Tag: documentary
Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali
Friday, September 17th, 2021 Film Reviews,“Destiny can take your best friend as an instrument to cause you harm and your worst enemy to do you good,” says Muhammad Ali a few minutes into this absorbing Netflix documentary. He is referring to black activist, Malcolm X, who had fallen out with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, a […]
The Met: Art Museums in a Changing World
Tuesday, September 7th, 2021 Art Column,While New South Wales lockdowns roll on, Queenslanders can go to Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art and view the blockbuster exhibition, European Masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It’s almost certainly the most impressive show to reach our heavily barricaded shores this year but the pandemic has made it hard to imagine […]
Top Secret UFO Projects Declassified
Thursday, August 19th, 2021 Film Reviews,On 6 April, 1966, a UFO appeared in the Melbourne suburb of Clayton South. The saucer-shaped craft caused a stir among students of Westall High School who watched it fly overhead then land behind a nearby clump of trees. Shortly afterwards it ascended again at high speed and disappeared. Channel Nine sent a team to […]
Naomi Osaka
Thursday, August 5th, 2021 Film Reviews,We’re all familiar with newspaper stories about torn hamstrings, stress fractures, busted knees and shoulders. The Age can devote an entire page to a champion footballer’s groin strain. But until recently nobody ever mentioned an athlete’s mental health unless it was to lament some lapse in concentration at a vital stage. “A brain explosion!” is […]
How to Become a Tyrant
Saturday, July 17th, 2021 Film Reviews,Politics is a fascinating game, but hard to win. Under the yoke of a tyrant people clamour for democracy but after generations of democratic rule they hanker for a strongman to come and make all their decisions for them. As we watch the United States careening towards a complete crack-up, with millions of people obsessed […]
Elvis Presley: The Searcher
Friday, July 2nd, 2021 Film Reviews,There are many different Elvises, from the young hillbilly who set the music world alight with his very first recording to the bloated, drug-addled superstar, squeezed into a white jumpsuit with cape, playing to packed houses in Las Vegas casinos. In a week in which it’s impossible to get to the movies in many parts […]
The Mole Agent
Friday, June 25th, 2021 Film Reviews,Novelists have always enjoyed passing off fantasy as if it were reality but documentary makers seem to take a special pleasure in making fact resemble fiction. There have been numerous examples in recent years of documentaries telling stories that seemed too bizarre to be true, framed with all the stock devices of a mystery or […]
It All Started with a Stale Sandwich
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,This year is the 50th anniversary of the Kaldor Public Art Projects, a testament to the persistence of a Hungarian migrant who needed to share his obsession with an entire city, if not a country. The birthday celebrations will continue to spread the Kaldor gospel via an unorthodox retrospective at the Art Gallery of New […]
Kusama: Infinity
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,Kusama: Infinity has echoes of “Eternity”, that word inscribed in chalk on surfaces all over Sydney for 35 years, by the eccentric Arthur Stace. It took Martin Sharp to make Stace into a cult figure when he reproduced that distinctive cursive script on a poster, but Yayoi Kusama has been a one-woman cult since she […]
Looby
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,“He’s due for a late flowering,” says artist, McLean Edwards. “I just wish he hadn’t burnt so many bridges on the way.” One of those bridges is Mclean himself, who has already told us he no longer has any relationship with Keith Looby. It made me think: “Do I have any sort of relationship with […]