Podcast appearances and mentions of christian tsoutsouvas

Presented annually by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Archibald Prize is Australia’s highest honour for portraiture. One of this year’s finalists is Bridgette McNab, whose entry is an oil painting of fashion designer Karla Špetić (pictured). In this segment, Bridgette chats with Liam, Monisha and Christian about her upbringing in regional Australia, how she came to pursue a career in art and why she chose Karla as her subject. Bridgette’s portrait of Karla, and many other Archibald entries, are currently on display at the TarraWarra Museum of Art in Healesville. For more information, head to the official TarraWarra website. Segment originally aired Wednesday, September 25th. Produced and edited by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

In preparation for the Australian Burlesque Festival, performer Camilla Cream came by the Art Smitten studios to discuss the history of the artform, and more, with co-hosts Liam, Monisha and Christian. The Australian Burlesque Festival is touring nationally until October 20th. More information can be found via the official website. Segment originally aired Wednesday, September 25th. Produced and edited by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

Aspiring curator Vidya Sai Rajan speaks with Christian and Monisha about what it's like to work with artist/diva/visionary Marina Abramolizardvic. A gala is being held in Marina's honour this Thursday as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. For more information, head to the official Fringe website. Segment originally aired Wednesday, September 18th. Produced by Christian Tsoutsouvas; edited by Tom Parry. Image courtesy of the artist.

Christian, Tom, and work experience student Angelica speak with comedian Aran Thingsatrandom about his Melbourne Fringe show The Aussie Ethnic Identity Crisis, which examines the juxtaposition between his Sri Lankan heritage and Australian upbringing. For more information about Aran's show and tickets, head to the official Fringe website. You can also follow the play on Facebook.   Segment originally aired Wednesday, September 4th. Produced by Christian Tsoutsouvas; edited by Tom Parry.  

Christian and Tom chat with writer and actress Katie O'Connor about her Melbourne Fringe Festival show The Subtle Art of Online Dating, why she decided to perform with her friends, and the potential future plans for her creation. The Subtle Art of Online Dating is being performed at the Butterfly Club until Sunday, September 15th. Segment originally aired Wednesday, September 4th. Produced by Christian Tsoutsouvas; edited by Tom Parry.

Photographer and documentarian Louise Lever is preparing to release her debut film Revolt She Said, a portrait of feminism through the ages. In this segment with co-hosts Liam, Christian and Tom, she discusses her two-year journey researching and making the documentary, where the modern feminist movement currently sits, and how she secured the participation of former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark. The world premiere of Revolt She Said is happening Wednesday, October 9th at Cinema Nova, Carlton. Tickets to the event are available via Eventbrite. You can also find out more about Louise via her official website. Segment originally aired Wednesday, August 21st. Produced by Tom Parry; edited by Christian Tsoutsouvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

As the Special Projects Coordinator with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Karl Knapp is responsible for bringing many events to the stage, including the MSO's ongoing Films In Concert series. Karl spoke with Art Smitten co-hosts Monisha, Christian and Tom about his work and some of the upcoming Concert performances, including Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Skyfall, and the film soundtracks of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. For more information about the MSO and its future events, head to the official website. Segment originally aired Wednesday, July 31st. Produced and edited by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

FROM THE ARCHIVES! Tom and Dana chat with Sim Luttin and Paul Hodges about their art exhibition We Can Be Heroes. Segment originally aired Wednesday, March 14th, 2018. Produced by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

FROM THE ARCHIVES! In this segment, Viv, Tom and Chirstian speak to Sophie Smyth and Ryan Smedley on their Melbourne International Comedy Festival show The Aspie Hour, which recently won a Green Room Award. Originally aired 2018 Sunday, March 4th, 2018. Segment produced by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

Sandra Thibodeaux’s The Age of Bones is an ambitious, playfully political Indonesian-Australian coproduction now being hosted by La Mama in Carlton.  For a play that extols (and some might say preaches) the virtues of working together across national and natural borders, it’s very pleasing to see how the production itself has exemplified this cultural harmony at every stage of its development. It also comes to Melbourne as part of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts festival, which, for some of the younger audiences of La Mama, might be delivering them their first taste of surtitled theatre, except for maybe opera. This will certainly be a very gentle introduction for them. About half of Thibodeaux’s dialogue is performed in Indonesian, while the other half is performed, unsurprisingly, in English. It also makes magnificent use of puppetry and projections as a backdrop to this story of a 15-year-old boy, Ikan (Imam Setia Hagi) who is lost at sea. Lost because that is the last place that his mother, Ibu (Imas Sobariah) and his father, Bapak (Budi Laksana) knew that he was going. Ibu doesn’t know if he is lying dead at the bottom of the ocean, or in the belly of a whale, like Jonah. Fortunately, he’s very much alive, and hasn’t been swallowed by a literal whale, although a “metaphorical whale” is a different story. Like so many Indonesian boys of his age, Ikan went to work on a fishing boat carrying refugees headed for Australia. In his community there is simply no other way to feed his family, although they hardly knew he would be risking incarceration. Ikan’s story is told as a fantastical, deep-sea satire, with the whale apparently representing an oppressive bureaucratic system, while a host of other underwater characters have much clearer allegorical allusions. Even though a lot of the conflict takes place in the depths in the ocean, the political symbolism is very much on the surface, intentionally and endearingly obvious. It is narrated, in English, by two of its most comedic characters, the Old Man (Deri Efwanto) and his young friend, Dalang the puppeteer (Mohammad Gandi Maulana). Dalang delights in spicing up the story with dramatic Indonesian shadow puppetry (walang), which Maulana is certainly very skilled at. Meanwhile, the Old Man, who does most of the talking, is a very charming anchor to this wild tale, even if some audience members might struggle to understand his accent. The pair of them watch and commentate as Ikan is picked up by a pair of “divers,” who are about as helpful (or unhelpful rather) as the ones in Finding Nemo. They imprison him at the bottom of the ocean for two long years. He shares a cell with a hammerhead shark (Kadek Hobman) a hilarious Aussie bloke stereotype, who has great comic chemistry with Ikan. A much less effective stereotype is the white saviour, Ikan’s lawyer (Ella Watson-Russell) who succeeds in getting him released, but not without sounding incredibly self-righteous. Given she appears as a white pointer shark, directors Alex Galeazzi and Iswadi Pratama were probably aware of the cliché, but don’t really do anything subversive or entertaining with her. The Age of Bones’ beautiful sailing ship set design by Dann Barber, dazzling oceanic projections and impressive puppetry are so entrancing that whenever the dialogue and performances are less than spectacular, it’s very easy to get distracted from the actual plot. Fortunately though, this is a genuinely moving story, told in a way that, despite its faults, still pointedly reveals just a few of the many things we need to reconsider about how we do things in Australia.   Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

There always seems to be something unsatisfying about these personal depictions of major historical events. Human dramas with a historical "backdrop" work well enough, but if the huge scale history is in the foreground it can really upset the balance. Jackie, the first English Language film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination from the point of view of his wife, Jacqueline Lee Kennedy. Mostly it's a psychological portrait of a grieving, widowed mother of two small children who has some very difficult decisions to make. There are countless movie protagonists who've been put in this same predicament, but of course she also just so happens to be the First Lady of the United States, and her husband just so happened to be the President. Because of their positions, any gossip about their private lives is thought of as political fodder and is of great interest to the public. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay works across three separate but very close points in time: the few days after his death, flashbacks from the last few weeks of his life and a press interview conducted in Jackie's new home, after she has left the White House. The journalist (Billy Crudup) says that after seeing how poised she was during her television tour of the White House, he thought she could have a career on the small screen. She's quite offended by this idea, but she does know how the media works. She knows she is going to be asked for a piece by piece, moment by moment account of how it all happened and how she has been coping. She also knows that if she gives them nothing, they'll just interpret her silence however they want (most likely cruelly), so she makes sure to tell him what he can and can't print from the whole exchange. She doesn't want him to publish anything misleading, even if it’s what she actually said. She has no qualms about being slightly dishonest with the world in order to show them her truest self. In many ways, Larraín and Oppenheim are being driven by the same curiosity as the journalist. This film is an intensely personal account of everything she felt, thought and dealt with over that terrible week, with occasional glimpses at what the rest of the world was going through too. Such a narrow focus in a historical film is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you only have 100 minutes it's best not to bite off more than you can chew, but it can also feel like a frustrating waste of all that meaty material from what’s happening around her. In Jackie, people sometimes talk about Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles de Gaulle, Vietnam and the like, but most of what you see and remember are close ups of the First Lady as she is steadily imploding. The character of Jackie, as the title would suggest, basically is the film. Playing her would have been a tall order for any actor that Larraín might have cast. If she'd been someone with a weak screen presence, this would’ve been a trainwreck. Luckily for him, he cast Natalie Portman. 6 years after Black Swan, Portman looks set to take home another Best Actress Oscar for playing a hard-working woman who is slowly falling apart before the audience's eyes (although, unlike Nina, Jackie does manage to put herself back together again). Once again, she fully embodies every bit of pain, pressure, confusion and terror her character is feeling. For much of the film, cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine looks like he's capturing a live theatre performance, and is content to let her powerhouse acting carry the film. Meanwhile, Mica Levi’s musical score is overly theatrical, and seems determined to be the star of the film instead of her. There's no doubt that as a Natalie Portman showcase, Jackie effortlessly succeeds, but her character does feel at odds with the rest of the film's world. The most intimate scenes with the First Lady have quite a polished and digital feel to them, while all the major "events" in the film (the assassination, the funeral, Oswald's arrest) have more of a grainy period quality, which lends them a lot of credibility. While with Mrs Kennedy you certainly feel like you're watching a high-profile actress take on the part, whenever the brilliantly cast Caspar Phillipson is onscreen, you just feel like you're looking at the real JFK: that’s how much of a likeness he is. It might have been more effective to film the whole movie in that celluloid style, but as it is, Jackie is a very engaging 21st Century look at one of the most earth-shattering tragedies of the 1960s. I suppose a fair bit of Jacqueline Kennedy's personal journey is emblematic of the global aftermath of her husband's death, and how people wanted him to be remembered. Interestingly, a later exchange with her local priest (John Hurt) is pretty much reflective of Jackie’s gradual success as a film, and not just as a Natalie Portman fan piece. Initially, both the priest and the film are saying what they need to say to justify their presence here – nothing more, nothing less – but eventually they both admit to their own limitations and give honest answers about where they think we should go all from here.   Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

After the melancholy vampire story that was Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch has delivered an equally meditative human drama with Paterson. It’s a film that shows a week in the life of a lovely artistic couple living in Paterson, New Jersey. Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) is an avid painter, designer and cupcake maker, with a distinctive monochromatic colour scheme in everything she makes, and wears, though ironically she is a very colourful character. Her husband, Paterson (Adam Driver), is a gentle poet who drives a bus for a living, and uses all of his break time to write a few lines in his "secret notebook". While Laura sells her wares at the local farmers’ market, where they're very popular, Paterson won't share his work with anyone other than her. For ages, she's been telling them he should get his poems published, or at the very least make copies of them. Eventually he promises to photocopy them all on the weekend, on one of those last two days that the film shows. This is hardly a movie that runs on suspense, mostly it's an episodic musing on the little things in life, but there are still a few little narrative arcs that are given a nice payoff. One of these is the question of whether he'll keep that promise in time. Unlike Laura, who shares a piece of her creativity everywhere she goes, Paterson is just happy to watch the world go by. Laura is the one with all the latest gadgets, while Paterson doesn't even have a mobile phone. He's content to just let it all come and go, just like his poems, and his passengers of course. As you’d expect, he hears all sorts of things when he’s eavesdropping at the wheel. People have some very amusing conversations when it looks like no one is listening. There’s plenty of shots of him smirking at them while looking at the road, but these snippets never really make their way into his poems. That would have been too predictable, and far too neat. He mostly writes about what he sees at home, or at the park where he eats his lunch every day. Adam Driver’s voiceover readings of these poems are pleasingly unpolished. Paterson doesn’t sound like he’s reciting them for an audience, he really does sound like he’s writing the words as they come to him. Jarmusch only overstretches believability when it comes to the couple’s dog, Marvin. He’s certainly adorable, but Jarmusch can’t seem to decide if he wants him to be an anthropomorphised animal character, like Gromit, or a projection of whatever the human characters are going through. It might have been more effective to just let him be a dog, another part of Paterson’s world that he can silently take in. Paterson is very much a quiet observer who’s surrounded by some very vocal characters. His boss, Donny (Rizwan Manji) is one of those people who likes to answer with complete honesty when someone asks him how he is. Paterson’s favourite bar is also frequented by an actor named Everett (William Jackson Harper) and his ex-girlfriend, Marie, (Chasten Harmon) who Everett can’t seem to let go of and to whom he won’t stop making melodramatic professions of his undying love. While these figures encourage Paterson to come out of his shell a little and make his mark on the world, they’re never called upon to transform him. Jarmusch isn’t interested in showing how an introvert can turn into an extrovert. Instead, he shows how it’s possible for someone so quiet to navigate a world where it’s survival of the loudest and still remain true to themself.   Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

The Founder is screenwriter Robert D. Siegel’s scathing portrait of Roy Kroc, the eponymous creator of the McDonald’s Corporation, not to be confused with the McDonald brothers who created, well, McDonald’s. If that sounds as all suss it’s probably because it was. Kroc, as written by Siegel, and played by Michael Keaton, is a shameless anti-hero, an opportunistic businessman who listens more to his motivational tapes than he does to his own conscience, if indeed he has one. The film follows his great ascent (or descent, depending on how you look at it) from a not-so-humble milkshake-mixer merchant to the owner of a giant plagiarised franchise. He’s that kind of smarmy fourth-wall-breaking capitalist who is usually the smartest person in the room. However, Siegel, and director John Lee Hancock, both suggest he might simply be the most “persistent” person working in the food industry, since one of his favourite tapes tells him that neither genius nor talent can ever be a substitute for persistence. In his mind, persisting seems to mean sacrificing your integrity and your personal relationships for money. This is exactly why Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), an honest pair of farmers, chose to abandon their first ill-fated attempt at franchising the business. When Kroc first suggests that they give it another go, they tell him they’d rather run one quality restaurant than fifty mediocre ones, especially since that first one in San Bernardino took them decades to build. While the brothers see their popular “Speedee Service System” as a wholesome masterwork of efficiency, Kroc sees it as a cash cow to be fattened, reproduced and milked for all its worth. Still, Mac thinks that Kroc can do a much better job of the expansion than they did, and Dick thinks that with the right contract he can safely keep Kroc on a leash. Even for those who don’t already know the story, there’s never any doubt how horribly this will end for the brothers. After all, Dick and Mac will always be looking out for each other and their legacy on top of the financial state of the business, while Kroc ticks all the boxes for a character who’s only looking out for himself and his bank account. The most obvious of these, for an ambitious middle-aged man, is the routine long-suffering wife, played here by Laura Dern. A memorable quote from her character in Wild (2014) pretty well sums up much of her recent career: “I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life.” Especially in films like 99 Homes (from the same year) Dern has often played women who’ve had the men in their life make choices for them. Despite her being an incredibly supportive partner, The Founder shows Roy going behind her back to cancel their club memberships, disown their friendship group, mortgage their house, and ensure that she gets no part of McDonald’s Incorporated when he finally divorces her. Her submissiveness throughout most of this makes her one of the least interesting of these characters that Dern has played in recent years, but she makes it work well enough. Still, she’s definitely not as engaging as Kroc’s second wife, Joan (Linda Cardellini), who Kroc courts when she’s still married to one of his new buyers. Once he’s stolen her away, and bought off the McDonald brothers as cheaply as he could, he quite literally has everything he’s ever wanted. By this point, every single character goal that Siegel sets up for him has been achieved (Given that this a true story, I don’t think this counts as a spoiler). For some reason, the last shot is of his big new bedroom mirror, which he looks into tearfully before going outside with Joan. I never took this character to be the crying type, but I hope they were tears of some twisted joy. If that was meant to be some sudden moment of feeling empty, remorseful or self-reflective, it was far too late to bring that in. The Founder might be a true story, but it’s hardly a human story. It’s actually quite cerebral and subversive in the way it questions the myth of the American dream. It’s essentially a cautionary tale against large scale enterprise, especially when Kroc starts comparing those big yellow McDonald’s arches to the Christian cross, and by extension suggesting that capitalism is America’s new religion, with franchise outlets as the new churches. This link is drawn even more strongly given that last year Keaton starred in Spotlight, the rather forgettable Best Picture winner about the corruption inside the Catholic Church. In its own way, The Founder is an even more chilling and timely reminder of what you can get away with once you have enough money and real estate to bury your crimes under.   Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Hosts Ben and Andrew are joined in the studio by playwright and actor, Nakkiah Lui, the playwright behind Malthouse Theatre's production of Blaque Showgirls. Loosely based off the movie, Showgirls (1995), the story is set in Brisvegas, where a young Ginny Jones seeks to join the Blaque Showgirls. Christian Tsoutsouvas' review can be found here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Blaque Showgirls is a merciless interrogation of Australian racism in the form of a stage parody of dance movies, including, of course, Showgirls (1995). Written by Nakkiah Lui, the acclaimed Aboriginal activist and playwright who recently worked on the ABC’s Black Comedy, it’s a play that mocks and borrows from film and tv in equal measure. Eugyeene Teh’s set design even resembles a television set as well as a theatre within a theatre, something that director Sarah Giles takes full advantage of. Voiceover abounds instead of theatrical asides. Jed Palmer’s musical score provides the cheese while the cast brings the delicious ham. Humorous captions race above the actors’ heads, and are easy to miss unless you’re paying close attention. Naturally, it ticks of all the obligatory dance movie scenes, albeit with more than a slight twist: a “montage of moderate success”; the arrival-in-the-big-city scene; the audition poster that blows into our protagonist’s face at just the right moment (here the wind is a stagehand carrying a pole); the jealous antagonist dancer throwing a tantrum at her dressing room mirror just before she hatches her third-act scheme. Lui’s story follows the blundering young Ginny Jones (Bessie Holland) an orphan from the town of Chitole (pronounced shi-toll). She dreams of moving to Brisvegas and joining the Blaque Showgirls. She might not be black, but she refuses to let that stop her, no matter how much people mock her for it. Apparently her mother was the best Aboriginal dancer in the country. She is adamant that she can remember looking up at her brown face when she was a baby, just before she was accidentally killed during smoking ceremony that apparently gave Ginny brain damage. In any case, the local Indigenous community are happy to see her go. One elder in particular, her would-be mentor figure (Elaine Crombie) is fed up with her thoughtless lack of cultural sensitivity and is happy to let Brisvegas knock some sense into her. It doesn’t. The moment she steps in to audition, she is brushed aside by the indomitable star of the show, Chandon Connors (Crombie again) and her arrogant but airheaded manager, cheekily named Kyle MacLachlan (Guy Simon). This is when the sprightly Molly (Emi Canavan) comes to her aid. She is the Japanese hostess of a club called the Kum Den, and, just like the Blaque Showgirls, she has had to make a living off selling her culture to white people, most of whom assume she’s Chinese and refuse to be corrected on it. She offers to help Ginny if she will later help her. All Ginny needs now are some culturally appropriative dreadlocks and an Aboriginal dance teacher. She finds one named True Love Interest (Simon again!) with crudely painted-on abs. Of course, all of their scenes together are built from the worst “dramatic” dialogue ever written for the screen. This part of the satire is probably the most fun to laugh at, since it makes everyone in the audience feel smart and sophisticated. Ginny is just generally good for a laugh right from the beginning, although, for the white members of the audience, the amusement turns to more of a self-reflective cringe once you realise who she really is. She’s not just clueless, she really is selfish and wilfully ignorant. As much as she might seem like one, she’s hardly an underdog, given that all the real power over the Blaque Showgirls is held by the unseen, ghostly white board of directors. Surprisingly, even True Love Interest has more substance than she does, and unsurprisingly, the formidable Chandon turns out to be much more than just a self-obsessed diva. As the most powerful Aboriginal woman in Brisvegas, poised to rise up through the ranks of the company just before Ginny showed up, she is actually the closest thing we have to a hero here. However, in writing this sly revelation of our racism past and present, there is one trap that Lui very nearly falls into: she does make more than a few jokes at the expense of Ginny’s supposed brain damage and speech difficulties, enough for the audience to start linking it to her social ignorance. Of course, fighting racism with ableism basically defeats the purpose, though fortunately she doesn’t dwell on it too much. Also, towards the end of the play there is a priceless gag attacking wheelchair inaccessibility that is rather redeeming. The lasting feel left by Blaque Showgirls is one of utter frustration with the way things have been, still are and probably will continue to be for a while. It’s a hard-bitten, feel-good and then feel-bad comedy that tricks you into caring. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hacksaw Ridge is quickly turning into the must-see film of the year: the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a pacifist army medic who saved the lives of 75 World War II soldiers without ever holding a weapon. It's that powerful combination of a visceral war film, a compelling social justice story and a very poignant biopic that always gets people talking. Audiences all seem to be appreciating a journey into the hellfire of war that leaves them with more than just a feeling of pointlessness. Critics all seem to be praising the juggling act of depicting such huge scale events on such a personal level. As always, I’m sure the Academy will be very generous with a film telling such an important historical true story. Meanwhile, everyone looks thrilled to see director Mel Gibson bringing himself back into the Hollywood good books. Screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight chronicle the personal life, early rejection, spectacular heroics and later veneration of the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honour. As a Seventh Day Adventist, he refuses to ever physically harm a fellow human being, takes the seventh commandment - “Thou shalt not kill" - in its most literal sense, and recognises Saturday as the Sabbath. Throughout his military training, his superiors and fellow soldiers find all of this supremely irritating. They think he's just trying to get an extra day off, that he's doing all this for attention, that he's a coward who’s too scared to fight but too ashamed to stay at home, or that maybe he’s just insane. Sergeant Howell (a surprisingly credible Vince Vaughn) tries both the stick and the carrot, neither of which can persuade him to leave. Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) tries to convince him that the better translation is "Thou shalt not commit murder," which apparently doesn't apply in a time of war, although of course once you start making exceptions it’s hard to know where to stop. That said, Doss has no political sympathies with Japan. Just like his beloved brother, Hal (Nathaniel Buzolic), Desmond is determined to protect his country on the battlefield, even though their jobs in the shipyard would have made both of them eligible for deferment. As Desmond sees it, the only difference between him and his brother, or any of the other soldiers, is that he wants to serve his country by saving lives instead of taking them. In his words: “With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don't seem like such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together.” This is the climax of the speech he eventually has to give in front of a court martial, which is, in the film at least, the tipping point of his stalemate with the military. While they are moved enough to reconsider sending him to prison, they are still far from truly understanding his views. Needless to say, the day after the Battle of Okinawa, after he spends the entire night trawling through enemy territory rescuing mutilated soldiers, they all come to respect him, and his beliefs. As Glover puts it, the soldiers might not all believe the way he does, but they believe in how much he believes. Similar to Chris Kyle, whose life was chronicled in Clint Eastwod’s American Sniper (2015), Desmond quickly becomes the stuff of legend, someone who makes the men feel as safe as you can when you're heading into battle with the ruthless Japanese forces. Unsurprisingly, given that this is an American depiction of the war, the Japanese soldiers are largely demonised. After being talked about throughout the first half of the film, and having their handiwork shown by truckloads of bleeding corpses, they make their first appearance in a long, gruelling battle scene, one that perfectly balances chaos and suspense. They are essentially portrayed as scary goons to be blown down. Most of their dialogue isn’t even subtitled. There's really only one character among them, the commander who would rather die than surrender, though he appears far too late to really humanise the enemy side. Every atrocity they committed is foregrounded, so as to prevent the morality of the war effort itself being called into question. Meanwhile, over in the American camp, an array of the usual colourful characters are introduced from the beginning, though fortunately none of the cliches actually end up playing out. They all feel like real people, probably because most of them actually were, but even the invented or composite characters avoid becoming stock soldier stereotypes. Still, apparently it was too much to show any of the misdeeds they would have been party to on the American side of the battle. Even though the action scenes excel at capturing the scale of the conflict, they end up missing quite a lot of the complexity. However, Hacksaw Ridge was never meant to be a docudrama about the Second World War. Above all else, this is Desmond’s story, and thankfully the complexities of his religious, ethical and personal beliefs are explored much more fully than the intricacies of the war. The film introduces a harrowing childhood incident where, as he and Hal are fighting, Desmond picks up a brick and strikes his brother over the head with it, almost killing him. It also depicts their father, Tom (Hugo Weaving) as a raging alcoholic, who Desmond comes very close to shooting in the head when he attacks his mother, Bertha (Rachel Griffiths). This might be a fictionalised and exaggerated version of his early life, but it does retain the essence of the part his upbringing played in shaping his values, and later his choices. For instance, he first meets his future wife, a nurse named Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) on the day that he rescues an injured stranger from a fallen cart, drives him to the hospital and makes one of his many blood donations while he's there. Once he eventually gets to the battlefield, it looks as though this one poignant little story might be swallowed up by the historical monstrosity that is World War II, but it isn't. The battle on Hacksaw Ridge was certainly great and terrible, but to those who knew him, Desmond Doss was even greater. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

Hacksaw Ridge is quickly turning into the must-see film of the year: the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a pacifist army medic who saved the lives of 75 World War II soldiers without ever holding a weapon. It's that powerful combination of a visceral war film, a compelling social justice story and a very poignant biopic that always gets people talking. Audiences all seem to be appreciating a journey into the hellfire of war that leaves them with more than just a feeling of pointlessness. Critics all seem to be praising the juggling act of depicting such huge scale events on such a personal level. As always, I’m sure the Academy will be very generous with a film telling such an important historical true story. Meanwhile, everyone looks thrilled to see director Mel Gibson bringing himself back into the Hollywood good books. Screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight chronicle the personal life, early rejection, spectacular heroics and later veneration of the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honour. As a Seventh Day Adventist, he refuses to ever physically harm a fellow human being, takes the seventh commandment - “Thou shalt not kill" - in its most literal sense, and recognises Saturday as the Sabbath. Throughout his military training, his superiors and fellow soldiers find all of this supremely irritating. They think he's just trying to get an extra day off, that he's doing all this for attention, that he's a coward who’s too scared to fight but too ashamed to stay at home, or that maybe he’s just insane. Sergeant Howell (a surprisingly credible Vince Vaughn) tries both the stick and the carrot, neither of which can persuade him to leave. Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) tries to convince him that the better translation is "Thou shalt not commit murder," which apparently doesn't apply in a time of war, although of course once you start making exceptions it’s hard to know where to stop. That said, Doss has no political sympathies with Japan. Just like his beloved brother, Hal (Nathaniel Buzolic), Desmond is determined to protect his country on the battlefield, even though their jobs in the shipyard would have made both of them eligible for deferment. As Desmond sees it, the only difference between him and his brother, or any of the other soldiers, is that he wants to serve his country by saving lives instead of taking them. In his words: “With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don't seem like such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together.” This is the climax of the speech he eventually has to give in front of a court martial, which is, in the film at least, the tipping point of his stalemate with the military. While they are moved enough to reconsider sending him to prison, they are still far from truly understanding his views. Needless to say, the day after the Battle of Okinawa, after he spends the entire night trawling through enemy territory rescuing mutilated soldiers, they all come to respect him, and his beliefs. As Glover puts it, the soldiers might not all believe the way he does, but they believe in how much he believes. Similar to Chris Kyle, whose life was chronicled in Clint Eastwod’s American Sniper (2015), Desmond quickly becomes the stuff of legend, someone who makes the men feel as safe as you can when you're heading into battle with the ruthless Japanese forces. Unsurprisingly, given that this is an American depiction of the war, the Japanese soldiers are largely demonised. After being talked about throughout the first half of the film, and having their handiwork shown by truckloads of bleeding corpses, they make their first appearance in a long, gruelling battle scene, one that perfectly balances chaos and suspense. They are essentially portrayed as scary goons to be blown down. Most of their dialogue isn’t even subtitled. There's really only one character among them, the commander who would rather die than surrender, though he appears far too late to really humanise the enemy side. Every atrocity they committed is foregrounded, so as to prevent the morality of the war effort itself being called into question. Meanwhile, over in the American camp, an array of the usual colourful characters are introduced from the beginning, though fortunately none of the cliches actually end up playing out. They all feel like real people, probably because most of them actually were, but even the invented or composite characters avoid becoming stock soldier stereotypes. Still, apparently it was too much to show any of the misdeeds they would have been party to on the American side of the battle. Even though the action scenes excel at capturing the scale of the conflict, they end up missing quite a lot of the complexity. However, Hacksaw Ridge was never meant to be a docudrama about the Second World War. Above all else, this is Desmond’s story, and thankfully the complexities of his religious, ethical and personal beliefs are explored much more fully than the intricacies of the war. The film introduces a harrowing childhood incident where, as he and Hal are fighting, Desmond picks up a brick and strikes his brother over the head with it, almost killing him. It also depicts their father, Tom (Hugo Weaving) as a raging alcoholic, who Desmond comes very close to shooting in the head when he attacks his mother, Bertha (Rachel Griffiths). This might be a fictionalised and exaggerated version of his early life, but it does retain the essence of the part his upbringing played in shaping his values, and later his choices. For instance, he first meets his future wife, a nurse named Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) on the day that he rescues an injured stranger from a fallen cart, drives him to the hospital and makes one of his many blood donations while he's there. Once he eventually gets to the battlefield, it looks as though this one poignant little story might be swallowed up by the historical monstrosity that is World War II, but it isn't. The battle on Hacksaw Ridge was certainly great and terrible, but to those who knew him, Desmond Doss was even greater. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As fantastic as it is to see Arrival gaining so much traction, I do hope that Amy Adams’ other big release, Nocturnal Animals, still gets enough attention. Tom Ford’s second feature, after A Single Man (2009), sees Adams playing an equally sleep deprived but much less scholarly professional at the peak of her career. Susan Morrow is the jaded owner of a glitzy contemporary art gallery, a realist in a world that is anything but reality.  She first entered the creative world when she wanted to a bohemian herself, back when she was engaged to Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal). Edward was just the kind of carefree romantic that her mother, Anne (Laura Linney), had always hated, and Susan has always hated her mother. She only has one scene, naturally the one where Susan announces her engagement, but that’s all we really need of her. She's the classic classist, conservative parent that any protagonist would want to rebel against, especially by running off with someone she looks down upon. Being married to Edward was supposed to stop Susan turning out anything like her, but, just as Anne warned her she would, she soon finds that he isn’t enough for her. The last thing she tells Susan, before they basically never see each other again, is that no matter what they do, everyone eventually turns into their mother.  All of this is told through flashbacks. The present-day Susan is married to the much more ambitious and money-minded Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer). They’re the kind of business couple who spend more nights away from each other in hotel rooms than they do at home. The world of the gallery where Susan works is an eerie mix of avant-garde artistry and sterile opulence. Funnily enough, it’s very reminiscent of the modelling universe of The Neon Demon, especially since Jena Malone and Karl Glusman are in the cast of this film as well. That said, most of the film takes place away from this narrative anchor, as it were. Ford is well aware that those tumultuous years with Edward are much more interesting than Susan’s current life with Hutton, even if the divorce is foreshadowed a bit too overtly. Many more years pass until she hears from him again, with the delivery of his latest manuscript for a novel entitled "Nocturnal Animals" that is dedicated to her. He used to call her a nocturnal animal when they were together, since even then she was a night owl. The book is a shockingly violent thriller about a family that go out on a camping trip in the middle of nowhere. After they've driven outside of any phone coverage, they are stalked, run off the road and harassed by a local gang. The dad tries to outplay them and get his wife and daughter to safety, but their assailants end up holding him down, forcing the two women into one of their cars and taking them far away, leaving him behind feeling useless and powerless. This is definitely the most intense, drawn-out and harrowing scene that this film delivers. Understandably, there were quite a few walkouts when it reached its darkest point. Most films only hint at or threaten to show these kinds of horrific occurrences, but this one goes much further with it than anyone was hoping. Still, it's integral to setting up the gruelling revenge story of Tony Hastings, the survivor of the attack, whose wife and daughter were both beaten, raped and murdered, leaving him with nothing but the raging need to find the men who did this to them. Often when films contain stories within stories they end up feeling quite trite and idle. They're usually told with wall-to-wall narration, an overdone fairytale aesthetic and double-casting that makes for some very overwrought allegory. Sometimes, funnily enough, it's very hard to be invested in a story that you know is fictional inside the world of the main story, even though the whole film is fictional anyway. However, the story of the novel inside this film adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel, Tony and Susan, is definitely not your average meta-narrative. It’s told so straightforwardly and given so much screen time that it almost makes you forget about the central story. In fact, this could have easily been just a single narrative film about Tony, although that would have been incredibly depressing. If nothing else, it's a relief when Susan puts the book down and returns to her unsatisfying but much less traumatic life. Compared with Edward’s novel and the romantic flashbacks, the main plot is pretty stagnant, with a much greater focus on characters than events. It certainly needs the two side plots to give it momentum, but equally both of the side plots rely on the central story to give them a more complex purpose. There is still a striking resemblance between Edward and Tony, not least because Gyllenhaal plays both of them, but even so their connection is much subtler than you’d expect. In one of the flashbacks, Edward defends himself against a bad review by saying that all authors write about themselves. Indeed, both him and Tony have been called weak by people with varying definitions of weakness, and strength. Eventually, both men decide that people see strength as cruelty, and they are done with being weak. By the same token, Tony’s wife, Laura, is basically Susan, although this connection is slightly veiled. Laura isn’t played by Adams, but, in a very inspired casting choice, she's portrayed by her startling lookalike, Isla Fisher. The allegory is there but it isn't being forced under a spotlight. It doesn’t have to match the main story beat for beat to make itself known. This is what makes Nocturnal Animals both a fascinating film to pick apart and a totally engrossing one to lose yourself in. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Blaque Showgirls is a merciless interrogation of Australian racism in the form of a stage parody of dance movies, including, of course, Showgirls (1995). Written by Nakkiah Lui, the acclaimed Aboriginal activist and playwright who recently worked on the ABC’s Black Comedy, it’s a play that mocks and borrows from film and tv in equal measure. Eugyeene Teh’s set design even resembles a television set as well as a theatre within a theatre, something that director Sarah Giles takes full advantage of. Voiceover abounds instead of theatrical asides. Jed Palmer’s musical score provides the cheese while the cast brings the delicious ham. Humorous captions race above the actors’ heads, and are easy to miss unless you’re paying close attention. Naturally, it ticks of all the obligatory dance movie scenes, albeit with more than a slight twist: a “montage of moderate success”; the arrival-in-the-big-city scene; the audition poster that blows into our protagonist’s face at just the right moment (here the wind is a stagehand carrying a pole); the jealous antagonist dancer throwing a tantrum at her dressing room mirror just before she hatches her third-act scheme. Lui’s story follows the blundering young Ginny Jones (Bessie Holland) an orphan from the town of Chitole (pronounced shi-toll). She dreams of moving to Brisvegas and joining the Blaque Showgirls. She might not be black, but she refuses to let that stop her, no matter how much people mock her for it. Apparently her mother was the best Aboriginal dancer in the country. She is adamant that she can remember looking up at her brown face when she was a baby, just before she was accidentally killed during smoking ceremony that apparently gave Ginny brain damage. In any case, the local Indigenous community are happy to see her go. One elder in particular, her would-be mentor figure (Elaine Crombie) is fed up with her thoughtless lack of cultural sensitivity and is happy to let Brisvegas knock some sense into her. It doesn’t. The moment she steps in to audition, she is brushed aside by the indomitable star of the show, Chandon Connors (Crombie again) and her arrogant but airheaded manager, cheekily named Kyle MacLachlan (Guy Simon). This is when the sprightly Molly (Emi Canavan) comes to her aid. She is the Japanese hostess of a club called the Kum Den, and, just like the Blaque Showgirls, she has had to make a living off selling her culture to white people, most of whom assume she’s Chinese and refuse to be corrected on it. She offers to help Ginny if she will later help her. All Ginny needs now are some culturally appropriative dreadlocks and an Aboriginal dance teacher. She finds one named True Love Interest (Simon again!) with crudely painted-on abs. Of course, all of their scenes together are built from the worst “dramatic” dialogue ever written for the screen. This part of the satire is probably the most fun to laugh at, since it makes everyone in the audience feel smart and sophisticated. Ginny is just generally good for a laugh right from the beginning, although, for the white members of the audience, the amusement turns to more of a self-reflective cringe once you realise who she really is. She’s not just clueless, she really is selfish and wilfully ignorant. As much as she might seem like one, she’s hardly an underdog, given that all the real power over the Blaque Showgirls is held by the unseen, ghostly white board of directors. Surprisingly, even True Love Interest has more substance than she does, and unsurprisingly, the formidable Chandon turns out to be much more than just a self-obsessed diva. As the most powerful Aboriginal woman in Brisvegas, poised to rise up through the ranks of the company just before Ginny showed up, she is actually the closest thing we have to a hero here. However, in writing this sly revelation of our racism past and present, there is one trap that Lui very nearly falls into: she does make more than a few jokes at the expense of Ginny’s supposed brain damage and speech difficulties, enough for the audience to start linking it to her social ignorance. Of course, fighting racism with ableism basically defeats the purpose, though fortunately she doesn’t dwell on it too much. Also, towards the end of the play there is a priceless gag attacking wheelchair inaccessibility that is rather redeeming. The lasting feel left by Blaque Showgirls is one of utter frustration with the way things have been, still are and probably will continue to be for a while. It’s a hard-bitten, feel-good and then feel-bad comedy that tricks you into caring. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

Roger Ross Williams' latest feature documentary is about a 23-year-old autistic man who's obsessed with Disney movies - basically, me, if you just wind his age back two years, move him from America to Australia and rotate his sexuality 180 degrees. In light of that, you'll have to forgive me since I can't exactly distance myself from what is pretty much my own biography. Mostly, I was just overjoyed to see a real person that I can relate to standing on the screen in front of me. I feel like I've earned that given how much of my life I've been looking at that screen. Not only is he obsessed with something that is neither maths or IT, he is also not a little kid: he is a self-aware adult, and fortunately Williams knows how to treat him as such. Unlike the subjects of most other autism documentaries, he is old enough to reflect on his own past and current experiences of friendship, love, and coming of age, and he is actually given the space here to share his reflections. Owen Suskind, the man in question, has watched every single animated film that Disney has ever made, and memorised every single line of dialogue. Most of these stories and characters have been a part of his life for as long as he can remember. They have a place in his heart and mind that goes far beyond their nostalgic value. Why does he love Disney so much? This is probably the only question he never answers for us. Not that I blame him, I wouldn’t really know where to start with that one. It’s just such an integral part of my psyche, of my personality and identity that it really would require me to step outside of myself to explain where that obsession came from and why it has endured. Owen’s parents talk about the comforting predictability in watching these same movies over and over, not only in that individually they never change but also that there are certain things you can always expect from a Disney animation, such as a happy ending. They also think it might be that the softness of the animation gels well with his sensory hypersensitivities, or the fact that the characters are, ironically, both very colourful and very black and white in their design. It’s a pretty clinical and simplistic explanation, but it’s not a bad start. What the film itself suggests, even if no one explicitly says it, is that these movies are a thrilling escape into a very different universe, a “whole new world” if you like, filled with endless possibility. The life of an autistic kid in a non-autistic world can be painfully lonely. Of course, Owen himself describes better than anyone else just how crushingly isolating it is. You want to make friends as much as anyone else does, but everyone you meet just dismisses you as the “weird” kid. By the end of primary school, the word “weird” can start to feel like a hateful slur. Everything about you that is unique, everything you love, everything you do, your entire identity is pushed aside and pigeon-holed into this single, meaningless category that no child wants to be a part of. Both Owen and I eventually gave up trying to play with other children and would play with the Disney characters instead. You still have fun that way and enjoy being a child. They can actually feel like good substitutes for friends. Up to a certain point, they fill that gaping hole. Even when you leave the house, you can spend ages revisiting them in your mind. Owen still likes to recite some of their best lines to himself when he’s out and about, in the way that most other people might sing to themselves. It’s also satisfying to make your up your own stories about them in your head. It’s the closest you can get to actually bringing them to life, and, until you finally learn to accept yourself and start to be accepted by others, this is the closest you can come to being a hero. At about the age of ten, Owen had written and illustrated a hundred-page story about all of the wise and quirky Disney sidekick characters, naming himself the “protector of the sidekicks” who kept them safe from the monster terrorising the forest that was their home. It’s easy to see why Owen identifies so strongly with these funny or sage-like side characters. As someone with unusual mannerisms and very specific interests, if this was any other movie he would most likely be a side character. He would be cast as the helping hand to the ‘relatable’ hero, put there to provide laughter when things got tense, wise words when things got rocky, and hi-fives when things turned out well for them, but his own aspirations, fears, goals and longings for companionship would never be considered. You can tell a lot about a person by the characters they identify with the most, especially when they’re not the ones you’re supposed to feel represented by. In this production, Owen’s story of the sidekick is brought to life in some dazzling animation sequences by the team of Matthieu Betard, Olivier Lescot and Philippe Sonrier. I can easily imagine just how excited Owen must have been to get that rare opportunity of seeing his childhood fantasies on screen. Equally, the scenes showing the Disney club he started with his fellow Neurodivergent friends are some of the most moving and satisfying moments in the film. I am happy to say that Owen has definitely not been made the sidekick in his own story. One of the many benefits of choosing an adult subject for an autism documentary is that you can show them taking their life into their own hands and making it better. Owen turns what used to be his sorry substitute for friends into a way to meet and connect with like-minded people, real people who will always be there for him. It also turns out to be a way for him to meet Jonathan Freeman and Gilbert Godfried, who pay the group a surprise visit and do a live reading of Jafar and Iago, their respective parts in Aladdin. Of course, the other important opportunity given by Williams’ choice of subject is that of exploring romantic relationships. Owen’s conversations with his girlfriend, Emily, who is also Neurodivergent, sound unhealthily strained. In many ways autistic people can be said to have their own language, and their own way of communicating. This is why an autistic person who is asked to communicate the way non-autistic people do will sound a bit like someone who is speaking in a language that is not their native tongue. It is quite strange that Owen and Emily would feel the need to speak in a neurotypical way when it is just the two of them, but there is obviously a force of habit at play. It is interesting that Life, Animated focuses quite a lot on the movie Peter Pan, seeing as there is this tendency view autistic people as children who never grow up, just like the lost boys. Certainly, on the surface, people like Emily and Owen might sound and look like children, but it is hard to know whether that is just the way they naturally carry themselves, or whether it is because they are usually spoken to as if they were children, which leads them to think that that is how other people like to be spoken to. In this manner, a lot of the medical and clinical studies of autism are very chicken and egg. The only trap of infantilisation that this film really falls into is its suggestion that Owen basically doesn'tknow what sex is. Sex is another thing that can be especially complicated for autistic people, but, unlike friendships at school, it is surprisingly easy, at least to a certain point, to convince yourself that it doesn't exist (after all, non-autistic people pretend that's true all the time when they talk to each other). His older brother and close mentor thinks that Owen actually doesn't understand it at all, mostly because he could never have learned it from watching Disney and because Owen's been very unresponsive any time he's brought it up. However, just because he doesn't like to talk it about with his brother, or on camera (which is far enough) doesn't mean he knows nothing about it. Nevertheless, Williams does give Owen ample opportunity to speak for himself on camera, and also to express himself through his impressive illustrations, as well as, of course, his favourite Disney scenes. He rounds off the film with some footage of Owen opening an international autism conference: a powerful reflection of the social progress of the past several decades. I can certainly understand how strange it must have felt, to be a 23-year-old who has fast-tracked their way to the big time thanks to their exotic brain. Unsurprisingly, Owen finds it hard to pen down everything he has to share into just one little speech, and asks his father, Ron, what he should say. Ron tells him that it is all up to him, that it's his story to tell, which is ironic, considering this film is technically based on the book that he wrote about his son's life with autism. Even so, by the time he is able to stand up there and present himself as a proudly autistic adult, his family has finally realised that he is not a lost boy, he is a man who has found himself. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Ken Stone and Irene Silber’s Hard to Believe is a tight 56-minute exposé of an issue that few people like to think about: forced organ harvesting in China. It isn’t exactly a secret that the Chinese government performs surgery on its political prisoners without their consent, but in recent years the media has largely neglected this still very present atrocity. This documentary, which mostly looks at the communist party’s persecution of Falun Gong spiritual practitioners, is Stone and Silber’s great effort to bring this issue back into the spotlight, to push past the compassion fatigue that most Western citizens in particular seem to be feeling. Most of the interviews here have been conducted with American Human Rights Defenders Torsten Trey and Ethan Gutmann, who urge people to realise that these horrific violations will never be stopped if everyone just keeps waiting for someone else to fight the fight. It seems to Trey and Gutmann that if this was happening anywhere other than in China, one of the most powerful global economic players, then the international outrage and protest would be much louder and stronger. They also suggest that the problem feels too large and abstract for most outsiders to really comprehend. The human impact of these practices can easily to get lost in the sea of statistics, or indeed in the literal sea that divides China from most other countries in the world. While the short running time does make the film easier to digest, and could well encourage some of the more apathetic people to actually see sit through it, it doesn’t really allow Stone and Silber enough time to explore the issue in quite enough detail. On top of that, far too much of this time is spent listening to these two white social commentators, while any interviews with the victims of this abhorrent system of exploitation are something of a rarity. In fact, out of the interviewees who are actually Chinese, the one who is given the most screen time is a perpetrator, not a victim. We hear a great deal about how prison doctors are being coerced into stealing the organs of their patients while they are still alive and fully awake. We also hear some of the telephone calls made by people wanting to purchase these rare healthy “criminal” organs. There’s no denying that these are both crucial things to cover, but this should not be at the expense of the voices that have already been horrifically suppressed. If anyone is going to be made the face of forced organ harvesting, it should unquestionably be one of the victims. While Gutmann doesn’t believe it’s fair to expect these people to advocate for themselves, since most of them don’t have the legal or political expertise, the idea that none of them have the skills or the capability to fight for their own rights is something I actually do find Hard to Believe. Political campaigning might work very differently in the West compared to China, but that does not in any way mean that the Chinese people can’t speak for themselves in the international media, or that they need a white saviour to fly in and rescue them. In some ways the most, and in other ways the least controversial approach this film adopts is to compare the organ harvesting in the Chinese medical system to the Holocaust. Even though they are both large scale atrocities that were at least initially met with global denial and apathy, we are now unfortunately at a point where this is a very commonly invoked comparison that people have become almost desensitised to. I’m not sure what it would take to shake the rest of the world out of their inaction, but an acceptance of the Chinese people as the leaders of this cause and as the voices of their own national problem would certainly be a start. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans is something of an epic, operating on quite a small scale but still putting its characters through some formidable challenges. It's based on TL Stedman's novel of the same name, one that suggests both intimacy and profundity. This story does eventually deliver on both, but in the film at least, the intimacy is there pretty much from the get-go. It sets itself up to be a charming love story about a mild-mannered lighthouse keeper (Michael Fassbender) and his lovely wife (Alicia Vikander) who live on the Island of January between two oceans. It is December, 1918. Tom Sherbourne was a lucky survivor of the Great War, though with no loving family to come home to and no reason to believe that he has any right to be alive after so many have died. As he is first getting to know the sweet young Isabel Haysmark, he tells her he has done some unspeakable things in the years he spent on the front, though he doesn’t go into any detail. For him, the noble occupation of a lighthouse keeper is a way to give something good to the world, to help others when they most need it, but to do so from afar, without having to look into their eyes and receive undeserved gratitude. He never envisioned sharing this new life with a wife and child, but almost immediately after she meets him, Isabel is determined to court him, marry him and give him a family. She manages the first two of those easily enough, but after two miscarriages that final dream of hers is looking unlikely to come true. Cianfrance doesn't spend too long on their burgeoning romance. He mostly just shows them sharing their different experiences of the war. Isabel lost all three of her brothers, and is now an only child. She notices how, unlike a wife who might tragically become a widow after the war, there is no special name for what a parent becomes if they lose their children, or for what a sister becomes if she loses her brothers. To her, it is a connection that cannot be severed, the kind of love that never dies, even if the person it was for is now dead, or never even had a chance at life. Conversations like this one are peppered throughout the film, particularly in the initial stages of the plot. This is one of the more well-written deep and meaningful dialogues to be seen here. Others are markedly more on-the-nose, such as Tom explaining all of the mythological symbolism of the island, or one that has a certain crucial supporting character reciting one of the morals of the story: “You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.” These are all very worthy, weighty sentiments, but some of them are gratingly overstated and seem to arrive just in time for some not-so-subtle foreshadowing. Unsurprisingly, the film is at its most effective when it communicates its ideas through sounds and images - especially one striking shot that makes the ocean feel just like a desert - and when it simply trusts the strength of its story. After a generous amount of romantic and tragic setup, the real story is carried over the waves towards the little island with those two tiny graves. The couple spot a dinghy drifting near the shoreline, with a dead man and a crying baby girl lying inside it. Isabel is desperate to keep her. For all they know, she has no one. If Tom puts this in the log book, she'll probably be sent to an orphanage. Isabel convinces him to pretend that she's theirs, to Christen her Lucy Sherbourne and literally raise her as their own, an apparently victimless crime that might just rescue all three of them. Years later, however, when Tom discovers there that there is indeed a victim still suffering from what they did to her, he fears that they have damned themselves to a lifetime of punishment. It turns out that the dead man in the boat, the girl’s biological father, was a German man named Frank Roennfeldt (Leon Ford), the one who later espouses the virtues of forgiveness in a romantic flashback. Unfortunately, his new overseas neighbours weren’t quite as willing to bury the hatchet so soon after the war. He got into that boat out of blind fear for his own life, and even more so the life of his tiny daughter, who he had named Grace. Meanwhile, his wife, Hannah (Rachel Weisz) was left behind to erect a tombstone for both of them on the mainland of Australia. Strangely enough, that is where the film is set, even though its three main actors are Irish, English and Swedish and use more or less English accents. Cianfrance has tried to create a believable sense of place by shooting some of the scenes in Tasmania and filling the supporting cast with well-known Australian actors like Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown, who all act in their native accents. It’s a pretty discordant mix, but it still amounts to some very evocative cinematography and many solid performances. Unsurprisingly, Fassbender imbues the world-weary war survivor with a genuine sense of humanity, Vikander brings an unexpected dark streak to the loving mother with no child to love, while Weisz is consistently engaging as the wounded wildcard who stirs things up to an exceptional level of moral complexity. There are an awful lot of films that start with an excitingly unique premise that then just tapers off into cliché, but, interestingly, The Light Between Oceans begins in a fairly predictable way and becomes more interesting and sure-footed as it goes along. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans is something of an epic, operating on quite a small scale but still putting its characters through some formidable challenges. It's based on TL Stedman's novel of the same name, one that suggests both intimacy and profundity. This story does eventually deliver on both, but in the film at least, the intimacy is there pretty much from the get-go. It sets itself up to be a charming love story about a mild-mannered lighthouse keeper (Michael Fassbender) and his lovely wife (Alicia Vikander) who live on the Island of January between two oceans. It is December, 1918. Tom Sherbourne was a lucky survivor of the Great War, though with no loving family to come home to and no reason to believe that he has any right to be alive after so many have died. As he is first getting to know the sweet young Isabel Haysmark, he tells her he has done some unspeakable things in the years he spent on the front, though he doesn’t go into any detail. For him, the noble occupation of a lighthouse keeper is a way to give something good to the world, to help others when they most need it, but to do so from afar, without having to look into their eyes and receive undeserved gratitude. He never envisioned sharing this new life with a wife and child, but almost immediately after she meets him, Isabel is determined to court him, marry him and give him a family. She manages the first two of those easily enough, but after two miscarriages that final dream of hers is looking unlikely to come true.   Cianfrance doesn't spend too long on their burgeoning romance. He mostly just shows them sharing their different experiences of the war. Isabel lost all three of her brothers, and is now an only child. She notices how, unlike a wife who might tragically become a widow after the war, there is no special name for what a parent becomes if they lose their children, or for what a sister becomes if she loses her brothers. To her, it is a connection that cannot be severed, the kind of love that never dies, even if the person it was for is now dead, or never even had a chance at life.   Conversations like this one are peppered throughout the film, particularly in the initial stages of the plot. This is one of the more well-written deep and meaningful dialogues to be seen here. Others are markedly more on-the-nose, such as Tom explaining all of the mythological symbolism of the island, or one that has a certain crucial supporting character reciting one of the morals of the story: “You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.” These are all very worthy, weighty sentiments, but some of them are gratingly overstated and seem to arrive just in time for some not-so-subtle foreshadowing.   Unsurprisingly, the film is at its most effective when it communicates its ideas through sounds and images - especially one striking shot that makes the ocean feel just like a desert - and when it simply trusts the strength of its story. After a generous amount of romantic and tragic setup, the real story is carried over the waves towards the little island with those two tiny graves. The couple spot a dinghy drifting near the shoreline, with a dead man and a crying baby girl lying inside it. Isabel is desperate to keep her. For all they know, she has no one. If Tom puts this in the log book, she'll probably be sent to an orphanage. Isabel convinces him to pretend that she's theirs, to Christen her Lucy Sherbourne and literally raise her as their own, an apparently victimless crime that might just rescue all three of them.   Years later, however, when Tom discovers there that there is indeed a victim still suffering from what they did to her, he fears that they have damned themselves to a lifetime of punishment. It turns out that the dead man in the boat, the girl’s biological father, was a German man named Frank Roennfeldt (Leon Ford), the one who later espouses the virtues of forgiveness in a romantic flashback. Unfortunately, his new overseas neighbours weren’t quite as willing to bury the hatchet so soon after the war. He got into that boat out of blind fear for his own life, and even more so the life of his tiny daughter, who he had named Grace. Meanwhile, his wife, Hannah (Rachel Weisz) was left behind to erect a tombstone for both of them on the mainland of Australia.   Strangely enough, that is where the film is set, even though its three main actors are Irish, English and Swedish and use more or less English accents. Cianfrance has tried to create a believable sense of place by shooting some of the scenes in Tasmania  and filling the supporting cast with well-known Australian actors like Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown, who all act in their native accents. It’s a pretty discordant mix, but it still amounts to some very evocative cinematography and many solid performances. Unsurprisingly, Fassbender imbues the world-weary war survivor with a genuine sense of humanity, Vikander brings an unexpected dark streak to the loving mother with no child to love, while Weisz is consistently engaging as the wounded wildcard who stirs things up to an exceptional level of moral complexity. There are an awful lot of films that start with an excitingly unique premise that then just tapers off into cliché, but, interestingly, The Light Between Oceans begins in a fairly predictable way and becomes more interesting and sure-footed as it goes along. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon would have been, I imagine, quite an easy film to pitch, but a very hard one to describe. Since seeing it I've been explaining it to people as "the Black Swan of modelling,” which might sound very reductive, but given how much it invites comparison with Darren Aronofsky's film, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how Refn had originally conceived it. Both of them begin by introducing a gifted but naive young woman wanting to enter into a soul-crushing profession, one that they short-sightedly think they can handle without losing themselves completely. This time around, we have 16-year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning, giving, to date, the best performance of her career) a natural beauty who wins over everyone with simply her radiating  personality. At first, she is aware of this great power she possesses, but only somewhat, only enough to know that, as a girl with no real professional skills and no family or friends to support her, her looks are something she can make money from. Her lack of any personal connections is never explained, but there's no denying it's effectiveness as a writing tool. It makes Jesse a clean slate, a mysterious wanderer with a murky past. Every other character in the film is someone that both she and the audience are meeting for the first time, and so every relationship she forms with them is seen in full, from its very beginning. Two of the most memorable people she connects with are a budding photographer, Dean (Karl Glusman), and a more experienced model, Ruby (Jena Malone) who both take an interest in her, for whatever reason. Out of all of Jesse’s modelling peers, Ruby is the only one to show her any kindness or to offer her any guidance. Funnily enough, she is also the only one who doesn’t have blonde hair, a choice that’s about as subtle as anything else in the film, which gets more expressionistic as it goes along. When a film opens with a vivid wide shot of a blood-splattered girl lying still in a bathtub, followed by a closeup of a young man coolly taking pictures of her, you certainly get an idea of what you’re in for. True to the name, just about every scene in The Neon Demon is bathed in a fluorescent glow, and just about every frame is filled with objects that catch and reflect that glow. However, there is definitely more than just one demon to be found here. Most of them are female, with ghostly faces saturated in makeup, who go from discussing the “Red Rum” brand of lipstick in front of a mirror to eventually turning into literal blood-sucking, flesh-eating monsters. Of course, this is all meant to represent the dangers of the modelling industry, all the harmful things it teaches to young girls and the kinds of women they apparently have to become in order to win over the male modelling agents and fashion designers. Naturally, a lot of this will be common knowledge amongst the audience. While Black Swan took place in the world of ballet, a profession that most people see as benign, respectable and not at all self-destructive, the modelling industry has been under public scrutiny for a while now, so it is doubtful that an emotional, rather than an intellectual film will bring anything new to the table. Still, as annoying as it is to see yet another production about women fighting each other for a man’s attention, it is a pleasant surprise to see a film that commits to having a female protagonist, several female antagonists and a few male supporting characters that remain as much all the way to the end. That said, you can still tell this was written and directed by a man. While some of the scenes between the models are quite clearly heightened, others feel more like a version of group female interaction rendered more comprehensible for men. If it weren’t for his co-writers, Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, I imagine some of the dialogue would have probably turned out even more stilted. Still, the five lead actresses always find ways to make their characters convincing, despite the absurd things they might end up saying or doing. Certainly Elle Fanning, and Melbourne actresses Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee, all shine in the most intriguing roles they have ever been offered. It’s particularly interesting to hear the two Australians using their native accents in an American production, a subtle reminder that models, unlike actors, are seen but not heard in their profession. Unsurprisingly, Christina Hendricks portrays one of the better stone-cold industry gurus we’ve seen onscreen in a while, and Jena Malone, possibly taking inspiration from Mila Kunis, is genuinely cryptic as the suspicious Ruby. Dean, on the other hand, very quickly proves himself to be a true friend of Jesse’s, and apparently the only decent person in sight. He suitably ends up going head to head with the two most despicable male characters: the fashion designer that all the girls want to be chosen by (a curiously uncredited Alessandro Nivola) who gets to say “beauty isn't everything; it’s the only thing”, and Jesse’s vulgar landlord (Keanu Reeves) who embodies every reason why a woman might be afraid to be out alone at night. Jesse’s power is not just her beauty, but, most importantly, her honesty, her moral integrity, her pure intentions. Initially, she simply wants to make a living and has no wish to step on other people’s toes. Her power comes from the fact that she’s not even aware that this is a power at all. The films presents us with a fascinating paradox when as soon as this neon demon realises how powerful she is, she is rendered powerless, and defenceless against the real demons she thought she could take on. Her pivotal transformation scene, about 90 minutes in, turns out to be the most stylised, well-paced and hypnotic part in the film. Rather than drag out the inevitable with a series of more realistic scenes, Refn wisely chooses to compact this character change into one fluid, dialogue-free sequence, which would have worked brilliantly as a final or penultimate moment. Unfortunately, though, we then end up spending half an hour with this brand new version of Jesse, which, as it turns out, we might have actually needed more than one scene to get to know. There soon comes a point where the style turns into excess, the characters turn into caricatures, the commentary just becomes comedy and the macabre expressionism turns into a full-on gore-fest. Strangely enough, I eventually got a little tired of watching the main character die, in many different ways, and slowly stopped caring if this was another fantasy sequence or if this time she had actually died for real. It’s always hard to know, not because of the complexity of the writing but more because it’s unclear what Refn expects us to accept as realistic and what we can safely assume to be fantasy. There are only so many fake murders that one little Stanley Kubrick reference can justify. I’m sure that the multiple death scenes are meant to show how this profession is slowly killing her from the inside, destroying her piece by piece. It’s a valiant effort to shock us all into sharing his anger, but by the end of the film, just before Sia’s ‘Waving Goodbye’ plays over the end credits, it looks like he’ll be getting more laughs than anything else, which is not to say that The Neon Demon fails as an art film, but rather that it succeeds as a late blooming horror flick. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

La Mama Theatre’s The Masque of Beauty seems to have taken its name from Ben Johnson’s courtly masque composed in 1608. However, in Peter Green’s ‘Renaissance Cabaret’ we certainly feel far away from the England court, even if he uses a few Shakespeare passages on one of his literary medleys. Green’s writing, and indeed Faye Bendrups’ directing, both take Australian audiences to very different theatrical territory than they might be used to. True to the form of a masque, this show is a meandering hour of live music, dance pieces, dramatic scenes and chorus style songs, which historically would espouse the most famous figures of the day. On this particular outing, to the Italian court, we encounter three formidable sisters-in-law – the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, the sharp-witted Isabella d’Este, and the worldly Elisabette Gonzaga – as well as the controversial Pope Alexander VI, his son, and Lucrezia’s brother, Cesare Borgia, the Monna Lisa (“constipated for over 500 years”) and a very nervous young Leonardo da Vinci. This production might have done away with some big hallmarks of the masque – the actual masks, the decorative sets and the audience participation – but aside from that, it really does feel like a journey back to the 16th century. 21st century audiences are very used to narrative-based entertainment, and to more visual forms of storytelling, whereas the figures displayed here are introduced much more through monologue than dialogue. Even the grim ensemble songs feel much more like an Ancient Greek chorus than an exchange played out in song. In these parts of the show, the four voices of the cast - Maria Paula Afanador, Madeleine Field, Claire Nicholls and Jessica Greenhall – seem to blend into the one entity. The dances and the more physical scenes function more as further illustrations of the figures than as a way of driving forward a story. I call them ‘figures’ instead of ‘characters’ because they are far from being active players in a dramatic narrative. The Masque of Beauty is, throughout, a consciously historical work. More specifically, this is revisionist history, and the sardonic kind at that, based on rumours and re-evaluations. This piece is undisguisedly looking backwards, and makes no attempt to make us feel like we are looking forwards as though we and the performing ensemble don’t know what’s coming. The cast and creatives are certainly in the know, but unfortunately, for the most part, their audience is probably not nearly as knowledgeable about it all. The commentary on Leonardo and the Mona Lisa works because this is a part of Italian history that is very much general knowledge. As for the three noble sisters-in-law, as fascinating as they seem, and as exuberantly as they are portrayed, they aren’t really part of the public consciousness. The production team might now know almost everything there is to find out about them, and they certainly seemed to find their commentary on them amusing and compelling, but I’m not sure that a lot of their audience will. It’s definitely a more obscure part of history, something the La Mama staff seemed to have picked up on. At the box office, each audience is member is given a Wikipedia blurb on each figure in the story, which helps a little but it still takes more than a couple of hastily read paragraphs to achieve that same level of familiarity. I’m sure those who know the history of the Italian royals will appreciate what this talented team manage to do with them, but those who don’t are never really brought up to speed at any point here, or at least not in any helpful way. There is often a large disconnect between what you are being told on stage here and what you are being shown. When the exposition becomes particularly intricate and hard to follow, it is very easy to be distracted by the other stagecraft elements and miss certain factual details. You can definitely feel that this is set in a world of seduction, corruption, manipulation and murder, but it’s very hard to be clear on who is doing what to who, and why. Seeing as there is no real narrative movement anyway, or even much thematic movement here, those who aren’t already familiar with all of these people will probably feel start to feel a bit restless. It’s definitely a treat for any Renaissance aficionados but will probably be quite unmemorable for anyone else. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers is one of the most bafflingly entertaining films of the year. A part-time cheesy teen movie, part-time goofy horror flick and full-time American satire of Canada, Nazis, Canadian Nazis, ‘kids today,’ and of course yoga, it never really asks to be taken seriously, just to be enjoyed. It's a follow-up to Smith's previous film, Tusk, with Johnny Depp reprising his role as the eccentric Guy Lapointe. However, it still works as a standalone film. Those who haven't seen the first movie will be a bit confused by the odd reference to a man being turned into a walrus, but with a script this off-the-wall those moments will hardly stick out. Yoga Hosers follows the misadventures of Colleen McKenzie (Harley Quinn Smith) and Colleen Collette (Lily-Rose Depp), two best friends who are almost never apart. Together, they are taking yoga classes run by Comic Side Character Yogi Bayer (Justin Long) who teaches a very unusual type of yoga. They also sing in a band together, where they mock Oddball Sidekick Ichabod (Adam Brody) their long-suffering drummer. They rehearse in the back room of the dreaded general store that they both work at. They hate their jobs. They can’t stand the customers, or the fact that they’re working for Daggy Dad Mr Collette (Tony Hale) and his new girlfriend, Evil Stepmother Tabitha (Natasha Lyonne). One day, their daily drudgery is interrupted by the arrival of Hot Guy Hunter Calloway (Austin Butler) and Gross Wingman Gordon Greenleaf (Tyler Posey), two senior students who invite them to a wild house party happening tomorrow night. However, they are gutted when Tabitha whisks her bumbling Bob away on a surprise trip to Niagara falls, purposely leaving the Colleens with the store to run on the very same night of the party. On top of that, Mean PE Teacher, Ms Wuckland (Genesis Rodriguez) has done the unthinkable and confiscated their phones for the day, which of course pretty much puts their entire lives on hold. Until they can collect them from Wacky Principle Invincible (Sassier Zamata), they might as well pay attention to Exotic Exposition teacher Ms Maurice (Vanessa Paradis) as she teaches the class a backstory about Canadian Nazis, one that will become very important once this movie's scary sci-fi subplot kicks in. Even before it does, however, Yoga Hosers doesn't feel like your typical trashy teen horror film. Evidently, as far as plot and characters go, it follows the formula to the letter, but in terms of tone it is much more sardonic than your average high school movie. For instance, the audaciously named Principle Invincible slips some biting remarks on racial privilege in between the standard routine for her character trope. She and the rest of the cast are also all in on the wall-to-wall Canada jokes. This ensemble of mostly American actors speak in a hilarious hodgepodge of their native accents, a touch of Québécois and as many oots as Smith could write into the script. Once the plot starts swerving in all sorts of directions, the fun quickly increases, and just occasionally decreases. Each twist is certainly unexpected, though largely because no groundwork is really laid down for any them before they arrive. They're not exactly believe, but they don't aspire to be. They are mostly there for novelty, not complexity, and the film only truly suffers when that novelty wears off in between the scattered climaxes. If this were an artistic film, it would probably be called an "eclectic mix" of genres and characters, but as a piece of mainstream entertainment it is more likely to be called "a mess," but what a glorious mess it is. Each subplot is basically a vehicle for the surprisingly star-studded cast to engage in some self-parody. It is very satisfying to see Hayley Joel Osment and all of the other young adult stars subverting their usual roles. There are also many memorable pop culture gags. Most of them are very contemporary, such as the uproariously paradoxical reference to Orange is the New Black. Has Collette just never noticed that her dad's new girlfriend looks and sounds exactly like Nicky Nichols? Or the actor who plays her? Oh well, who cares. Meanwhile, some of the more classically educated moviegoers in the audience will appreciate the older references, which all come from Ralph Garman's gallery of impressions. As one of the funnier Nazi caricatures that we've seen recently, Garman does flawless impersonations of actors like Al Pacino, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even the lisping Ed Wynn (best known for Mary Poppins and Alice in Wonderland). All of these are lost on the young Colleens but Guy Fontaine is very impressed by them. It might just sound like Hollywood nepotism to have Lily-Rose Depp share scenes with her mum, dad and even her little brother, Jack, all while Harley Quinn Smith is being directed by her dad, but the Depps really do bounce off each other well, and Kevin Smith does get a good performance out of his daughter. The results here might not exactly be cinematic gold, but they are nothing like the debacle that was After Earth or The Godfather: Part III. It's also very refreshing to see a film with two female protagonists who both remain happily single from beginning to end. Yoga Hosers is silly, lightweight fun that usually knows where its limits are. It doesn't attempt to hold its audience's interest for more than 90 minutes, but it does still expect them to engage with its fight scenes, even though no suspense is ever properly built for them. Sometimes Kevin Smith seems to forget that, although the Colleens are likeable and enjoyable to watch, since there is no emotional investment made at the start, there can be no dramatic payoff at the end, even though there are plenty of comedic payoffs. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Phil Rouse decides to introduce his production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with a very peculiar sight: some slides of Elizabethan text hover above our very skilled ensemble as they are all club dancing to ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s one of those audacious mixes of the highbrow classical and the lowbrow modern that the theatre world can never get enough of. Arturo Ui (played here by George Banders), the fictional Chicagoan crime lord, is of course Bertolt Brecht’s parodic and blatantly allegorical version of Adolf Hitler, rendered comprehensible for an American audience in 1941. Since the play took 22 years to make it to Broadway, it has only ever been performed in front of already well-versed audiences, and never as an introductory education on the history of Nazi Germany. Before they’ve even sat down, this 2016 Australian audience will already hate the infamous dictator just as much as the play’s 1963 American audience would have, but their prior knowledge of Brecht and Epic theatre will be less certain. In this production, Rouse bombards the audience with countless lines of text for the same purpose that Brecht once did: to give the audience all the facts they need to follow the allegory and understand his message, without being “distracted” by the fictional story he is telling. In contemporary theatre making this is known as heavy-handedness, but in the 1920s the idea of using theatre to shamelessly recruit people as political activists was a novel and exciting one. However, even today Rouse gets away with it by embracing this style of alienating the audience from the pathos of the story, and by having his own anti-right wing political agenda to parade around. The text on the screen and a handful of throwaway lines make it abundantly clear that Donald Trump is the politician he is truly taking aim at, with the original Hitler allegory itself becoming an allegory for a much more contemporary issue. There is also another, much more subtle comparison made between the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis, which interestingly is pulled off without the assistance of the fact slides. However, there are times when the three story levels, one literal and two allegorical, feel like they are about to crumble in and collapse on one another. It was also a questionable choice in the otherwise sound set design by Martelle Hunt to put the screen so high above the actors. Much of the opening dance sequence and character introductions will likely go unseen by audience members who are reading the opening text, and likewise, many important pieces of text shown throughout the production will go unread since there is rarely anything to direct people’s attention all the way up there. This is why Brecht would project his text at the back of the stage, so that it was always in view. Also, despite all the text, the self-aware jokes and the intentional breaking of character, there is one Brechtian technique that Rouse uses only very sparingly: bright lighting. There is a brief moment where the entire theatre is strongly illuminated and an awkward false curtain call plays out, but, for the most part, Rob Sowinski and Bryn Cullen’s lighting design is surprisingly traditional, putting the audience at a very comfortable distance and ultimately making the viewing experience too passive for this sort of material. Part of the intention of a show like this is to disorientate the audience, to pull them out of the story and keep the focus on the message, but until the very end of the play, the message within the message tends to make the space outside the story just as murky as the story itself. Fortunately though, each time both the narrative and its social significance become unstable, there are always the characters to fall back on. One of Brecht’s greatest inconsistencies was that, despite his frequent postulations on the importance of emotional distance, he had an irrepressible knack for writing vivid and endearing characters. Here we have the ruthless Ernesto Roma (Peter Paltos), Ui’s tough mentor in crime who turned a spineless common thief into a deadly rabble-rouser with the nerve to eventually kill him. In a “parable play” that draws heavily on Shakespeare, and even goes as far as flat-out copying a few scenes from Richard III, Roma, and his real life counterpart Ernst Röhm, are both the Banquo and the Lady Macbeth in Ui and Hitlers’ origin stories. Paltos not only masters his menacing presence, but, with the right makeup on, he also happens to look a lot like Laurence Olivier. Of course, the other standout characterisation here is Ui himself. Banders certainly has the right stuff and isn’t afraid to get up close and personal with the audience while in character. He consciously breaks the fourth wall in a glorious moment of theatrical self-reference and, in one scene, he impressively manages a dexterous run through the audience. Thanks to the talents of Banders, Paltos, Brecht and Rouse, the great anti-hero and his seedy keeper have a life beyond the confines of the allegories, something they probably weren’t supposed to have in theory, but in practice is really what allows this piece to work as a two-hour play. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

Phil Rouse decides to introduce his production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with a very peculiar sight: some slides of Elizabethan text hover above our very skilled ensemble as they are all club dancing to ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s one of those audacious mixes of the highbrow classical and the lowbrow modern that the theatre world can never get enough of. Arturo Ui (played here by George Banders), the fictional Chicagoan crime lord, is of course Bertolt Brecht’s parodic and blatantly allegorical version of Adolf Hitler, rendered comprehensible for an American audience in 1941. Since the play took 22 years to make it to Broadway, it has only ever been performed in front of already well-versed audiences, and never as an introductory education on the history of Nazi Germany. Before they’ve even sat down, this 2016 Australian audience will already hate the infamous dictator just as much as the play’s 1963 American audience would have, but their prior knowledge of Brecht and Epic theatre will be less certain. In this production, Rouse bombards the audience with countless lines of text for the same purpose that Brecht once did: to give the audience all the facts they need to follow the allegory and understand his message, without being “distracted” by the fictional story he is telling. In contemporary theatre making this is known as heavy-handedness, but in the 1920s the idea of using theatre to shamelessly recruit people as political activists was a novel and exciting one. However, even today Rouse gets away with it by embracing this style of alienating the audience from the pathos of the story, and by having his own anti-right wing political agenda to parade around. The text on the screen and a handful of throwaway lines make it abundantly clear that Donald Trump is the politician he is truly taking aim at, with the original Hitler allegory itself becoming an allegory for a much more contemporary issue. There is also another, much more subtle comparison made between the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis, which interestingly is pulled off without the assistance of the fact slides. However, there are times when the three story levels, one literal and two allegorical, feel like they are about to crumble in and collapse on one another. It was also a questionable choice in the otherwise sound set design by Martelle Hunt to put the screen so high above the actors. Much of the opening dance sequence and character introductions will likely go unseen by audience members who are reading the opening text, and likewise, many important pieces of text shown throughout the production will go unread since there is rarely anything to direct people’s attention all the way up there. This is why Brecht would project his text at the back of the stage, so that it was always in view. Also, despite all the text, the self-aware jokes and the intentional breaking of character, there is one Brechtian technique that Rouse uses only very sparingly: bright lighting. There is a brief moment where the entire theatre is strongly illuminated and an awkward false curtain call plays out, but, for the most part, Rob Sowinski and Bryn Cullen’s lighting design is surprisingly traditional, putting the audience at a very comfortable distance and ultimately making the viewing experience too passive for this sort of material. Part of the intention of a show like this is to disorientate the audience, to pull them out of the story and keep the focus on the message, but until the very end of the play, the message within the message tends to make the space outside the story just as murky as the story itself. Fortunately though, each time both the narrative and its social significance become unstable, there are always the characters to fall back on. One of Brecht’s greatest inconsistencies was that, despite his frequent postulations on the importance of emotional distance, he had an irrepressible knack for writing vivid and endearing characters. Here we have the ruthless Ernesto Roma (Peter Paltos), Ui’s tough mentor in crime who turned a spineless common thief into a deadly rabble-rouser with the nerve to eventually kill him. In a “parable play” that draws heavily on Shakespeare, and even goes as far as flat-out copying a few scenes from Richard III, Roma, and his real life counterpart Ernst Röhm, are both the Banquo and the Lady Macbeth in Ui and Hitlers’ origin stories. Paltos not only masters his menacing presence, but, with the right makeup on, he also happens to look a lot like Laurence Olivier. Of course, the other standout characterisation here is Ui himself. Banders certainly has the right stuff and isn’t afraid to get up close and personal with the audience while in character. He consciously breaks the fourth wall in a glorious moment of theatrical self-reference and, in one scene, he impressively manages a dexterous run through the audience. Thanks to the talents of Banders, Paltos, Brecht and Rouse, the great anti-hero and his seedy keeper have a life beyond the confines of the allegories, something they probably weren’t supposed to have in theory, but in practice is really what allows this piece to work as a two-hour play. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There is of course an old adage that comedy equals tragedy, plus time. In the case of Cholai, Arun Roy's black comedy about the Bengali hooch fatalities in 2011, not much time apparently is needed for us to be laughing about the thousands of deaths caused by a bad batch of illegal home liquor. Cholai is the local common name for this strongly addictive, very cheap and very lucrative brew. The Bengali government and law enforcement have been known to turn a blind eye to its distribution, until, as it is told in the film at least, the wife of a manufacturer accidentally tampers with the mixture. She only finds out that the results were toxic after it has sold and consumed across the entire village, killing nearly 200 of its most valued middle-aged male drunks. Roy is supremely cynical in his depiction of this tragedy. The death scenes themselves are presented in a cold yet absurd fashion, one that suggests that the men had it coming, that they deserve their punishment for poisoning their minds and body with illicit substances. Their deaths are dealt with very quickly, as Roy is itching to get to the crux of the story: the fallout. The government is of course pressured for a simple explanation and a quick response. They are lightning-quick to offer compensation for the victims’ families, which they hope will also stop all of the questions. The media, of course, spreads this information as far as it possibly can, along with every juicy, gruesome detail about the crisis that they can get their hands on. Where facts are sparse, they clutch at straws to get something that sounds newsworthy. The movies usually portrays television news in one of two ways: docudrama realism or fanciful parody. Cholai definitely does the latter. It judges the media as cruelly as it lambasts the government, but not without a sense of fun. Much of the film is very episodic and emotionally detached from its own story. After the effects of the chemical blunder have fanned out far beyond the small village where this all started, every second scene seems to be a self-contained vignette that tears a particular aspect of Bengali society. It would have probably been too messy to squash all of Roy’s criticisms into the main story, so this colourful collection of hit-and-miss subplots feels like the best way to get in some extra jabs at the region’s welfare system, health care, economy and even a confusingly patriarchal women’s protest movement. For good measure, Roy also throws in some scenes on a bus route frequented by a handful of amateur social commentators, who all seem to be the director’s mouthpieces as they express their profound disillusionment with the present state of the region. There are a few political subplots in particular that leave a strong impression, in terms of both message and story: those that show the families attempting to exploit the bureaucracy around compensation for their own personal gain, and those that reveal the media’s penchant for milking sympathy for a reformed sinner. However, quite a few of Roy’s statements do get lost in all of the chaos. Without the usual cinematic oxygen of emotional investment, some of the longer vignettes are very quick to run out of fuel. Fortunately, there is a consistent thread in the actions and reactions of the cholai manufacturer, Natah, and his wife, Bishu, who started this entire mess. Funnily enough, the two perpetrators are the characters that come out relatively unscathed by Roy’s fierce social satire. He seems to respect their intelligence more than those of the other characters (which still isn’t saying very much though). As mere inhabitants of this farcically defective society, these two are not painted as shameless opportunists, but more as perceptive people with enough common sense to know that they should take something if it is practically being handed to them by people who can well afford to have it taken from them. Unlike Natah’s honest, hardworking brother, whose decency has never been interesting enough to win him fame and fortune, Natah and Bishu are quick to spot and seize the unscrupulous shortcut to success that is staring them in the face. Cholai has a lot of fun delivering uncomfortable truths such as these. By not asking its audience to really care about the characters it puts forward, it has nothing to lose by being as exaggerated and ridiculous as it wants to be, except perhaps the consistent interest of its audience. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

La Mama’s P.O.V. Dave is essentially a film noir play about a retiring press photographer who gets more than he bargained for with his last assignment. It definitely shows that most of playwright/producer Noel Maloney’s background is in screenwriting as he takes on the kind of story and genre that is much more acquainted with the screen than with the stage. Dave’s profession as a merchant of dirty secrets working for his heartless editor, Bronwyn, has finally driven away his beloved wife, Susan (both played brilliantly by Eleanor Howlett) and, now that one of his assignments has driven a young girl to suicide, this job could also destroy his relationship with his son, Jack (the talented young Jude Katsianis) if he should ever find out. He plans to get out after getting one last fat paycheque that will set him up until he finds a more respectable job. He just has to get a few compromising shots of a sleazy priest named Kevin (Gabriel Partingon), although it turns that he and his saccharine wife Kathryn (Annie Lumsden) have been playing this game for some time and have long known how to win. All of this is depicted in a long series of flashbacks that Dave is experiencing in his dying moments on a train. As such, much of the story is told through narration delivered by Dave, who is both our dying man looking back on how he ended up here and our jaded film noir detective whose gloomy inner psyche the piece is delving into. This is what Maloney turns to whenever he wants to write in a Hitchcockian scene that doesn’t translate so well to the stage. Strangely though, it’s also where he puts many moments that probably would have worked more powerfully if they were played out in full. Even though occasionally it offers a special insight into Dave’s thoughts, it’s still a rather clunky storytelling device, as is the overused framing of the wretched man’s life flashing before his eyes as he faces an untimely death. What makes it work much better than it probably should is the inspired performance of Keith Brockett as Dave. Brockett is certainly not the typical film noir anti-hero, and as far as dying wretched men go, he is certainly one of the more interesting and entertaining ones. Brockett has such a powerful stage presence and has so finely perfected his characterisations of short, bumbling, amusing yet complex characters that Dave’s overindulgent amounts of dialogue are still a joy and a fascination to listen to. The same goes for the rest of the cast, who populate this familiar narrative landscape with characters that feel wonderfully fresh and exciting. Dave’s family, including his fading father (Peter Stratford) are the true emotional backbone and moral centre of the story. They definitely feel like a family worth fighting for, and their characterisations are much fuller than those of most of their cinematic counterparts. The seedy editor, Bronwyn, whose scenes are all angry phone conversations with Dave, is the kind of boss character you would only hear and never see if this was a film. However, director Beng Oh more than makes do with having Howlett perform her lines with her back to the audience and a cigarette in her hand. Partington and Lumsden, as the creepy priest and his manipulative wife, are two very striking villains and the perfect foil to the naïve Dave and Susan. The final theatrical touch that enlivens the story and compensates for the clichés is Christina Logan-Bell’s staging and Tom Backhaus’ sound design. Just like the lead performances, the bookending scenes on the train that show Dave’s gruesome death manage are dramatized as an incredibly immersive fusion of the realism of the cinema and the hyperrealism of the theatre, which is what Maloney seems to have been aiming for in his writing. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

234 years after Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les liaisons dangereuses was published, and 31 years after the premier production of its stage adaptation by Christopher Hampton, this new production from Little Ones Theatre comes to Melbourne as a fresh and lively piece of contemporary theatre. Those who've studied the novel will certainly appreciate how director Stephen Nicolazzo has captured the sardonic spirit of the French aristocracy, while newcomers will surely be enticed into discovering more about it all. Most importantly though, this sojourn amongst the affairs of the French court has a meanly entertaining story to tell and the courage to tell it like it was. It was a world where wit and amoral intellect was the currency of the day, ruled by those whose minds were as nimble as their bodies and even more adept at vigorous intercourse, but whose hearts were held in as tightly as their bladders. Amazingly, Nicolazzo, and indeed his nearly all-female cast, are daring enough to match the intensity of the vocal sparring with raunchy nude scenes of masochistic intimacy, sights that are capable of shocking today's audiences as much as the sounds of blasphemy would have shocked 18th century audiences. He introduces his audience to this arena with an onslaught of ridiculous wigs, pasty white faces, exaggerated mannerisms, opulent set design from Eugyeene Teh and a robot-like match of Four in a Row. Here the original Connect Four is spruced up with some video game sound effects, just as the rest of the play is peppered with interludes of modern pop music. While it's certainly been done before, and not always well, the songs are well chosen to illustrate a battle between the two finest players in the great game of courtship. Representing men, we have the seductive Vicomte de Valmont (Zoe Boesen), and on the side of women we have the decadent Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (Alexandra Uldrich). The two of them look to be evenly matched in cunning, arrogance and education. They court each other for pride and amusement, just as they carry on affairs with countless others as a form of recreation and competition. Their relationship is the classic on-and-off mix of love and hate, of devotion and indifference. Both actors are outstanding as these familiar archetypes that, through the immediacy of live theatre, are given new life. Boesen is as convincing as she needs to be in the part of a man. It turns out to be quite an inspired casting choice, seeing as many of the characteristics that are now considered feminine would have been regarded as masculine in the French salons. On the other hand, the Vicomte's valet, Azolan, is played by Tom Dent, who towers over Boesen as something of a gentle giant at first, before the Vicomte comes to realise how much he underestimated him. As the Marquise, Aldrich somehow manages to switch between, comical, despicable, likeable and moving with the speed of a lighting change. Her endlessly expressive face, richly intoned voice and slick movements make her a consistently fascinating character to watch, even when the main scene is happening elsewhere. The Vicomte's latest challenge, to court the devoutly Catholic and chronically morose Cécile de Volanges (Brigid Gallacher), forms the crux of a narrative that exposes the naiveties of both characters. The Vicomte believes that his heart can be contained again after it has been let loose, that you can control love and prevent love from controlling you. A parodic performance of Felix Jaehn's 'Ain't Nobody (Loves me better)' succinctly captures the Vicomte's delusions about these two of the many women in his life. While his twisted love for the Marquise is sold successfully by Hampton's writing and by Aldrich and Boesen's peformances, the love he eventually comes to feel for Cécile is not given enough time or breathing space to feel real, and certainly not enough to surmount the trite baggage that this plot line has garnered over the centuries. Fortunately, the Marquise's hard-learned lesson that emotions cannot always be suppressed for the sake of the game is a much more convincing character arc. A playful karaoke of Whitney Houston's 'I'm Every Woman' is similarly effective at signaling the universality of the Marquise's doomed attempt to fight with, and not against, the sexism of her world, to win at a game that has always been rigged against her gender instead of seeking to change the rules. The only music that doesn't quite fit is the funk tune that plays over a certain duel scene, one that felt like it was meant to be the climax, but ended up being a slow build-up to a fierce contest that never eventuates. One of the most common problems with many tragicomedies, is that they often make promises they can't keep. However, thanks to the talent of the creative team, and the strong establishment of its setting and main characters, Dangerous Liaisons delivers on most of the comedic payoffs it spends time developing in its first act, and remembers to set up most of the dramatic payoffs it launches itself into during the second act. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

For any fans of the fantasy genre, Bhaskar Hazarika's Kothanodi is a great entry point into this year’s Indian Film Festival. For anyone's who's not as keen on swords, dragons and castles, this adaptation of four classic Assamese folk tales is not that kind of fantasy movie. Taken from a compendium entitled Burhi Aair Sadhu (Grandma’s Tales) compiled by Lakshminath Bezbaroa, the stories all have a maternal relationship at their centre and a different harsh truth to deliver about motherhood. The story of Malati, and her husband Poonai, is perhaps the harshest of all. They are a childless couple, but only because Poonai's mystical uncle has told his nephew to kill each of the three babies that Malati has given birth to. Poonai promised his father on his deathbed that he would always follow his uncle's counsel, however difficult it might be. The film's opening scene shows Poonai taking their third screaming infant into the dark forest and burying it alive. It's an unexpectedly horrifying introduction to the world of this film, but one that sets the tone right from the outset. The murder is depicted in a way that is dark and confounding, but not gruesome or gratuitous. It operates within the familiar frame of folk tale logic, and in a very recognisable fantasy setting. While Poonai and Malati are naturally disheartened by what they've had to sacrifice, they are not as traumatised as they would be if this film was striving for realism. Nevertheless, the once again pregnant Malati is determined to keep this next child, no matter what Poonai's uncle says. However, her feeling changes when he eventually shows her a vision of what would have happened if she'd kept her other children.  While the rest of the stories don't start off quite as gruesomely, one way or another they all end up in quite a violent place. The tale of Keteki, a woman who has given birth to a fruit, begins less shockingly but just as strangely. A friendly traveller named Devinath tells her that there is in fact a human son inside the fruit, one who loves his mum as much as any child does but who doesn’t fee safe enough to come out of his shell and into the world. As you can imagine, Keteki is simultaneously overjoyed at this discovery and overcome with maternal guilt. The image of her walking around with her elephant apple rolling behind her is so unashamedly bizarre and eventually so emotionally charged that it works. No doubt much of this production’s local audience would have grown up with these stories and have no impulse to question their believability. As for international audiences such as Australia, surely they will respect a film that feels no need to explain itself too much.  The stories are told with an effective mix of fantasy and magical realism. When Devinath guides Keteki through a ritual that will draw out her son, she certainly reacts as though she is watching something otherworldly. It is definitely the film's most fantastical scene, and yet we still feel that we are in the same "real" world where more mundane happenings are taking place. Keteki’s neighbours react to her fruit child with surprise, but not disbelief. They think she is a witch, and a dangerous one. If it’s her they’re afraid of, they should really meet the other two mothers we see here. While Malati and Keteki are the two understatedly sympahetic characters, the domineering Doneshwari and evil stepmother Senehi are our gloriously fearsome villains. Doneshwari, we hear, has been tricked by a cunning python into selling her daughter's hand in marriage.  He managed to conceal his species from Doneshwari until just after the deal was made, but she is not at all aggrieved. She has heard tell of a girl in a nearby village who was also married off to a python. Apparently the morning after the marriage was consummated she woke up dressed in finery and covered with money, so Doneshwari is convinced that her daughter’s marriage will be a very prosperous union. The snake's con happens offscreen, as Hazarika, who wrote and directed the film, very wisely doesn't go so far as showing us a talking snake. The fact that we only ever see him doing things that a real python would do makes Doneshwari appear all the more deluded and self-centred. That said, the avaricious matriarch has nothing on our evil stepmother, Senehi, who also happens to be Devinath's second wife. She is bitterly envious of the special connection between her new husband and his sweet young daughter. She feels incapable of competing with such a strong familial bond, and decides she wants her stepdaughter gone. The final straw is when the girl borrows , without permission, the dress that used to owned by Senehi's deceased mother. While Devinath is off travelling and helping Keteki connect with her withdrawn child, he has unknowingly left his own child at the mercy of a woman who has resolved to kill her. The film's title roughly translates to "dark waters" in English. On its surface, Kothanodi simply looks like a dark but entertaining mix of traditional fables. While it does conjure a sense of curiosity about what fates these characters will eventually meet, they are all quite clearly illustrations of different vices and virtues. However, Hazarika manages to infuse most of these cautionary tales with a contemporary relevance. The story of a woman who must decide whether or not to keep her child, and who is sick of having men make that decision for her, is anything but otherworldly. There are also many children who are born living in their own little world that they never want to leave, something their mothers sadly can't help but take personally. Unfortunately, there are also still many matchmaking mothers around the world who will turn a blind eye to an abusive son-in-law if he is rich enough.  The odd one out here is the wicked stepmother, who just doesn't have the same social resonance as the other three. As memorable as she is, and even though the real world does actually have a few resentful step-parents, hers is a story that feels overrepresented, especially in folk tales. Nevertheless, she is a delightful addition to what is still a deep and varied exploration of what it means to be a mother, and how hard it is to be a good one. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

To say that The New Girl in Class is the weakest offering of the Indian Film Festival would be something of an understatement. Amrita Dasgupta's documentary on the life of a 9-year-old autistic girl is certainly never boring, but for all of the wrong reasons. The story that Dasgupta wants to tell and the story that she has actually documented are so embarrassingly different that the end result approaches the so-bad-it's-good territory. It is so perfect a manual on how not to represent autism that it is, in its own way, highly informative. Roshni is the new girl in question. Her mother, Neeraja, has fought hard to finally get her daughter into a mainstream school. However, she doesn't just want her daughter to get the same opportunities as her non-autistic classmates: she wants her to become them. She wants Roshni to stop flapping her hands, cycling through repetitive actions, and playing with her own saliva (although that last one is certainly justified). She wants her to play ball sports, to play with her toys “appropriately,” just like the other children do. She describes the feeling of grief that she and unfortunately many other parents feel upon receiving an autism diagnosis for their child. Her husband, Shubhashish, talks about it being one of those things that you know happens to other families but never think will happen to yours, about wondering why it had to happen to his family. Listening to them both, you'd think that Roshni had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Shubhashish says that it gets easier, that the reality eventually sinks in. Neeraja says that she has accepted that autism will be with her daughter for life, that Roshni is not and never will be a typical child, and yet she is trying to make her as close to one as she can. She talks about wanting her daughter to become independent and socially connected, and yet there is never a moment at home, or even at school, where Roshni doesn't have her mother with her. When Roshni isn't at home or at school, she is attending Applied Behavioural Analysis therapy sessions that are designed to make her act like a non-autistic child, whatever the cost. Of course, it's easy to see where Roshni's parents are coming from. They want their daughter to be happy, healthy and successful, and autism, like many things, is excluded from the mainstream picture of happiness, health and success. Neeraja rejoiced when Roshni was walking and talking sooner than the other children, but panics as soon as her little girl starts falling behind in the race. Autism might now be widely known, but it is still sparsely understood. It is something that Neeraja had probably heard about but never given a second thought until Roshni was diagnosed. Now she is desperately playing catch-up. She is trying do the right thing. She is researching like crazy, but the immense ocean of literature out there is overwhelming, even to those who’ve been learning about it all their life, simply because just about everyone seems to have something to say about autism. For Neeraja, what floats to the surface is what speaks to what she has already been taught to want for her child: for her to be normal, but not average; special, but not "special". Autism research and services is a huge, lucrative business. There is naturally a lot of money to be made in telling parents that their neurodiverse child is broken, and that you know how to fix them. Similarly, there is much acclaim to be won from making a documentary about a heroic mother on a quest to rescue her child from the disability of the week. What is much harder to sell is acceptance, accessibility, and social and systemic change brought about by some long, hard self-reflection. We do hear at least one person politely challenge Neeraja’s quest. In the closest thing this film has to a climax, where Neeraja finds out if her daughter has passed her first year at her new school, Roshni’s wise school principal reminds her that every child learns at their own pace and in their own way. Sadly though, her tiny bit of screen time is too little, too late. We see interviews conducted with Roshni’s beleaguered parents, her strict therapists, her bewildered classmates, and even her twin sister, Srishti, who knows about Roshni’s diagnosis, but not one of them is taken with Roshni herself. This means that countless important questions are never answered, or even addressed. What does Roshni want? What are her interests? What does she enjoy doing? What does she think of her classmates? What does she think of her new school? How does she feel about having her mum at school with her all day, every day? If her sister knows about her diagnosis, does Roshni also know? Did she overhear it? Did she figure it out? How does she feel about it? Why is it hard for her to focus on playing a ball game? Is it really because she has a short attention span, as her father thinks, or does she just not like playing ball sports? Why does she like playing with her toys differently? What stories is she creating in her head? Why does she sometimes lash out at people? Is it because she feels overwhelmed? Frustrated? Threatened? Scared? Does she know that Srishti discloses her diagnosis and life story to anyone who asks about her? Does she mind her doing that? Is Srishti accurate in her accounts of her sister’s experiences and feelings? Are her parents’ accounts accurate? As both a biography of Roshni and a documentary on autism, The New Girl in Class really shoots itself in the foot, not just by jumping the gun with its production and restricting itself to the first 9 years of her life, but also, more significantly, by not giving Roshni or any other autistic person the space to be heard. Roshni is made the object, not the subject, of what is supposed to be her own documentary. Instead of hearing from actually autistic people about the realities of being on the spectrum, we are stuck listening to closed-minded non-autistic people making uneducated guesses and getting just about everything wrong. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

To anyone who's been holding out for a good theatrical sequel, Roberto Aguire Sacasa's Abigail/1702 is the latest member of that rare species. Picking up 10 years from the ending of its predecessor, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Sacasa plucks out Miller's two-faced antagonist, Abigail Williams, and turns her into a very successful protagonist. The past decade has transformed the jealous young girl into a desperately puritanical young woman. Once a fierce denouncer in the Salem witch trials who sent 20 people to their deaths over a tumultuous affair with John Proctor, the married man she once worked for, she now lives on a farm in Boston. She has abandoned her now infamous name and adopted the new identity of a god-fearing farmer and nurse, which she hopes will drive away Satan's hold on her. So far she has been successful. After all these years of living in a modest little hut, surrounded by dense forest and countless iron crosses, the Devil has not come to reclaim her. However, the arrival of a handsome wounded sailor, who is ironically named John Brown, is enough to stir up feelings that she has thus far been able to suppress. Their attraction to each other is palpable, as much as Abigail might deny it, but she certainly hasn't forgotten the last time she gave in to a man's insistence on bedding her, and not least because both men share the same first name. Abigail/1702 reveals that John Proctor, the protagonist of The Crucible, forced himself upon Abigal the first time that they slept together, even though their later encounters were apparently consensual. While John Brown never physically violates her, he is not about to take no for answer. He scoffs at her choice of chastity, and declares, to the shock of the audience, that "a woman who is not a wife or a mother is only half a woman." Although, thanks to Abigail, John's wife, Elizabeth Proctor, is now a widow with no surviving children, and looks at most like half a woman when Abigail comes to see her in a desperate attempt to set things right. The Crucible's account of the absurd Salem witch-hunt was famously allegorical, with its real target being the anti-communist paranoia that Senator McCarthy was still stirring up when it was first performed. However, Sacasa's sequel does not continue this focus. Its social commentary is much more visible at the surface, but arguably just as contemporary. While it is remarkable how seamlessly our old spiteful villain has transitioned into a sympathetic tragic heroine, there is no denying that she is still up to her old tricks. She is still doing selfish things for purportedly selfless and pious reasons. Her intentions are good, but they are nowhere near as pure as she tells herself. Her interest in redeeming herself, in healing the sick and in caring for orphans only started when she found out that the Devil was in hot pursuit of her. Swinging between extremes is the only way she knows how to survive. When she is not destroying every life in sight, she is trying to save them all. When she is not entering into abusive love affairs, she is abstaining from all sexual acts. Whatever she tries, it never works for long. Boutique Theatre has added their own special touch to the play's premier Australian production. At the bottom of the staircase leading up to the theatre, each guest is offered a small wheat biscuit. At the top of the stairs, they are offered a thimble cup full of either wine or blackcurrant juice. As they go through the big double doors to take their seats, the usher collects their empty cup and warns them that this 'communion' "may not save your soul." Just like this play's depiction of the Devil, who surprisingly is present as a character here, this elaborate welcome strikes the right balance between campy and caustic. Abigail/1702 feels just as cruel as its predecessor, but it is also much more playful. Abigail's sins might have been forgiven, but they certainly have not been forgotten. There is a sadistic sense of inevitability to Abigail's great punishment, as it would seem that not only circumstance but also her nature have always been against her. Under Elizabeth's excellent direction, the cast of this production do a fine job of creating either complex or more cartoonish characters well called upon, just as the special effects team have a good sense of when to make things stylised and certainly know when and how to make things look realistic. Emma Caldwell is particularly impressive as Abigail and Jessica Tanner leaves an especially strong impression as the wounded Elizabeth. Nick Casey's forest-inspired set design is the perfect landscape for these haunting figures to prowl about in and the thrust theatre staging literally gives every audience member a different perspective on the action. Depending on where they are seated, some character reactions may be obscured while others happen in plain view. There is no level playing field for these characters as they each receive their judgement. Sacasa has also written a fair bit for the screen, which shows here in the way he takes his cues from some of the best cinematic sequels as he crafts this follow-up to Arthur Miller's classic play. He draws on the most interesting story points of The Crucible while still having his own story to tell and his own messages to send. As such, Abigail/1702 is not only a fitting continuation of the original story, but it also works solidly as a standalone piece. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Never underestimate the power of a child's imagination. Children often understand much more than we think about our adult world. When confronted with something complex and scary, they seize upon what they do know and invent like crazy to fill in what they don't know. This is something every great children's storyteller understands, and something that I certainly hope first-time feature director Simon Rouby never loses sight of. His debut, Adama, takes on the task of showing the horrors of the battle at Verdun, one of the worst of the entire First World War, to a primary school audience. What helps enormously is that his titular protagonist is the same age as the people who will be watching him. Adama (voiced by Azize Diabaté Abdoulaye) is the plucky adventure-loving hero of this particular kids’ animation. He and his family live in a village in West Africa that is surrounded by lush vegetation, freshwater rivers and towering cliffs. His older brother, Samba (Jack Mba), has been his best friend and playmate for as long as he can remember, but now the time has come for Samba to become a man, with the heavy responsibility of putting food on the family table. However, his initiation ceremony is interrupted by the appearance of a seagull flying overhead, a bad omen. The ritual is halted, and this dark sign turns out to be very prophetic. Samba is offered a bag of cold coins by the recruiting "Nassaras," to travel to France and fight in the army. He accepts, determined to be his own man instead of the man his father has always told him he has to be. He tells Adama, on the night that he runs away, that he'll understand when it's his turn to leave childhood behind, and gives him the bag of gold. Right now, Adama doesn't understand in the slightest. He hears his parents talking about the terrible fate that awaits all those travelling to the front, but refuses to believe that his brother can't be saved. He too runs away from the village, taking the gold so he can return it to the Nassaras and have his brother back. An adult audience might view this as a cute but tragic story of a naive boy on a well-intentioned fool's errand, but a child probably has no reason to think his plan won't work. The genius of Rouby's direction of Julien Lilti's original story, co-written for the screen by Bénédicte Galup is that, on Adama's long journey, some of his wonderment will be shared with the young audience while other parts of it will seem very strange to them at first. After he has been walking for some time and arrives at the coast near his village, he thirstily slurps up a mouthful of seawater that he of course very quickly spits back out. This is the very first time that he has seen the ocean, a scene that really drives home to a Western audience how different his life has been from theirs, and yet also how similarly they both would react to seeing something for the first time. The same goes for Adama's first look at a White person, a mirthless military official on board a ship just like the one that would have taken Samba away, a faceless spectre looking more like a mannequin than a man. This figure is also rendered in 2D animation, along with the backgrounds and the crowds, while the characters in the foreground are animated in 3D. Any character that emerges from the nameless throng sheds their watercolour texture and gains a striking definition that also highlights their facial imperfections. The digital imaging, combined with the skilful clay sculpting by Michel Lauricella,, gives these characters a sharp yet jerky appearance, one that's lifelike without trying to be photorealistic. By the time we, and Adama, get to Verdun, and start seeing bombs, horrific injuries and lethal gas, the adults and teenagers in the room will definitely know that this storyworld is partly a fantasy, but one that rings true on an emotional level. Young children may not necessarily find the story as fanciful, in fact this may well be the most intense film they will have ever seen, but the animation is certainly a good cue for them not to take this at face value. Whilst they will surely identify with Adama, share his frustration with the adults in his life, feel the urgency of his quest and be just as afraid of its many dangers, I think they will also have a sense that everything is going to be alright in the end. They'll recognise staple kids film characters, like the streetwise sidekick, the eccentric wise old homeless man who is vaguely magical (Pascal N'Zonzi), and that one stuffy grownup that eventually comes around to helping our young hero (Oxmo Puccino, who also writes and performs a beautiful piece of slam poetry that is heard during the end credits). Together, all of them will reassure younger viewers that this is a fable, one where courage and kindness are rewarded, war or no war. Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

The 1966 book Hitchcock/Truffaut was as intriguing and exciting a read as its title suggested. Based on Francois Truffaut's 8-day interview with Alfred Hitchcock, it offered readers the chance to feel like a fly on the wall for the meeting of two of the most avant-garde film directors of the decade. At the time of their meeting at Hitchcock's Universal Studios office in 1962, the British auteur had recently released his fortieth feature, the hugely successful Psycho, while the young man from across the chanel had completed his directorial debut, The 400 blows, only 3 years ago. Hitchcock was arguably more open and generous with Truffaut than he was with any of his press interviewers, which was surely a testament to the depth of their shared love and understanding of the art form they were both dedicating their lives to. Present day filmmaker Kent Jones is evidently on this same level of cinematic appreciation. His documentary, which shares the same title as Truffaut's book, is much more than just a companion piece. This is partly because it is one thing to read a transcript of this mysterious conversation, but it is quite another thing to hear a recording of the exchange, to absorb the nuances of the interaction that took place through a French-English interpreter. This coupled with the pictures that were taken from the meeting almost make you feel that you are in that office with them. More importantly though, Jones has invited some of the most interesting, influential working filmmakers of the day to discuss how the “Master of Suspense" has inspired them and what they have admired most about his work. Bringing on board the likes of David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Martin Scorsese is no small feat. It is unfortunately a very homogeneous group, an all-white, all-male ensemble cast, sometimes saying very similar things. The lack of diversity is certainly felt strongly towards the end, when the conversation turns towards Psycho and Vertigo. As interesting and insightful as these men are, there are some perspectives they simply don't have. French director Olivier Assayas has plenty to say about the New Wave cinema of Truffaut's time, Scorsese is the ideal person to comment on on the history of the crime genre and on the nature of a directing career that spans several decades, but no one seems very well equipped to discuss the characters played by Janet Leigh or Kim Novak. It feels very strange for there to be no thorough discussion of the director's trademark casting of blonde actresses in roles that were much more femme fatale than ingenue. When it comes to Vertigo, the interviewees excel at describing how it harks back to the pure cinema of the silent era and how its impact extends far beyond its mediocre opening weekend, but their examination of the lead female is very a much a male perspective on Hitchcock's male perspective on the Jimmy Stewart character's male perspective of her character. An informed critique of the Hitchcockian blondes should really be sitting alongside this documentary's great sections on the man's famous fear of police and his often quoted belief that "actors are cattle." This documentary is excellent at providing the context surrounding this statement and the background to that very recurrent theme of false criminal suspicion. Cinema Nova will be screening Hitchcock/Truffaut from July 14, a week before the beginning of their upcoming festival featuring most of the highlights from Hitchcock's filmography. It will be opening with the 1954 drawing room thriller Dial M For Murder, in 3D funnily enough. When this little tidbit was announced at the critics screening I attended, the fellow next to me cried "oh Fuck off!" I wonder if that was Hitchcock's response when Warner Brothers told him to shoot it in 3D, or when he found out that they actually released it that way, or even when they asked him to make it. This wasn't a project he chose, he was under contract, and indeed, it is difficult to imagine him choosing this one for himself, despite it having the word "murder" in the title. Hitchcock/Truffaut purported that you could watch any Hitchcock film with the sound on mute and still understand 90% of what was happening. This film might just be the exception to that rule. It's definitely one of the most dialogue-heavy and dialogue-driven films that he made, with suitable theatrical performances from every member of the cast. It was quite obviously an adaptation of a play, in this case written by Frederick Knott. It follows the diabolical plot of a jealous husband (Ray Milland) to murder his wealthy adulterous wife (Grace Kelly) in order to get her money, a plan that of course goes terribly wrong. As tends to happen with plays, this one takes place almost entirely in one room, inside the couple's apartment. However, rather than being restricted creatively by the setting, Hitchcock of course knew how to work with this claustrophobia rather than against it in this very different medium. This film is also a prime example of another of his great skills that the documentary points out, his knowledge of when to draw out a moment that would normally fly by an instant, and when to contract an event we are used to seeing being played long. A devastating murder trial is one such moment, naturally because it is this film's centrepiece of the staple false conviction theme, the perfect opportunity to fully demonise the character of Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams), before it is shown that me might not actually be all that bad as far as policemen in Hitchcock films go. The conviction scene appears more like a psychedelic dream than a reality. As such it is one of the few dated parts of this now 62 year old film. As is also observed in the documentary, his films really haven't dated at all since they're very much human stories that aren't focused on any particular time period. Meanwhile, the scene of the pivotal telephone call of the title is markedly extended, to the point where we even see the lines being connected in the control room. The murder scene that immediately follows is naturally of the high standard that you would expect from this director, and was clearly the scene that was most important to him. However, the rest of the film is also well-paced and absolutely engrossing, even as Knott's writing becomes more gleefully convoluted by the second. This detailed documentary and uproarious crime thriller are both perfect for whetting your appetite before seeing North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window and all the others on the big screen. Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

La Mama Theatre is an ideal place to host the Australian premiere production of Lars Noren’s Courage to Kill. This tense two-hander, sometimes three-hander, from Sweden’s most celebrated playwright definitely works best in an intimate venue. It is one of those many plays that take place entirely in a domestic setting, in this case inside a young man’s apartment that he is forced to share with his father. While in some plays this makes the home seem like a bigger, grander place for having been the site of so much drama, Noren, and indeed set designer Charlotte Lane make it feel as though the walls are closing in on its inhabitants, largely because those walls are covered in sticky-taped newspaper clippings that keep being added to. As the audience takes their seats, director Richard Murphet places the son, Eric (Luke Mulquiney) at his desk and has him sort through the clippings while smoking a cigarette, in the manner of the classic film noir detective. He might have the jaded look, the unhealthy lifestyle and the rotating roster of young female lovers, but he’s a self-confessed coward, and a waiter, though a very attentive one apparently. However, none of this hospitality is afforded to his new housemate. His usually absent father, Ernst (Stephen House) has fallen on hard times. With nowhere else to go, Eric takes him in, more as his prisoner than anything else. While Ernst tries to make up for lost time, Eric tries to heal himself by punishing his father for what those years of parental neglect have done to him. Much of the play is a dance between pointing fingers and self-blame, between hurling insults and self-loathing, as the pair of them are sickened by the weakness they see in each other, and even more so when they see that same weakness in themselves. After the interval, Eric’s new exotic young lover, Radka (Tamara Natt), comes to have dinner with them, an event that Ernst has long been looking forward to. With fresh eyes, she witnesses how harsh Eric is with his father, and how manipulative Ernst is with his son. She hears how quickly calm words turn into snarls, which then turn into barking shouts, which then turn into a silence that is finally broken by more calm but wounded words. Their similarities are what strikes Radka the most. In the heat of the moment, Eric struggles to muster the courage, or the nerve, to do the right thing, while Ernst often can’t, or won’t, control his urge to do the wrong thing. Eric couldn’t save a woman he saw being violated because he hesitated before delivering that punch to the head to the man who was attacking her. On the other hand, Ernst, as Radka finds out, would have more likely been the violator. Either way, the same damage is done. She ultimately realises that she is not safe with either of the two sides of this terrible coin. All three cast members do an outstanding job. House is perfect as the ageing failure of a parent who invites both pity and scorn. Natt gives an entertainingly exaggerated performance as the siren-like voice of reason who drives the true selves of these two men right out of their self-righteous exteriors. Malquiney seems also a few steps removed from realism in his portrayal of the unhinged son tormented by the need to make his father proud, even one as flawed and wretched as Ernst is. However, despite the efforts of these fine actors, and the ominous sound design by Adam Casey, this production is inbuilt with a highly melodramatic ending that runs more on poetic logic than character believability, unlike the rest of the play, which is largely realistic. Perhaps it is a fault in Marita Lindholm Gochman’s otherwise solid translation of the original Swedish text, but this play’s abrupt conclusion just doesn’t feel earned. However, if Noren hadn’t forcibly accelerated the proceedings at the end there this production may well have outstayed its welcome. Courage to Kill finishes more or less after it’s said everything it has to say, which is a hell of a lot, and all of it is richly engrossing. Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Our Kind of Traitor may well be the least confusing film adaptation of a John le Carré novel that we are ever going to see. If you enjoy political thrillers but don't exactly the have the head for real, convoluted espionage, Susanna White's film is sure to be the thing for you. Unlike the rather cold and brittle Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, this story of a man about to inform on the Russian mafia has a much stronger human element, one that often even takes precedence over the political machinations, which are explored in unusually sparse detail. Dima (the always brilliant Stellan Skarsgard) wants to defect to Britain, using the central intelligence he has been privy to in order to gain safe passage from the British Secret service for himself, but also, more importantly, his family, whose lives have been threatened by the vengeful new mafia boss, "The Prince" (Grigoriy Dobrygin). MI6 won't officially go anywhere near Dima, but an agent named Hector (a perfectly British Damien Lewis) reaches out to him without official sanction and offers to get him sanctuary, provided the man can give him enough information to bargain with. Dima doesn't want to give the secret service everything he has, everything they need in order to take down The Prince and the treacherous Aubrey Longrigg (Jeremy Northam), only to be left for dead. Hector won't be able to put a strong enough case to the service unless Dima gives him everything he has. To get things past this standstill, Dima reaches out to the holidaying English couple Perry (Ewan McGregor) and Gail (Naomie Harris), who he's only just met but who have already shown themselves to be trustworthy, principled people. He asks them to be present for all the negotiations, to put their safety on the line to ensure the safety of Dima's family. Dima's wife and children, and the thorny question of who should be responsible for their survival, is ultimately the heart of this story. The family themselves all look to Dima, who is not just the self-proclaimed patriarch but also the instigator of all this, to protect them all, and put him down whenever he looks to be failing to fulfil this duty. Dima, and indeed Hector, look to the secret service to fulfil their duty to those who are giving them information at great personal risk, to be better than the criminal organisations they are working to bring down and the oppressive political regimes that they fight against. On the other hand, the service, embodied here by the character of Billy Matlock (Mark Gatiss) is looking to Dima and Hector to give them enough to go on that will ensure that this operation doesn't ruin them. Meanwhile, all of these parties are looking to Perry and Gail to offer the independent assistance they so desperately need. At first the couple echoes the words of the service, that they are not the ones who put Dima's family in this dangerous situation and that it is not their responsiblity to get them out of it, until Hector shows them photos of The Prince's terrible handiwork and cunningly triggers their empathy. The lowly agent is certainly very well versed in the power of personal motivation. Much of his determination to finally bring down Longrigg is personal vendetta after his last attempt to expose the big shark saw his son imprisoned. At least in this adaptation, that particular element of backstory feels a little haphazardly thrown in to humanise his character at the last minute. It's talked about but never really felt. On the other hand, the conflict between Perry and Gail, while very clichéd, is evident visually as well as verbally. White places her two best directed scenes in the first ten minutes of the film. The first is of a grizzly, politically motivated murder by The Prince that perfectly sets up the impetus for the rest of the story, the terrible danger that Dima is fleeing from. The second is a painfully poetic scene of intimacy interrupted by an old wound that Gail is still healing from. It is later revealed that Perry slept with one of his students, and that this trip to Russia was meant to help repair their marriage. There's no denying that this is an overused plot line, but it works because, as with the cruelty of The Prince, we can see it as well as hear about it, and seeing is believing. Hector's grief might not have the space to be shown, but his rage is palpable, both politically and personally. His only scene with the nefarious Longrigg managed to do the most with the least, and his rant to his peers about the world's complacency in running on black market economies is the flm's great dialogue centrepiece. Fans of the more cerebral le Carré adaptations will probably be put off by this one's more emotional bent, but ultimately it makes for a stronger and more memorable cinematic experience. Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Albert Einstein is the latest scientific genius to have lured a scriptwriter into the trap of biography. Jess Newman was clearly intrigued by the mind of the famous theoretical physicist when she started to write the sung-through musical Einstein: Master of the Universe. Watching it, you can feel her yearning to see the world as he saw it, if even for a moment, and to understand what he saw. Her audience, I’m sure, is after the same thing, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is something she either cannot, will not or has lost interest in delivering. This is one of those biopics that gravitates more towards the “man behind the science” than the work itself. The bulk of the story is taken up by Einstein’s younger years at university, starting just after the turn of the century, until he travelled to America in the early 30s. His two marriages are used as a frame for his journey from patent office clerk to Nobel-prize-winning physicist. Mileva Marić, his long-suffering first wife, can only stand his obsession with his theories for so long, and his affair with Elsa Löwenthal is the last straw. Elsa marries the famous man whose mind mystifies her, but the mystery soon loses its novelty as it did with Mileva. There’s only so far you can go with someone who always keeps you on the outer. Ironically, and perhaps even intentionally, the audience feels the same way. Despite the beautiful projection art and animation from Jack Crosby, and Newman’s impassioned tunes and lyrics, Einstein’s inner world remains inaccessible, and its highlighted connections to our human world are just a little too trite, even for a musical. We understand that this is an underdog story, one about an ambitious young man hoping to prove everyone wrong, because we’ve seen those kinds of stories before. The young academic’s contemporaries and rivals are amusing villains in their own right, but the substance of his conflicts with them, the science itself, is not given the space to be understood and appreciated. Much of it is stuffed into the throwaway lines of babble that fill up the more light-hearted comedic songs. Most of the big pathos numbers are set aside for an equally expected story, that of the man who was a great genius but a failure of a husband and father. The more refreshing aspect of this subplot is Mileva, who, as a mathematics student, has much more to offer than Albert gives her credit for. Again, rather like the audience, she wants to be treated as an equal, and is tired of being shut out. She can see that her husband’s head is buzzing with thoughts, but, as she tells him repeatedly, her family cannot live on thoughts. It is not enough just to watch a man sit at his desk and rave about his epiphanies in the vaguest of terms. We need something to take away from it. We want to hear something that we haven’t heard before, or at least something that we haven’t heard so many times before. In this regard, it seems as though Newman simply made the mistake of picking the wrong years to focus on. While Einstein’s early career might not have offered much original material to work with, his time in America as a refugee, his involvement in the Second World War and in the civil rights movement, his religious writings, and the many other chapters in his later years may well have been theatrical dynamite. Newman’s compositions, the talents of the triple-threat cast and the skill of the production team are all top notch, all impressively assembled and ready to deliver a fascinating, remarkable story. Unfortunately, it looks like the timeline was being held the wrong way up in the script development process, leading to the expansion of the years that play out more like celebrity gossip than historical biography, and the baffling omission of the meatier material. Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

*Note to listeners: this review contains gun shot sound effects* This year, the Scandinavian Film Festival is leading with what might sound like just another World War 2 movie, but is one that actually turns the tables the tables on a lot of its predecessors. The Danish film Under Sandet (literally Under the Sand), is a drama set in post-war landmine-ridden Denmark and is being released internationally with the English title Land of Mine, a rather unfortunate, hopefully accidental pun on an obviously serious issue. It's easy to see why the second world war is still a cinematic staple. The Third Reich, and its soldiers, remain the definitive example of what hateful extremism can lead to, and what we all want to avoid becoming. No film has ever had to work especially hard to characterise Nazi soldiers as villains. It is curious, then, that in Land of Mine, these supposedly evil men appear in the form of scared, defeated young boys who just want to go home. Of course, as prisoners of war from the losing side, some are wondering if they'll even have much of a home to go to once they've been released. The ones that handled the landmines are being made to remove all 2.5 million of them from the beaches that they buried them on. Danish Sergeant Carl Rasmussen (Rolan Møller) is given a group of 14 German soldiers that are to dig up and defuse thousands of unexploded mines before they are allowed to go home. In a damaged country that has just been freed from German occupation, its German prisoners have become the lowest class of people. Sergeant Rasmussen and his fellow officers beat them, starve them, mock them, and deny them any medical attention, until it is too late. The boys all find various ways to deal with their plight. Ludwig Haffke (Oskar Bökelmann), their leader, appointed while the war was still being fought, has resigned himself to the totality of their defeat and ultimate ruin. Most of the others are more hopeful, and spend their time talking about what they'll do when they get home and the lives that they will lead. Twin brothers Ernst and Werner Lessner (Emil and Oskar Buschow), seeing a country in need of rebuilding, plan to start up a bricklaying business, called Ernst, Wernst & Sons (even though the sons haven't been born yet). As tends to happen with twins, especially identical ones, their connection is strong. Ernst also shares a sort of big-brotherly bond with the little girl from the family farm that is next to the hut in which the boys are locked up every night. For Nazis, they seem to have an incredible capacity to love. The real, unspoken leader of the group is now Sebastian Schumann (Louis Hoffman), a boy with a quiet maturity that is well beyond his years. He deals with the danger by taking control and becoming the protector. The sergeant manages to do this dirty work by reminding himself of what these boys were party to and detaching himself emotionally from them, until they have their first casualty, and he sees just how much of himself there is in Sebastian. As for the other characters in the Danish military, writer/director Martin Zandvliet doesn't quite afford them the same complexity and dynamism. Rasmussen's superiors, namely Lieutenant Ebbe Jensen (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), are painted as the cold, ivory tower authorities in this narrative, while the Sergeant has a very different point of view from working on the ground. However, Zandvliet is not about to deny that Ebbe has a point when he tells Carl "You have no idea what they have on their conscience." Of course, the audience of Land of Mine has much more than merely an idea of what these 14 boys might have done. They can also see as well as anyone that the Danish officers have their own people to protect and a country to rebuild. With not even enough food to feed the people of Denmark, why give any to the Germans? Someone has to clear the mines, so why not the people who put them there? Why risk the lives of people who had no involvement whatsoever with the atrocities committed by the Nazi party in cleaning up their mess? Still, in cinema, murky misdeeds done offscreen seldom match the raw victimisation that takes place onscreen. The prior actions of these boys is left to the imagination, one that is more fuelled by their heartbreaking pleas for mercy than anything else. One has to wonder how much choice some members of the Hitler Youth generation really had in the part they were playing in all of this. By allowing us to spend time with this small company out of an enormous group of prisoners, Zandvliet makes it very hard for anyone to see a way that placing children in harm's way, even Nazi children, can truly be the answer to anything. Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Australia's first production of The River, by Jez Butterworth, called for a complete revamp of the Red Stitch Actors Theatre. To make a small fishing cabin by the river feel like an arena, the audience is seated on two sides of the stage as they watch a devout fisherman entertain his novice fisherwomen guests. Sometimes you are getting a monologue delivered straight to you, at other times the actor with all the lines is facing away from you, so you're watching much more of the reacting than the acting, as it were. The action and setting of this play are so markedly mundane that every tiny detail comes under the microscope. At one point, we are simply watching the fisherman clean and cook the fish that his current housemate has caught for a good few minutes. The music playing from his radio hells to lull the audience into an easy, meditative state that is far from boredom. If anything, these quiet and sometimes completely silent moments are a welcome relief in between the deep-and-meaningfuls about life out in the wilderness. Specifically, much of the conversation being had is about fish, and the sport of fishing. Butterworth, and his characters, are among the countless writers and thinkers to marvel at how spiritual and sensual an act it is, especially in the dark with only the moonlight to guide you. The River features speeches about how quickly such creatures can be pulled from their world into ours; how brown trout are born but sea trout are made; how fleeting, deceiving and humbling that electric tug of the line can truly be. They might have felt self-indulgent if they were not so exotically entrancing, and even so, he indulges his audiences as much as he might be indulging himself. No doubt during these monologues we are expected to draw parallels between the scene playing out in our mind’s eye and the scene being played out on stage, between both the fish and the women that the fisherman reels in and routinely consumes. The playwright, and arguably the director, John Kachoyan, give us many invitations to follow this line of interpretation, sometimes just short of having a character say “there are plenty more fish in the sea,” but I much preferred to follow the gaze of the characters, to look out at something larger and more ethereal than the oft-portrayed search for that special someone. The strength of the familiar characters and setting lies in their relatability, achieved by the cast – Ngaire Dawn Fair, Dion Mills and Christina O’Neill – the set designer, Chloe Greaves, and the lighting designer, Clare Springett, who bathes the scene in a multitude of gentle, cosy hues. On the other hand, the value of the extended poetic dialogue lies in its novelty, in its distance from the confines of the cabin, the play’s one, unchanging set. While the two worlds certainly take turns at being the entry point to each other at various points in the show, to peer into the wonders of the aquatic world and think only of ourselves and our own world feels like a wasted opportunity. Of course, it is important to see ourselves onstage, but it is also important to step outside of ourselves. Not everything has to be about us. Sometimes a speech about fish can actually be about fish. Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

Saturday April 23, 2016 marked 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare, and exactly 452 years since his birth. You have to appreciate the perfect symmetry of being born and being taken on the same day of the year, apparently due to some overzealous celebrating at his favourite pub. It also gives his global fanbase a reason to have two big celebrations each century. The latest of these, held at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, is now being screened at Cinema Nova up until Wednesday May 18, accompanied by a short film about the history of these celebrations, which announces an intention to be more than just a collection of the bard's best known couplets and soliloquies. This gala is also a showcase of his extraordinary influence across so many different artforms. For instance, it was no surprise to get a performance of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, with Mariah Gale as a particularly histrionic Juliet, but what I wasn't expecting was to see that same scene then danced by the Royal Ballet, with a powerful final tableau of both the dancers and the actors locked in a loving embrace. There's also a Shakespeare-inspired hip-hop performance, but not of the forced variety. As we are reminded by our delightful hosts, David Tennant and Catherine Tate, these works were the mainstream popular entertainment of their time, and were performed to much rowdier crowds than they tend to draw in today. The song ‘This gives life to thee’ by Akala, founder of the Hiphop Shakespeare company, is arguably just as lyrical and hard-hitting as the Elizabethan poetry that inspired it, and to have this sitting alongside performances from English National Opera made quite a statement about the equal value of all forms of art. The other musicals highlights were mostly jazz and blues renditions of some of the ballads from the comedies. All of them struck the right balance between true musicality whilst also supporting the poetry, rather than distracting from it. Whilst almost all of these were pre-recorded, Rufus Wainwright’s electric performance of Sonnet 29 proved to be the strong live vocal performance that the night needed. Fortunately, there was more than enough live acting, especially on the comedic front. A mixture of young, fresh faces and game old faces such as John Lithgow and Dame Judi Dench brought us some of the writer’s best scenes of farcical misunderstandings and absurd declarations of love. All of the numerous big names, which also include Roger Allam, Sir Ian McKellen, David Suchet and Helen Mirren, get brilliant chances to show off their comedic and their dramatic skills, except perhaps for Benedict Cumberbatch, who still felt rather underused. On the flip side though, the opening act, ‘Tonight’ from West Side Story performed by 19 of the UK’s top performing arts students, got off to a wobbly start as the cast and the orchestra were out of time, although it did eventually manage to pick itself up, especially as Maria’s part began. Henry Goodman and Rufus Hound didn’t fare so well either with the three-part, one-joke song ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ from Kiss Me Kate. There is only so long one can listen to Shakespeare puns and still be amused, and the fluffed line towards the end certainly didn’t help matters. It is curious that while both the music and theatre acts were so strong, the musical theatre pieces were this far off the mark. There is also a series of short biographical films scattered throughout the acts, presented quite fittingly by Joseph Fiennes, who of course played the man himself in Shakespeare in Love nearly 20 years ago. While some of them are a bit on-the-nose educational, they do serve well to remind us of the humble origins of the legendary wordsmith, and also to contextualize the shift from the comedies to the tragedies, which seemed to occur after the death of his son, Hamnet, who was only 11 years old. At this point, we transition from the cheerful ditties and the comic misdemeanors to the deep, dark tragedies. Most notably, Othello is performed in a magical mixture of jazz and ballet, and, just in case anyone thought proceedings were going to stray too far from all the laughs and smiles, a star-studded comedy sketch surrounding the most overthought and overused line that Shakespeare ever wrote, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” is easily the highlight of the night. Just as predictably, but very fittingly, the final two acts feature the bittersweet final verses of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, two very poignant reminders of the immortality of a good story, despite the sad mortality of those who tell it, and where they tell it. Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas