Mrs Lowry & Son
Directed by Adrian Noble
Starring Vanessa Redgrave & Timothy Spall
In cinemas as part of the MINI British Film Festival
This film adaptation of the stage play by Martyn Hesford shows the early life of one of the titans of modern British art, L. S. Lowry, famous for his paintings of “matchstick people” going about their lives in working class northern England.
His simplistic style evokes beauty in what was considered squalid and lower class.
Finding Evald Ilyenkov: How a Soviet philosopher who stood up for dialectics continues to inspire
By Corinna Lotz
Lupus Books, 2019
57 pp., $8
Order online
The Report is based on the real-life work of US Senate staffer Daniel Jones, who led the investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s international torture program that followed the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks.
The makers of this documentary advocate using psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms and an African hallucinogen called iboga in the treatment of opioid addiction and other drug dependencies.
In 2011, retired British lawyer Rupert Grey and his wife Jan set off on a driving tour of India — in a 1936 Rolls Royce that he had inherited from his father. Filmmaker Oliver McGarvey tagged along for the six-month journey across mountains, deserts, through civil war zones and bureaucratic snafus.
Martin Monath is one of the great, though barely known heroes of World War II. A German-Jewish Marxist, he fled the Nazis and operated underground, first in Belgium and then in France.
Fully Sikh
By Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa
Starring Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa & Pavan Hari
Black Swan Theatre Company & Barking Gecko co-production
Season ends November 3
Sukjit Kaur Khalsa has done the hard yards in fighting racism in Australia. She has given speeches to parliamentarians and caused a sensation on Australia’s Got Talent.
Fully Sikh is her (nearly) one person show that names and shames racism, but also goes beyond that.
This Australian-made film dramatises the experience of a 14-year-old Cambodian boy who is tricked into boarding a fishing vessel, where he is enslaved.
This book is effectively a sequel to Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, which inspired an hilarious film of the same name. That book exposed the US military's serious experimentation with all sorts of weird and whacky, New Age, mind-altering techniques to produce better killers.
Black is the New White is a hilarious farce that throws everything at the audience to get a laugh. There is physical clowning, outrageous nudity, family feuding and piss-takes of innumerable sacred cows.
While it was Afro-American blues music that grew into rock and roll, soul music sprang from the Black tradition of gospel churches. Aretha Franklin was undoubtedly the greatest soul singer of the 60s and this film shows that she never left the church behind.
There would have been no Enlightenment without Avicenna and his successor, Averroes – who Bloch sees as forming an “Aristotelian left” trend, writes Barry Healy.