Maryanne & Leonard, Words of Love
Documentary film directed by Nick Broomfield
In cinemas
As I emerged from the media preview for this film, I heard another viewer mutter that it was “the most self-indulgent film I’ve ever seen”.
So, beware! This documentary about Leonard Cohen’s personal and artistic life will cut the sheep from the goats of fans and detractors – much like his music and atonal singing have always done.
While there are serious flaws in Inside the Greens, author Paddy Manning is too good a journalist to suppress vital information. Some of it is explosive.
For instance, during the recent conflicts in the Australian Greens between The Greens NSW and Bob Brown devotees, some in the later camp pushed for the wholesale expulsion of the former.
That was not the only example of such blow-up-the-ship thinking.
The Professional Footballers Association (PFA), the union representing Australia's professional football (soccer) players, registered a third straight year of record membership at its November 20 Annual General Meeting.
Leah Cowan reviews a book that systematically unpicks the myths that are spread in order to preserve the status quo.
The red and green shelf is overflowing! Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus looks at nine important new books address topics ranging from ecosocialism and rising seas to trees, growth and global poverty.
Considering the terrors that Mikhail Sholokhov lived through and nearly perished from in Stalinist Russia, it is a wonder that the Soviet novelist retained any sense of humour. Yet he did.
Margaret Atwood's 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel The Testaments is her response to the question of readers of The Handmaid's Tale: how did Gilead fall? She's had 35 years to come up with the answer, and she doesn't disappoint.
How to Read Donald Duck
By Ariel Dorfman & Armand Mattelart, translated by David Kunzle
Pluto Press, 2019
192 pp, $17.00
Today, as the streets of Chile burn with rebellion, it is timely to look back on this book, which was burned by the military during the 1973 overthrow of the socialist Salvador Allende presidency.
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.
