The French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is best known for mainstream films like Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, stylishly expressive in their harnessing of alienating terrains, notably deserts and plains.
Brahms: Symphonies 3 & 4 Australian Chamber Orchestra/Richard Tognetti (ABC Classic)
Moral reckonings don't come much more serious than the one that propels The Lie, in which a family must deal with a murder perpetrated by their daughter. Will Jay (a weary-looking Peter Sarsgaard) and Rebecca (the wonderful Mireille Enos) hand 15-year-old Kayla (Joey King) over to the authorities?
How do they do it? Bach and Angela Hewitt, I mean, transfixing and focusing the audience in the Wigmore Hall – at home, too, hopefully, thanks to the livestreaming– through 13 and three-quarter fugues and four canons, all starting in the same key and (until the last) on the same theme, plus a benediction, the glorious whole amounting to an hour and a half without a break.
Ian Williams’s writing is always in motion. For his 2012 poetry collection Personals, and since, he has composed little circular poems, similar (in style though not sentiment) to the posies you sometimes find inscribed on the inside of rings. He incorporates a couple into Reproduction, his debut and Griffin Prize-winning novel. “I’m sorry I made you hate me”, “no I don’t hate you baby don’t hurt me”, they read.
“Produced by Tommy LiPuma.” That phrase has appeared on just about every Diana Krall album since the summer of 1995, when the Cleveland-born mogul arrived at the GRP label – it would be his sixth and last music industry affiliation – and promptly signed the Canadian singer-pianist.
The emotional rawness of Xavier Dolan’s films reflects a rare humanity and empathy. For someone still only 31, the French-Canadian writer and director displays an uncanny sense of the passionate turmoil that animates his characters. The subtle shifts in moods he achieves may often be sustained through an unusual talent for picking the right music or song, but the tone is never set in a way that manipulates the audience.
Alanis Morissette was relieved when fame’s comet swiftly fell to more manageable levels, having crashed into her full-force 25 years ago, when she was just 21. Selling 33 million copies of Jagged Little Pill means, though, that she remains on many people’s minds.
A master at bringing neurotics to bilious life on screen, David Thewlis shines as a peevish, corrupt health inspector in Guest of Honour.
