasts apart everything that she can. When she made a blisteringly memorable feature debut behind the lens — giving audiences one of 2021's's best Down Under releases, in fact, and deservingly earning a place among the Academy Awards' rare female Best Director nominees in the process — she honed in on the absolute worst that a patriarchal society affords women. Now, after also pointing out the protection provided to the wealthy in that first effort as a helmer, Fennell has class warfare so firmly in her gaze that Saltburn is named after a sprawling English manor. With both flicks, the end result is daringly unforgettable. This pair of pictures would make a killer double, too, although they enjoy neighbouring estates rather than frolic across the same exact turf. On her leaps from one side of the camera to the other, Fennell also keeps filling her features with such spectacular casts that other filmmakers might hope to fall into her good graces to bask in their glow — a fate that sits at the heart of Saltburn, albeit beyond the movie world. Fresh from nabbing his own Oscar nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin, Barry Keoghan adds yet another beguiling and astonishing performance to a resume that's virtually collecting them (see also: The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Dunkirk, American Animals, The Green Knight and Calm with Horses), proving mesmerisingly slippery as scholarship student Oliver Quick. Usually standing in his sights, Euphoria's Jacob Elordi perfects the part of Felix Catton, aka that effortlessly charismatic friend that everyone wishes they could spend all of their time with. And as Felix's mother Elspeth, father Sir James and "poor dear" family pal Pamela, Rosamund Pike (The Wheel of Time), Richard E Grant (Persuasion) and Carey Mulligan (Fennell's Promising Young Woman star, also an Academy Award nominee for her work) couldn't give more delicious line readings or portraits of the insular but shambolic well-to-do. Read our full review. BARBIE No one plays with a Barbie too hard when the Mattel product is fresh out of the box. As that new doll smell lingers, and the toy's synthetic limbs gleam and locks glisten, so does a child's sense of wonder. The more that the world-famous mass-produced figurine is trotted through DreamHouses, slipped into convertibles and decked out in different outfits, though — then given non-standard makeovers — the more that playing with the plastic fashion model becomes fantastical. Like globally beloved item, like live-action movie bearing its name. Barbie, the film, starts with glowing aesthetic perfection. It's almost instantly a pink-hued paradise for the eyes, and it's also a cleverly funny flick from its 2001: A Space Odyssey-riffing outset. The longer that it continues, however, the harder and wilder that Lady Bird and Little Women director Greta Gerwig goes, as does her Babylon and Amsterdam star lead-slash-producer Margot Robbie as Barbie. In Barbie's Barbie Land, life is utopian. Robbie's Stereotypical Barbie and her fellow dolls (including The Gray Man's Ryan Gosling as Stereotypical Ken) genuinely believe that their rosy beachside suburban excellence is infectious, too. And, they're certain that this female-championing realm — and the Barbies being female champions of all skills, talents and appearances — has changed the real world inhabited by humans. But there's a Weird Barbie living in a misshapen abode. While she isn't Barbie's villain, not for a second, her nonconformist look and attitude says everything about Barbie at its most delightful. Sporting cropped hair, a scribbled-on face and legs akimbo, she's brought to life by Saturday Night Live great Kate McKinnon having a blast, and explained as the outcome of a kid somewhere playing too eagerly. Meet Gerwig's spirit animal; when she lets Weird Barbie's vibe rain down like a shower of glitter, covering everything and everyone in sight both in Barbie Land and in reality, the always-intelligent, amusing and dazzling Barbie is at its brightest and most brilliant. Read our full review, and Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, Issa Rae and America Ferrara chatting about the film. SAINT OMER In 2016, a French documentarian with Senegalese heritage attended the trial of a Senegalese French PhD student who confessed to killing her 15-month-old daughter, who was fathered by a white partner, by leaving her on the beach to the mercy of the waves at Berck-sur-Mer. The filmmaker was fixated. She describes it as an "unspeakable obsession". She was haunted by questions about motherhood, too — her mum's and her own, given that she was a young mother herself as she sat in the courtroom. That story is the story of how Saint Omer came to be, and also almost exactly the tale that the piercing drama tells. In her first narrative film after docos We and La Permanence, writer/director Alice Diop focuses on a French author and literature professor with a Senegalese background who bears witness to a trial with the same details, also of a Senegalese French woman, for the same crime. Saint Omer's protagonist shares other traits with Diop as she observes, too, and watches and listens to research a book. A director riffing on their own experience isn't novel, but Saint Omer is strikingly intimate and authentic because it's the embodiment of empathy in an innately difficult situation. It shows what it means to feel for someone else, including someone who has admitted to a shocking crime, and has been made because Diop went through that far-from-straightforward process and was galvanised to keep grappling with it. What a deeply emotional movie this 2022 Venice International Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-winning feature is, understandably and unsurprisingly. What a heartbreaking and harrowing work it proves as well. Saint Omer is also an astoundingly multilayered excavation of being in a country but never being seen as truly part it, and what that does to someone's sense of self, all through Fabienne Kabou's complicated reality and Laurence Coly's (Guslagie Malanda, My Friend Victoria) fictionalised scenario. Read our full review. WOMEN TALKING Get Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand and more exceptional women in a room, point a camera their way, let the talk flow: Sarah Polley's Women Talking does just that, and this year's Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar-winner is phenomenal. The actor-turned-filmmaker's fourth effort behind the lens after 2006's Away From Her, 2011's Take This Waltz and 2012's Stories We Tell does plenty more, but its basic setup is as straightforward as its title states. Adapted from Miriam Toews' 2018 novel of the same name, this isn't a simple or easy film, however. That book and this feature draw on events in a Bolivian Mennonite colony from 2005–9, where a spate of mass druggings and rapes of women and girls were reported at the hands of some of the group's men. In a patriarchal faith and society, women talking about their experiences is a rebellious, revolutionary act anyway — and talking about what comes next is just as charged. "The elders told us that it was the work of ghosts, or Satan, or that we were lying to get attention, or that it was an act of wild female imagination." That's teenage narrator Autje's (debutant Kate Hallett) explanation for how such assaults could occur and continue, as offered in Women Talking's sombre opening voiceover. Writing and helming, Polley declares her feature "an act of female imagination" as well, as Toews did on the page, but the truth in the movie's words is both lingering and haunting. While the film anchors its dramas in a specific year, 2010, it's purposefully vague on any details that could ground it in one place. Set within a community where modern technology is banned and horse-drawn buggies are the only form of transport, it's a work of fiction inspired by reality, rather than a recreation. Whether you're aware of the true tale behind the book going in or not, this deeply powerful and affecting picture speaks to how women have long been treated in a male-dominated world at large — and what's so often left unsaid, too. Read our full review. ASTEROID CITY In 1954, one of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest thrillers peeked through a rear window. In Wes Anderson's highly stylised, symmetrical and colour-saturated vision of 1955 in Asteroid City, a romance springs almost solely through two fellow holes in the wall. Sitting behind one is actor Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson, Black Widow), who visibly recalls Marilyn Monroe. Peering through the opposing space is newly widowed war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse), who takes more than a few cues from James Dean. The time isn't just 1955 in the filmmaker's latest stellar masterpiece, but September that year, a month that would end with Dean's death in a car crash. Racing through the movie's eponymous setting — an 87-person slice of post-war midwest Americana with a landscape straight out of a western, the genre that was enjoying its golden age at the time — are cops and robbers speeding and careening in their vehicles. Meticulousness layered upon meticulousness has gleamed like the sun across Anderson's repertoire since 1996's Bottle Rocket launched the writer/director's distinctive aesthetic flair; "Anderson-esque" has long become a term. Helming his 11th feature with Asteroid City, he's as fastidious and methodical in his details upon details as ever — more so, given that each successive movie keeps feeling like Anderson at his most Anderson — but all of those 50s pop-culture shoutouts aren't merely film-loving, winking-and-nodding quirks. Within this picture's world, as based on a story conjured up with Roman Coppola (The French Dispatch), Asteroid City isn't actually a picture. "It is an imaginary drama created expressly for the purposes of this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication," a Playhouse 90-style host (Bryan Cranston, Better Call Saul) informs. So, it's a fake play turned into a play for a TV presentation, behind-the-scenes glimpses and all. There Anderson is, being his usual ornate and intricate self, and finding multiple manners to explore art, authenticity, and the emotions found in and processed through works of creativity. Read our full review. LIMBO When Ivan Sen sent a police detective chasing a murdered girl and a missing woman in the Australian outback in 2013's Mystery Road and its 2016 sequel Goldstone, he saw the country's dusty, rust-hued expanse in sun-bleached and eye-scorching colour. In the process, the writer, director, co-producer, cinematographer, editor and composer used his first two Aussie noir films and their immaculately shot sights to call attention to how the nation treats people of colour — historically since its colonial days and still now well over two centuries later. Seven years after the last Jay Swan movie, following a period that's seen that character make the leap to the small screen in three television seasons, Sen is back with a disappearance, a cop, all that inimitable terrain and the crimes against its Indigenous inhabitants that nothing can hide. Amid evident similarities, there's a plethora of differences between the Mystery Road franchise and Limbo; however, one of its simplest is also one of its most glaring and powerful: shooting Australia's ochre-toned landscape in black and white. Limbo's setting: Coober Pedy, the globally famous "opal capital of the world" that's known for its underground dwellings beneath the blazing South Australian earth, but reimagined as the fictional locale that shares the film's name — a place unmistakably sporting an otherworldly topography dotted by dugouts to avoid the baking heat, and that hasn't been able to overcome the murder of a local Indigenous girl two decades earlier. The title is symbolic several times over, including to the visiting Travis Hurley (Simon Baker, Blaze), whose first task upon arrival is checking into his subterranean hotel, rolling up his sleeves and indulging his heroin addiction. Later, he'll be told that he looks more like a drug dealer than a police officer — but, long before then, it's obvious that his line of work and the sorrows he surveys along the way have kept him hovering in a void. While he'll also unburden a few biographical details about mistakes made and regrets held before the film comes to an end, such as while talking to the missing Charlotte Hayes' brother Charlie (Rob Collins, The Drover's Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson) and sister Emma (Natasha Wanganeen, The Survival of Kindness), this tattooed cop with wings inked onto his back is already in limbo before he's literally in Limbo talking. Read our full review, and our interview with Ivan Sen and Simon Baker. Looking for more viewing highlights? We also rounded up another 15 exceptional flicks that hardly anyone saw in cinemas this year — plus the 15 best straight-to-streaming movies, 15 best new TV series of 2023, another 15 excellent new TV shows of 2023 that you might've missed and the 15 best returning shows as well. And, we've kept a running list of must-stream TV from across the year, complete with full reviews. Also, you can check out our regular rundown of film and TV streaming recommendations, which is updated monthly.t you might've missed.
When Colin From Accounts arrived for its first season in 2022 with a nipple flash, a dog and strangers committing to take care of a cute injured animal together after a meet-cute, it also began with a "will they, won't they?" story. Ashley (Harriet Dyer, The Invisible Man) and Gordon (Patrick Brammall, Evil) crossed paths in the street in Sydney when she gave him a random peek, then he was distracted behind the wheel. Thanks to the titular pet, the pair were soon intricately involved in each other's lives — and, as they endeavoured to work out what that actually meant, sift through their feelings for one another and navigate the respective chaos that fills everyone's existence anyway, a delightful small-screen Australian rom-com (and one of that year's best new TV shows) was the end result. In season two, which streams weekly on Binge from Thursday, May 30, the series picks up after the duo gave Colin From Accounts to new owners at the end of the show's debut batch of episodes, then immediately regretted the decision. A couple of things are different from the outset: after moving in together, Gordon and Ashley are on a quest to get their pup back and they'll stop at almost nothing for their family to be reunited; also, this award-winning series is now in "should've they or should've they not?" territory about its central romance. (Moving from an all-at-once release to week-by-week instalments is another change for viewers.) Falling in love is easy. Being in the honeymoon period, whether or not you've tied the knot — Colin From Accounts' protagonists haven't — is clearcut, too. Taking a relationship further means peeling away the rosy and glowing surface, however, which is where the series follows its medical student and Inner West microbrewery owner in its second season. A television romantic-comedy with longevity can't be solely fuelled by fluttering hearts and butterflies in stomachs, especially one that's as dedicated to eschewing saccharine cliches as this. Colin From Accounts isn't afraid to be sweet, but a not-insignificant amount of its charm comes from feeling lived in as Ash and Gordon's romance keeps developing. Same show, but with a few new tricks: that's season two, then. Like relationship, like series: when it comes to diving deeper than the first season, that also fits. There has always been a spark between Colin From Accounts' lead characters, or else it wouldn't have made it to air in the first place, but the program's return digs into the reality that taking the next step for any couple is a dance through love's equivalent of dog mess on an otherwise pristine lawn. No matter how well you plot out a clear path, how flexible and adaptable you are to obstacles, and how determined you are to evade the crap, no one can avoid dirty shoes 100-percent of the time. As season two sees Ash and Gordon confronting the everyday details of intertwining their lives, it also has them tackling a range of relatable questions again. This round inspires plenty, in fact. Is there more than just chemistry between them? How much do shared interests count? Does a lack of commonalities cast a shadow, and their age gap as well? Will their routines knit together easily enough? Can they weather setbacks and roadblocks, unpack historical baggage and make space for a new way forward? How will their respective dating histories colour the first real serious relationship that they've each been in? Also, as they continue getting to know each other better — warts and all, and through secrets and surprises — will they still feel the same way? Ash and Gordon have another query to face at the outset of this new set of chapters: without Colin binding them together, who are they are a twosome? The first new instalment starts with a happy park playdate and all seeming being well, until it's revealed that the dog's former guardians are just pestering his new ones (Bump's Sam Cotton and Home and Away's Sophie Bloom), who'd really like them to go bark up another tree. From there, unexpected news, meeting family members, former flames and more await, all with their own tests. Plus, Ash's best friend Megan (Emma Harvie, In Limbo) and Gordon's counterpart Chiara (Genevieve Hegney, In Our Blood) are using the couple's home as a love nest while embarking upon an affair, while brewery employee Brett (Michael Logo, High Country) is being pushed out of home by his parents. Creators, writers and stars Dyer and Brammall keep performing their parts to perfection; given that they're married IRL and no strangers to working side by side (see: the also-excellent No Activity, which ran for two seasons between 2015–18), the charisma between them isn't hard to maintain. Neither is the naturalism in their portrayals, but they're not just playing themselves. As scribes, Dyer and Brammall are also particularly gifted with dialogue, ensuring that everything that the show's characters are saying always feels authentic. Sometimes the banter is amusing, sometimes it's heartfelt, and it can be acerbic and insightful, too — and all of the above combined — but it never sounds like something that works fine on the page yet no one would ever utter aloud. When it initially bolted out of the gate, Colin From Accounts was a fast homegrown hit, then had audiences overseas swooning as well. A series this genuinely funny, heartfelt and honest, and that manages to be light yet weighty and grounded, was always going to earn affection — and the same remains true in season two. Again, Dyer and Brammall have crafted a gem that bounces by with help from its directors (the returning Trent O'Donnell and Madeleine Dyer do the honours once more in season two, plus Summer Love's Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope), and that plays like hanging out with old friends. And yes, in lead, supporting and guest roles alike, casting is another of its treats — including with new additions such as Celeste Barber (Wellmania), Justin Rosniak (Wolf Like Me) and Aunty Donna's Broden Kelly (Aunty Donna's Coffee Cafe) this time around. Check out the trailer for Colin From Accounts season two below: Colin From Accounts season two streams via Binge from Thursday, May 30, 2024. Images: Lisa Tomasetti / Joel Pratley.
Sydney boy Jack Milas left home for Brooklyn about three years ago, armed with a guitar, a killer falsetto and a head full of tunes. Six months later, his friend and musical collaborator, Oli Chang, followed on his heels. At the time, the two had completed just one song together, the original version of which, according to Milas, "no one will ever hear'". This summer they're returning as High Highs, with a pile of flashy reviews from the likes of NME and The Guardian under one arm and a management deal with Elton John's Rocket Music under the other. Their folksy and lyrical yet grounded combination of honeyed harmonies, subtly arranged synths and dashes of acoustic rock has been garnering quite a following both in New York and online. Apart from a handful of early gigs at the now sadly boarded-up Hopetoun Hotel, High Highs "haven't really played a proper show in Australia". They'll certainly be making up for it this visit, as they drop their debut LP just days before appearances at the Laneway Festival and satellite shows in Sydney and Melbourne. https://youtube.com/watch?v=iiVIB_W-MSw
As someone who spends a lot of time indoors (that's where the internet is), I can understand that leg itch, the twitch, that feeling of needing to go outside, and do something that really makes you feel alive. Some people jump out of planes, or wing suit down huge mountains. Those particular activities might be a bit much for some, but to celebrate the release of Berlin Syndrome, a film that really gets the blood pumping, we've come up with a list of activities to get you fired up without the risk of severe injury or death. [caption id="attachment_616455" align="alignnone" width="1920"] The Cypher Room.[/caption] GET OUT OF AN ESCAPE ROOM The premise of the escape room is simple enough. You're in a room, now escape it. The devil, as always, is in the detail. Escape room themes can be anything from an asylum to a gaol cell or a haunted house — anywhere that's going to get your brain imagining every possible outcome. And you're going to need your brain, if you ever want to get out of the room (jokes, of course you can leave whenever you want, if you're chicken). You and your team solve the clues, and break yourselves out. There are heaps of rooms around Sydney, like The Cipher Room in Newtown, Shutdown or Escapism by Strike, or the Paniq Room. [caption id="attachment_616456" align="alignnone" width="1920"] SkyZone's Sky Climb.[/caption] TACKLE A TEETERINGLY HIGH WALL While there are many who would argue that the point of climbing to the top of a cliff that you're just going to abseil down is a little counter productive, these arguments would tend to come from those who've never done it before. Rock climbing gets you going for a number of reasons — the fear of falling, the drive to push yourself to the top, and that feeling of the only other alternative, halfway up, is a leap of faith. Which we all know is a terrible idea. High and Wild are just one local group that have some great day trip deals out of Katoomba, with combinations of climbing up and rappelling down. Closer to home and with a roof overhead, try Nomad in Annandale for some casual indoor bouldering, or head to SkyZone's batshit insane climbing wall. SEE A MODERN THRILLER IN A DARK CINEMA Based on a novel of the same name, the film follows Australian photojournalist Clare (played by Teresa Palmer) as she embarks on her first solo trip to Berlin. While travelling, she meets and begins a passionate romance with charismatic local man Andi. Their relationship soon takes an unexpected and sinister turn—she wakes one morning to discover that Andi has left for work and locked her inside his apartment, with no intention of ever letting her leave. Filmed on location in Berlin and Melbourne, the film is a thoughtful, psychological thriller written and directed by Australian Cate Shortland (who also directed the critically acclaimed Somersault). It examines tough topics such as emotional manipulation, gaslighting and Stockholm syndrome in a provocative fashion, leaving the audience with a new outlook on the relationship that can occur between captor and captive. Berlin Syndrome opens in Sydney cinemas on April 20. GO WHITE WATER RAFTING WITHIN THE CITY There aren't many more things that'll get your heart rate up faster than careening down a choppy river at blistering speed in a boat that's made out of the same material as a raincoat. But don't worry, you get a helmet. While it might not be an activity for the faint of heart, white water rafting is a real thrill, kind of like canoeing but with an insane sugar rush. It's all about working in teams to overcome the problem which, in this case, is water that is trying to kill you (nah, you'll be safe, don't worry). Head over to Penrith Whitewater for a real rush of blood to the head. GO CANYONING WITHIN A RELATIVELY QUICK DRIVE OF THE CBD There are many ways to the bottom of a canyon, but the fastest is by abseiling down with the assistance of some well placed ropes and a few sturdy carabiners. The real rush comes at the exact moment you step out, backwards over the precipice, and all over a sudden gravity has never been more apparent. Leaning back, you take that first step off the rock face and, boom, that's living. As usual, RedBalloon has you covered for some excellent experiences in the Blue Mountains. Top image: SkyZone's Sky Climb. Berlin Syndrome will be released in cinemas nationally on April 20 — watch the trailer here.
Turning real-life post-September 11 events into a moving and heartwarming musical mightn't seem like an easy feat, but it looks that way when you're watching Come From Away. Dramatising an exceptional story, the production has made that very task an enormous success on Broadway and London's West End, and won Tony and Olivier awards for its efforts. It's also proven a hit already around Australia. Now, audiences in Melbourne and Sydney are set to get another chance to dive into this kind-hearted story — for the third time in the Victorian capital, and the second in New South Wales. As part of its ongoing tour of Australia, Come From Away is heading back to both cities before the year is out. If you aren't familiar with the musical's plot or the actual events that inspired it, it really does tell quite the astonishing tale. In the week after the September 11 attacks in 2001, 38 planes were unexpectedly ordered to land in the small Canadian town of Gander, in the province of Newfoundland. Part of Operation Yellow Ribbon — which diverted civilian air traffic to Canada en masse following the attacks — the move saw around 7000 air travellers grounded in the tiny spot, almost doubling its population. Usually, the town is home to just under 12,000 residents. To create Come From Away, writers and composers Irene Sankoff and David Hein spent hundreds of hours interviewing thousands of locals and passengers, using their experiences to drive the narrative — and, in many cases, using their real names in the show as well. The result is a musical not just about people coming from away (the term that Newfoundlanders use to refer to folks not born on the island), but coming together, all at a time when tensions were running high worldwide. Since being workshopped in 2012, having a run in Ontario in 2013, then officially premiering in San Diego in 2015, Come From Away has become a global smash hit. After opening on Broadway in 2017, it was still running before the theatre district closed due to COVID-19. The musical wowed crowds in the West End, too — and, when it first opened in Melbourne in July 2019, it became the Comedy Theatre's most successful musical in the venue's nine-decade history. Along the way, the show has picked up a Tony Award for best direction of a musical, six other nominations, and four Olivier Awards out of nine nominations. The local production features an impressive cast, spanning Kyle Brown, Zoe Gertz, Manon Gunderson-Briggs, Douglas Hansell, Kat Harrison, Joe Kosky, Phillip Lowe, Joseph Naim, Sarah Nairne, Natalie O'Donnell, Emma Powell and David Silvestri — as well as Kaya Byrne, Jeremy Carver-James, Noni McCallum, Michael Lee Porter, Alana Tranter and Jasmine Vaughns Come From Away also already has a Gold Coast season locked in for July. COME FROM AWAY 2022 AUSTRALIAN TOUR Gold Coast: Thursday, July 7—Sunday, July 31 at HOTA, Home of the Arts — with tickets on-sale now. Melbourne: From August 27, Comedy Theatre — with tickets on-sale from June 6. Sydney: From November 5, Theatre Royal — with tickets on-sale from June 14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zmvy1p2FOE&feature=emb_title Come From Away continues to tour Australia throughout 2022. For further information — or to buy tickets — visit the musical's website. Images: Jeff Busby.
