Arts and Entertainment Archive

With three documentaries from Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney showing at the 2015 Sydney Film Festival, I packed plenty of popcorn and set out on a three-day bender that transported me from the mythic tale of galactic overlord Xenu in Going Clear: Scientology …

With three documentaries from Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney showing at the 2015 Sydney Film Festival, I packed plenty of popcorn and set out on a three-day bender that transported me from the mythic tale of galactic overlord Xenu in Going Clear: Scientology …

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a touching and very funny film directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and written by Jesse Andrews (based on Andrews’ 2012 debut novel of the same name), made a great impression on the 62nd Sydney Film Festival audience. …

The provocative title of the documentary Bikes vs Cars is deliberately misleading. The documentary doesn’t choose to address the animosity felt and often amplified by the media between motorists and cyclists but focuses on the war in ideologies between cities that plan …

  A unique new production, Like Me, will have audiences running wild in an 18th century mansion driving the direction of this immersive theatre experience. The stage is set, the actors are prepared and they are ready for you to run amuck when the …

The twin pillars of 1970s jazz-fusion keyboards were Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. They had both been through the fire of Miles Davis’s greatest bands – Hancock most notably in the envelope-pushing Quintet of the 1960s and Corea in Miles’ envelope-puncturing electric …

Garth Nix moderated a panel of three young adult fiction writers who discussed the genre and why it has been very successful. The panel featured Australian writer of short stories and young adult fiction, Margo Lanagan, US writer Laurie Halse Anderson This …

Thousands of people queued up on the weekend to take part in the various discussions and workshops on the closing days of the 2015 Sydney Writer’s Festival at Sydney’s arts hub in Walsh Bay. One I attended was Everyone’s a Critic, But …

When an unknown neighbour knocks on your door asking the name of the band that played at your party on Saturday night, you know you’re on to a good thing. It’s even better that the neighbour is himself a musician, a bass …

In the early 1980s Carmen Bradford walked right up to legendary band leader Count Basie and said, “if you hire me I’ll make you a million dollars”. The young jazz vocalist had been booked to open a show in Texas for the …