Daniel Day Lewis makes his last appearance in Phantom Thread as master of a fashion house disturbed by his relationship with a waitress.
Mezzo soprano Eve Klein performed two compositions while a medical laryngoscope, inserted into her throat, revealed the movement of her vocal chords.
Jesse Hunniford
Between Music’s AquaSonic puts five musicians in tanks of water. It is an hour of evocative new sounds and striking visuals.
Maura Tierney (second from left) plays Germaine Greer, Scott Shepherd (far left) and Ari Fliakos (second from right) both play Norman Mailer, and Greg Mehrten as Diana Shilling (far right).
Prudence Upton
The Town Hall Affair is a recreation of a 1971 debate between Germaine Greer and other feminists and Norman Mailer. It feels exceptionally prescient in 2018.
Circus Oz’s Model Citizens seamlessly intertwines entertainment with political and social commentary.
Jaimie Williams
An exhibition at the Melbourne Museum tells the history of colonialism in East New Britain, PNG, from the perspective of the local people. This is history from the ground up, told through film, art and music.
Taylor Mac sacrificed the audience in a ‘Radical Faerie realness ritual’. Fortunately we survived.
Melbourne Festival
2017 gave us a blockbuster female superhero, radical faerie realness rituals, and the ‘frenetic flapping of male genitalia’. Here’s what our arts critics made of all that.
Elaine Cromby and Ursula Yovich in Barbara and the Camp Dogs.
Brett Boardman
Barbara and the Camp Dogs transformed Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre into a pub gig. But what started as a comedy became a searing tragedy about Australia’s inability to listen to Indigenous people.
Jake Arditti (Nero) in Coronation of Poppea: the production is a haze of drug-fuelled violence, erotic drive, and dog eat dog power plays.
Brett Boardman
The Monteverdi opera exploring passion in ancient Rome has been transposed to a contemporary gangster setting in a new Sydney production.
Ngathu, in Bangarra’s Ones Country, is a brilliant combination of the contemporary and traditional, telling the story of the ngathu, or cycad, in Arnhem Land.
Photo by Daniel Boud
Bangarra’s current season of three new works, Ones Country, is uneven in parts but worth seeing for the diversity of Indigenous stories from some new choreographic voices.
Sabbia Gallery - Alison Milyika Carroll working on a pot at Ernabella Arts ceramic studio, 2017.
Photo Ernabella Arts, Courtesy of Sabbia Gallery
Clay Stories, a travelling exhibition, showcases ceramic art from Indigenous artists across the country. It is a triumphant display of specific stories and Dreamings, standing against cultural and political amnesia.
Muriel Heslop stole Australia’s heart when she debuted on screen in 1994. Now she gets a loving, ABBA-filled musical tribute, that is definitely not terrible.
Sophia Forrest as Eli in Let the Right One In.
Photo credit Daniel J Grant
The paintings in Del Kathryn Barton’s new show at NGV Australia are visually stunning and painstakingly executed. But the women depicted are often de-personalised objects or headless cauldrons of destructive passion.
Jason Mamoa as Aquaman and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman are the best things about Justice League.
Atlas Entertainment, Cruel & Unusual Films, DC Comics
The makers of Justice League embed the film in a post-9/11, post-global warming, post-Brexit, post-Trump context. But it is loud and disappointing with some genuinely unimaginative action sequences.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne