Isabelle Huppert’s masterful turn in Elle, Paul Verhoeven’s latest skewering of middle-class concerns, is let down by a psychosexual bent with no convincing basis.
In Rosehaven, Luke McGregor and Celia Pacquola have delivered a comedy comparable to Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, with the wit to reflect on life’s disappointments without eschewing laughs.
Joanna Murray-Smith’s drama about thriller writer Patricia Highsmith’s dying days sequestered in Switzerland is brilliant, sinister entertainment in the Hitchcock mode.
Australian solo act D. D Dumbo’s debut album Utopia Defeated marries African desert blues and Captain Beefheart skronk to a darkly mysterious lyrical core.
With flashes of The Strokes and a debt to The Rolling Stones, Active Galactic has The Delta Riggs delivering swaggering dance-floor rock’n’roll the way it’s meant to be.
Director Ben Wheatley is too faithful to J. G. Ballard’s simplistic prose in High-Rise, missing the opportunity to refine its class politics for the present day.
Nicholas Manganexplores the tension between capital and dwindling natural resources, and how they come together in the grim story of asylum seekers held on Nauru.
Neko Case, k.d. lang and Laura Veirs collaborate for ‘case/lang/veirs’
Dave Faulkner
A collaboration between singer-songwriters Neko Case, k. d. lang and Laura Veirs to record some covers has instead produced an original album of consummate craft.
Queen of the Desert plays it safe and fails the story of Gertrude Bell, the pioneering woman who guided the British during the emergence of the modern Middle East.