Reviewed by Michael Dalton

For the most part, Desert Fury has all the trappings of film noir crossed with the western. There's tension here, but it's undermined by the overwhelming Technicolour (rare for the era and the material) and Lizabeth Scott's matching makeup and countless costume changes. It's a shame, because the film would have been more effective in black and white.

Reviewed by Will Noonan

Something about seeing the head of John the Baptist on a platter has meant that I’ve never been able to take the story of Salome entirely seriously. The highly enjoyable new Salome by The Rabble at the CarriageWorks Theatre confirms this hypothesis in some unexpected ways, although there is far more at stake here than a cheap laugh. Third in the series of “In Cogito” collaborations between director Emma Valente and co-creator Mary Helen Sassman, this production is by turns cruel, poignant and side-splittingly funny, crossing shades of Wilde with modern Australiana and the Theatre of the Absurd.

Reviewed by Michael Dalton

In my previous reviews of the films of Carl Theodore Dreyer, Gertrud and Master of the House, I discussed the emotional investment that strengthened his narratives. In the recently-released Day of Wrath and Ordet, the emotional mood is once again ubiquitous; this time, he has flavoured them with themes of horror and the supernatural, and to masterful effect. The sense of dread hanging over Day of Wrath—a meditation on witch-hunts—is devilishly claustrophobic, and the power of religious belief allows his masterwork Ordet a celestial finale.

Reviewed by Jodie Martin

Home: A Memoir of My Early Years by Julie Andrews was released in April to the delight of long-time fans and curious readers. In Home, Andrews pieces together previously unknown facts about her childhood with exceptional storytelling.

Home follows Andrews’ early life, beginning with her birth in 1935 at Walton-on-Thames, England and ending in the early 1960s with Andrews leaving for Hollywood to film Mary Poppins with Walt Disney (for which she won an Academy Award). Andrews has previously written best-selling children’s books alone and in co-authorship with her daughter Emma, though Home is the first time readers can find out more about Julie Andrews, before her celebrity status.

Reviewed by Angela Romano

Global Journalism Research is the product of an impressive initiative to distill an enormous body of historical, theoretical and methodological perspectives about journalism research from across the world into a single text.

The prospective reader should be warned, however, that the book’s title may be slightly misleading. Global Journalism Research is almost exclusively about the journalism scholarship that is conducted by researchers and educators at universities and similar institutions. The authors rarely mention the extensive body of research that has been conducted by media corporations and institutions themselves, let alone research from governmental institutions, non-government organisations (NGOs) or other significant societal institutions.

Reviewed by Michael Dalton

Ingmar Bergman's obsession with women, their psyches, and the bonds they share with each other takes beautiful form in his 1955 film Dreams. This is only a small film—it doesn’t achieve the heights of say, Wild Strawberries or Persona—but it resonates nonetheless. The shots are beautifully framed; Eva Dahlbeck is a cinematographer’s dream, and despite its remarkably short running time—it doesn’t even break the 90 minute mark—Dreams leaves us with haunting images.

Reviewed by Tara Simmonds

A trip down memory lane can be a real pain. All that reminiscing, shaking off of dusty memories, placing people and events – it’s enough to give you a head ache. Not so when your journey is accompanied by the superb talents of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, a selection of star voices, and a hilarious, passionate conductor whipping up a storm of fun like a first time visit to Luna Park.

Reviewed by Victor Marsh






Two new books (Defining Visions & Better Living Through Reality Television) from Blackwell focusing on television in American society provide a drastic contrast between approaches to the medium, but one is scarcely worth the read.

Reviewed by Michael Dalton

Obviously, Anton Chekhov designed his plays to exist within the confines of the stage. As Stanislavski observed, "Chekhov often expressed his thought not in speeches, but in pauses or between the lines or in replies consisting of a single word…” Put simply, the prolific author intended nuance and its poetic beauty to underline his work. For those familiar with his powerful work, The Cherry Orchard, these meditations have never been more appropriate. And for the same audience, devastation will surely be a reaction to Mihalis Kakogiannis’s film version when they discover a distinct adjustment to the text.

Reviewed by Allison Bambrick

If Channel Ten really wanted to make Big Brother an interesting show maybe they should try filling the house with two middle aged bar maids, the ornery old mother of one of these women, two canecutters, apparently flush from the season, a young buck and a sweet young thing of twenty-two. Oh and of course they’d have to extract these people from the 1950s, the era of Ray Lawler’s ground breaking play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.