Australia
Thomas H. Green
Dan Kelly is rapidly becoming a big noise Down Under. His uncle, Paul Kelly, is a star of long standing in Australia, but Kelly junior's profile is also now rising fast. Judging from his fifth album, the only thing I've heard by him, such attention is well deserved. In truth, it's his second solo album as he usually works with a group called the Alpha Males. Details aside, though, he's a joy to listen to because he combines the whacked-out madcap lyricism of Julian Cope with a musical sensibility that falls between the Beach Boys and Seventies glam dons The Sweet. In other words, his way with Read more ...
david.cheal
Frothier than a zero-gravity cappuccino, camper than a gay pride march through Brighton, cheesier than all the fromageries in France, and with almost as many beats per minute as a hummingbird’s heart: Kylie is back with a brand new show, and it’s quite something. Others will doubtless have rolled out the statistics – that it cost £530 million to stage, is built and staffed by a crew of 7,000, and requires a fleet of trucks that would stretch from London to Luton to keep it on the road. Or something. Whatever: it’s big, it’s spectacular, it’s silly, it’s kinky, it’s utterly inconsequential, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tomorrow, When the War Began, Australia's highest-grossing movie of 2010, was written and directed by Stuart Beattie. It was adapted from John Marsden’s novel of the same name, the first in his seven-book Tomorrow series for teenagers, published 1993-1999. They tell the story of Ellie Linton and a group of her high-school friends who have to try to save their country from an invading militia after their hometown of Wirrawee has been taken over, their families taken prisoner and their homes destroyed.Ellie (a winning performance by Caitlin Stasey) and her best friend Corrie (Rachel Hurd-Wood) Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This film tells an extraordinary - scarcely believable - story. Throughout the 20th century, the UK sent tens of thousands of children from care homes and orphanages to the colonies, later the Commonwealth. Parents were routinely told their children had been adopted by British families, while the children were told in many cases that their parents were dead. Children had been sent to the colonies since the 1600s but in the 20th century there was a formal nationwide policy organised by churches, local authorities and Dr Barnardo’s homes, which stopped only as recently as 1970.Jim Loach's (son Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The animals 17-year-old Josh Cody has to survive are his own criminal family. The Codys are hardly the Corleones. Led by sweetly smiling, grandmotherly matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver) as they fume and feud in Melbourne’s suburbs, this motley gang of five’s only outstanding quality is their ruthlessness. Deposited with them when his mum overdoses on drugs, the shy teenager navigates between armed robber Uncle Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) and wired drug dealer Uncle Craig (Sullivan Stapleton). Senior detective Leckie (a moustached, understated Guy Pearce) would also like a word, as Josh tries to Read more ...
David Nice
Too many column inches have been devoted to Percy Grainger’s sado-masochistic sexplay and celebration of blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon supremacy, but it’s his music I love. And have done ever since they celestially sounded the wineglasses for Tribute to Foster, his fantasia on "Camptown Races", at the 1982 Aldeburgh Festival (Britten had been an adoring fan). None of our main orchestras has yet taken up a similar gauntlet on the 50th anniversary of the Australian-born one-off’s death. So hurrah, in principle, for the smaller-scale enterprise of Kings Place’s four-day festival devised by pianist and Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There is little danger of our nation wasting away for the lack of culinary-themed televisual roughage: hairy bikers, domestic goddesses, campaigning wide boys, chicken-liberating poshos, alpha-male bully boys, Michelin-starred French fusspots. Channel hopping some nights feels more like flicking through the world's least coherent cook book.But it’s Masterchef – and its inevitable D-list-led Celebrity offshoot – that has become the firm favourite of the armchair gourmand. It's not fine dining by any stretch of the imagination but it's reliable and terribly moreish. Part contrived reality telly Read more ...
David Nice
Rumour has it that Snoop Dogg may be serenading the royals there in a couple of months' time, but this afternoon it was the most agile, even and full soprano voice of all which rang from the vaulting of Westminster Abbey. Thanks to the noble co-operation of the Royal Opera House - serving up its orchestra and music director, Antonio Pappano - the Australian High Commission and the Australian Music Foundation, we celebrated the life and works of Dame Joan Sutherland in the high, orchestrated style which only this kind of event could have done full justice.She WAS the Bright Seraphim of Handel' Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“How many derelict gasworks can you shoot?” director Patrick Keiller asked almost in despair, at an early screening of his third psychogeographic amble through Britain. Not too many more may be the answer, as Robinson in Ruins significantly misses the mark set by its predecessors, the wonderful London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997). This long look at the landscapes of Oxfordshire and Berkshire does still find sharp moments of beauty and oppression in England’s rolling hills.Keiller’s original conceit had Robinson, a fictional, shifty type, wandering obsessively through first London then Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s an interesting concept that Adam Hills has come up with for his latest show, Mess Around. The ever-smiling and hugely likeable Australian - a longtime sellout hit at the Edinburgh Fringe but who has yet to make a broader breakthrough like his peers - is a past master of audience interaction, so why not ditch the material and make that the show?“Less a show and more of a chat,” he calls it, and I’m sure that when this approach works, on those nights when he mines a seam of comedy gold among his fans, that it can be huge fun. But on the first night of his 10-show run at Soho and despite Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Joan Sutherland’s was the voice of my childhood, the voice on the record-player when my mother, a coloratura soprano, practised her Lucia and Traviata. It was a clear and ravishingly carefree sound, as fluid as a stream bubbling in sunlight, effortlessly scintillating in the highest registers, a voice that almost sounded regretful as it descended to earth.I drank in her bel canto records (I too wanted to be a singer), and generations of trainee sopranos sped through their two-octave scales seeking that sweetness, that blitheness, and also that plummy lushness. Not for the teenaged me the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Call a comic surreal and you hand him or her a licence to be as self-indulgent as they desire. Think of Vic Reeves, who long ago started believing that the mere proximity to one another of words like "bacon", "kazoo" and "Manama" was sufficiently hilarious to bring down the house. Ross Noble is, we are frequently told, a surreal comedian. His new show certainly contains enough references to "dwarves in sombreros" and "shaven suicide monkeys" to ensure that its title, Nonsensory Overload, comfortably adheres to the terms of the Trade Descriptions Act.
As befits a show with a get-out clause Read more ...