Kathleen Jennings‘ debut novel, Flyaway was a quiet achiever of a novel– it wasn’t the title on everyone’s lips, but those who knew it, raved about it. Published in 2020, it was a finalist for the 2021 World Fantasy Awards and the 2020 Crawford Award, as well as one of NPR’s picks of 2020. Kathleen is…
the AU review is thrilled to bring you the exclusive single and video premiere of “Tambourine Mountain”, the warmly reflective new single from Australian favourites Icecream Hands. Premiering today ahead of its official single release this Friday, “Tambourine Mountain” is taken from Icecream Hands’ eighth album, Giant Fox Pineapple Tree, which is out now on vinyl,…
Any complaints about Sydney’s nightlife vanish after a night at Carriageworks nowadays. It’s become the Inner West’s iconic warehouse-style venue, perfect for raves (as we witnessed with the The Works, kicked off by none other than Underworld) And so it’s no surprise that to see South Korean DJ and effortless cool-girl Peggy Gou set up…
It’s been an event thirty years in the making as Sidney Prescott faces her past in Scream 7. After sitting out the events of Scream VI, Neve Campbell is back facing the knife in the hotly anticipated sequel which sees original writer Kevin Williamson step into directing duties, three decades after the original film terrorised…
British pop icon Lily Allen will return to Australia for a national headline tour, delivering a run of highly anticipated live shows that will include a special featured performance of her acclaimed rendition of West End Girl. Lily Allen emerged in the mid-2000s as one of the UK’s most distinctive pop voices, blending sharp social…
It’s hard reviewing A Fine Line Between Clever & Stupid: The Story of Spinal Tap now. It is devastating to know that its co-author, the acclaimed director Rob Reiner is no longer with us. Vale Rob! If there’s any consolation, it is knowing that now – more than ever – the world needs to be…
In today’s day and age, we do more on the go than ever. Whether for work, gaming, or a mix of both, the rise of portable monitors has arguably never felt more justified. We recently had the chance to take the Arzopa Z3FC portable monitor for a few weeks now, and have been pleasantly surprised…
Few artists have reshaped popular music as decisively as Britney Spears. From the moment she debuted in 1998, she redefined what a pop star could look like, sound like, and represent. Her influence is embedded in the DNA of modern pop – in vocal styles, production trends, choreography, and the marriage of image and music….
Silenced is a bracing, compassionate, and urgently necessary documentary that transforms complex legal battles into a deeply human story about power, credibility, and the precariousness of women’s voices in public life. Director Selina Miles delivers a film that is both rigorously investigated and profoundly felt, blending courtroom insight with intimate, vérité-style storytelling that keeps the…
2026 is already off to a great start in the book world, and the AU Review’s resident bookworms have gathered together some of the reads they’re most excited to get stuck into in the first few months of the year. From rich fantasy and sci-fi reimaginings, to 1960s sitcom moms and famous female pirates, we’ve…
Does anyone even trust celebrity chef restaurants? To me, they seem a bit like influencers. Had trust, lost trust, and now no one trusts any of them. The only people who trust influencers now are other influencers. I don’t think even chefs would trust celebrity chef restaurants. I’ve been stung more than once, I can…
Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? is a film about what lingers after the end of a marriage – not the explosive rupture, but the quieter aftermath where two people must confront who they’ve become once the life they built together begins to dissolve. Rather than framing divorce as a dramatic turning point, Cooper is…
In Is This Thing On?, intimacy isn’t played for grand gestures or easy resolutions. It’s found in the quiet, uncomfortable spaces where love begins to shift shape. Directed by Bradley Cooper, the film observes Alex and Tess Novak as their marriage gently fractures, following two people forced to confront who they are beyond the roles…
The Musical is a prickly, uneven but intriguingly sharp first feature from director Giselle Bonilla, a film that clearly knows what it wants to be, even if it doesn’t always get there. Equal parts workplace satire, personal meltdown, and theatrical farce, the movie operates best when it leans into its absurdity, and falters when it…
Set in rural New Zealand in 2006, Big Girls Don’t Cry revels in its own humid, jangling state of being. Writer/director Paloma Schneideman, emerging from Jane Campion’s orbit (the director serving as an executive producer), has made a debut that feels lived-in rather than observed, patiently slipping inside the skin of a 14-year-old girl who…
Ramzi Bashour’s Hot Water arrives as a gentle, road-worn meditation on movement, belonging, and the complicated geometry of parent-child love. More interested in texture than plot, the film drifts across America with a perceptive eye, finding both beauty and banality in the stretch of highways that carry a Lebanese mother (Lubna Azabal) and her troubled…
When Valentine hit American theaters in February 2001, it arrived at a strange and unforgiving moment for horror. The post-Scream boom had peaked, critics were exhausted by the meta-wave, and studios were scrambling to find the next box-office darling. Into this atmosphere entered a stylish, glossy, almost defiantly straightforward slasher film – one that critics…
Assigned to a county-mandated drug court program, Cody Parsons begins a fragile and hard-won journey toward recovery in the shadow of the opioid crisis that continues to ravage rural Ohio. From that premise alone, Union County could have been another familiar tale of addiction and despair, but what unfolds instead is something far more tender,…
Night Nurse arrives already cloaked in intrigue: a psychosexual thriller set not in a glossy penthouse or shadowy alleyway, but inside the pristine, hushed corridors of a luxury retirement community. It is, on paper, a promisingly perverse collision of caregiving, exploitation, and desire – a place where intimacy is transactional, trust is fragile, and vulnerability…
Nick Cave’s Wild God tour stop at Alexandra Gardens last night unfolded like pure theatre, with the sun dropping over the river as the atmosphere shifted from a glowing golden hour to something electric and reverent. From fans reaching out at the edge of the stage to the almost mythic presence of Nick Cave himself, it…
What does my surprise at finding a superlative meal in Waikiki say about the most famous tourist area of Hawaii? Yes, that loud, colourful strip that flows south towards Diamond Head is jam-packed with all the top touristic textures. And that already says a lot. It’s the tourist area of one of the world’s most…
Vera Miao’s feature debut, Rock Springs, is a film of undeniable importance, even when its storytelling struggles to cohere into a fully unified whole. Structured across three distinct acts – each with their own tonal and thematic weight – the film reaches for something vast: a reckoning with historical violence, inherited trauma, and the uneasy…
Sexual assault is one of cinema’s most fraught subjects. Not because it can’t be depicted, but because it so often can be mishandled. Films either flinch away from its reality, overtly depict the act with an almost exploitative lens, aestheticise it into something palatable, or frame it through adult comprehension that dulls its true terror….
Run Amok announces the arrival of a filmmaker unafraid of discomfort. In her striking debut feature, writer-director NB Mager tackles one of the most fraught subjects in contemporary American life – the aftermath of a school tragedy – and does so with a form that feels almost provocatively unexpected. The premise is deceptively simple yet…
“The Skylab space station fell out of orbit in 1979. During its mission, it had been home to hundreds of scientific experiments. Most of the debris burned up on re-entry, but some of it crashed to Earth. NASA thought it had recovered every piece. They were wrong.” Pay attention. This shit is real. That’s how…
We’re seeing out January with ten more tracks added to our Discovery playlist on Spotify and Apple Music; including two we had exclusive premieres for earlier in the week. With their UK and European tour imminent Newcastle’s Rum Jungle take out Track of the Week with their new single “Coal Dust”. The single finds the…
Tablet and phone stands are certainly plentiful in today’s market, so we don’t blame you for struggling to decide between what works and what’s best. In many ways, Twelve South has provided some serious quality across a range of phone, tablet, and laptop accessories, including the HiRise 3 Deluxe charging stand and AirFly Pro 2, two options that I…
From the moment The Wrecking Crew was announced, it felt less like a standard studio project and more like an inevitability. Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista – two of the most physically imposing stars working today – had already proven their onscreen chemistry as brothers in See. Fans could sense it. So could they. What…
After the Breakers rose – monstrous creatures that infect and twist their victims – men fell first, leaving women to lead the fight for survival. In this perilous new world, Willa’s mother is one of the war’s fiercest warriors, while her father, a battle-scarred veteran, hides with Willa on a remote island, training her in…
There’s a quiet coastal revolution going down around Sydney. First, Accor saw a mountain of acclaim when they reworked the old Novotel in Manly. transforming it into a more appealing, beach-friendly MGallery. They did the same over at The Brighton Sydney – again, lifting it from mid-range Novotel status and priming it for the premium…
