Returning to the country for the first time in three and half years, Joy Crookes took to Sydney’s Enmore Theatre stage to deliver a smooth, sultry and genuinely funny set in support of her second album Juniper. In town performing on a selection of new year’s festivals, the English artist was in fine form as…

London singer-songwriter Joy Crookes performed for the first time in Sydney in over three years at the Enmore Theatre, playing songs off her critically acclaimed 2025 album Juniper and debut album Skin. Her songs draw from smoky jazz phrasing and soul tradition with cool beats and basslines. A star on the rise. Supported perfectly by…

Underworld may be the biggest name on the lineup for a new Carriageworks live series, simply called The Works, but make no mistake about it: the headline is intelligent curation and the art institution’s wondrously well-suited warehouse. Over the next few weeks, Carriageworks will kick the new year off with a series of classic warehouse…

The wind, music and good times were at an all-time high on the fourth and final day of Beyond The Valley 2025. The Day 3 fatigue was shaken off with attendees eager to get back into high spirits and ring in the New Year in the best way possible. It was a much cooler day,…

  Beyond The Valley Day 3 arrived with a noticeable and welcome shift in pace and temperature, which was exactly what the festival needed. After the chaos and intensity of Day 2, Tuesday felt like a collective exhale. Attendees were obviously still keen on partying like there’s no tomorrow, but there was a calmer, more…

2025 has proven to be a year of cinematic surprises, a period where filmmakers pushed boundaries, challenged expectations, and delivered stories that linger long after the credits roll. From pulse-pounding thrillers that leave you breathless, to intimate dramas that pierce the heart with quiet, unflinching honesty, this year’s films navigated extremes – emotional, visual, and…

Day 2 of Beyond The Valley came and went in a hot, dusty haze. Most of this week is a haze, really- that odd time between Christmas and New Years when you have no clue what day it even is. Except this time, it’s filled with live music, great food and the best vibes. The…

Until the Sky Falls Quiet is not an easy film to watch, and that is precisely why it matters. Filmed largely in real time and through the doctors’ own cameras, directors Erica Yen-Chin Long and Jason Korr deliver a raw, urgent documentary that refuses distance or comfort. Following Western Sydney doctors Dr Siraj Sira and…

Between continents, contracts, and curtain calls, Barry Conrad has found himself standing at the threshold of a bold new chapter. In the space of just a few months, he went from rehearsal rooms in Australia to stepping into New York for meetings – landing in time to attend the Tony Awards the very next day…

Song Sung Blue brings a gentle, often disarming dignity to the art of imitation. Inspired by Greg Kohs’ 2008 documentary of the same name, it largely sidesteps the trap of becoming a jukebox curio thanks to Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson’s open-hearted performances, which ground the film in emotional sincerity rather than novelty. What begins…

Against the thunder of the Western Front, The Choral listens instead for something quieter – the fragile, defiant sound of people choosing to sing. Set in Ramsden, Yorkshire in 1916, the film unfolds as a community hollowed out by war attempts to hold itself together through music, recruiting boys to replace the men who have…

Set in 1916 during World War I, The Choral takes a look at a certain group of community who, in their time of hardship, come together to uphold a tradition that serves as a spiritual lifting. The choral society at the centre of the film have come to a crossroads.  Their choral director has been…

The end of the year is nigh, and the Australian summer sun has finally decided to make an appearance, just in time for Beyond The Valley to kick off today. Day one was off to a cracking start with tops of 28 degrees and a gentle, cool breeze. This is my first year attending the…

The Copenhagen Test arrives without the usual genre fanfare. There are no grandiose set pieces or relentless action beats demanding attention (at least not initially), with the series instead drawing viewers in quietly, building tension through atmosphere, psychology, and a creeping sense of dread. It’s a sci-fi espionage thriller that understands restraint can be more…

For more than a decade, Call the Midwife has made a virtue of quiet heroism – finding revolution not just in the streets, but in delivery rooms, kitchens, and moments of unspoken care. As the multi-award-winning drama returns with its Christmas special and the forthcoming Series 15, Poplar enters 1971: a year of upheaval and…

There’s something uniquely disorienting about realising a movie like Anaconda is old enough to be rebooted. The 1997 original – equal parts jungle pulp, star-studded curiosity, and cable TV staple – belongs to a very specific era of studio excess. So when this new Anaconda announces itself not just as a reboot but as a…

Thanks to Sony Pictures Australia, we have 5 double in-season passes (Admit 2) to see Ralph Fiennes in the The Choral, in Australian theatres from New Years Day, January 1st, 2026. 1916. As war rages on the Western Front, the Choral Society in Ramsden, Yorkshire has lost most of its men to the army. The…

It’s hard to believe it’s that time of the year again. Christmas is here, Summer has come for us Down Under, and another year of content has wrapped at The AU Review. But we couldn’t leave without giving props to our favourite games of the year, and boy, were we spoilt for choice. It was…

We had the pleasure of reviewing the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless Gaming Headset when it was released back in 2022, and had crowned it the undisputed champion of gaming headsets. I still use it to this very day on my Xbox Series X. It’s incredibly comfortable, provides great audio quality, and has a range…

With the list of stick and robot vacuums seemingly growing by the day, there’s no doubt that there are a multitude of ways to keep your floors clean at home. While the robot vacuum is always a solid option for the sake of convenience, there are some benefits to having a decent stick vacuum at…

Clip-on earbuds have become one of the most interesting alternatives to traditional in-ear designs, especially for workouts, and the Shokz OpenDots One are among the most refined examples of the category to date. While their sound quality won’t rival premium in-ear models, their comfort, stability and battery life make them an easy recommendation for gym-goers…

I’ll be honest: cleaning the floors is a chore I put off for as long as humanly possible. It’s repetitive, time-consuming, and somehow never-ending. So, when a cleaning gadget promises to make that process easier, I’m all ears. The Roborock F25 RT is one of those appliances. It sells itself as a straightforward, affordable wet-dry…

Lenovo have released the Legion Tower 7i, a radical new tower that combines form and function with an impressive lighting rig and easy to upgrade inside, making this the ultimate PC gaming tower. The Lenovo Legion Tower 7i (Gen 10) doesn’t radically reinvent Lenovo’s flagship desktop formula, but it doesn’t need to. Instead, it refines,…

If Hotline Miami was a synthed up fever dream, Anger Foot is that same dream dosed with five espresso shots and a white Monster chaser. Developed by Free Lives (Broforce, Genital Jousting), this first-person kicker makes supercharged, choreographed chaos into an artform. Less about survival and more about weaponising momentum, it’s dumb, brilliant, infuriating, and…

The Last Dinner Party have spent the past year accelerating from London newcomers to one of the most talked-about bands in contemporary guitar music. Their debut album, Prelude To Ecstasy, announced the all-female five-piece with grandeur, pairing sharp songwriting and theatrical vocals with a baroque-inspired visual identity that felt fully formed from the outset. Their breakout…

Inspired by the films of the same name, Now You See Me Live at the Sydney Opera House is a fantastical night of illusions, sleight of hand and death-defying stunts. Performing together in Australia for the first time, Adam Trent (USA), Enzo Weyne (France), Andrew Basso (Italy), and Gabriella Lester (Canada) are the four Horsemen…

Like all twist-laced thrillers based on successful (if trashy) novels, to some there’ll be a level of expectation walking into a feature like The Housemaid. Thankfully, even if you are initiated with the turns and curveballs that author Freida McFadden laid out in her novel of the same name, screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine (The Boys, The…

As outlandish as it sounds, in the early 1990s in Japan a rental family service (レンタル家族), or professional stand-in service, was founded to provide clients with actors who portray friends, family members, or coworkers for social events such as weddings, or to provide platonic companionship. In a city as big as Tokyo the idea of loneliness is…

In Rental Family, connection is never simple – it’s negotiated, performed, and deeply felt in the spaces between what’s said and what’s withheld. Takehiro Hira and Mari Yamamoto bring quiet precision and emotional intelligence to a film that lives in those in-between moments, portraying characters shaped as much by restraint as by longing. As Brendan…

In an age defined by curated selves and digital distance, Rental Family asks a quietly radical question: what if connection – even borrowed connection – could still save us? Directed with tender restraint by Hikari and anchored by a deeply humane performance from Brendan Fraser, the film follows a drifting American actor who finds work…