Author: Lisa Roberts

There is nothing Lisa loves more than delving beneath the surface to catch a glimpse of the hidden mechanisms that bring the magic to the screen. She first studied film in a pioneering course, Rough Beasts are Slouching, directing with St Martins Youth Theatre and she has completed a postgraduate certificate in writing with Swinburne University.

Judy

Rated: MJudy

Directed by: Rupert Goold

Written by: Tom Edge

Produced by: David Livingstone

Starring: Renée Zellweger, Finn Wittrock, Jessie Buckley, Rufus Sewell.

I’ve often wondered how those lucky souls who have an inborn gift, the ones who are so effortlessly feted and adored, so often come undone. So badly.

For Judy Garland (Renée Zellweger) there was a price for ‘earning a million dollars before you’re twenty one’, and the dark side of her gift slowly becomes apparent as she vainly searches for a way to leave London and return home to her children.

Shown in a combination of flashbacks and flash-forwards, the movie alternates between a fifteen-year-old Garland filming, The Wizard of Oz and the final months of her life spent performing in London at the height of the swinging 60s, with surprisingly close parallels between the two very distant eras of her life and her role in the famous film.

When the Judy opens, Garland is strolling through the set of ‘the yellow brick road’ with a faceless studio executive. She’s not sure that she is ready to take on the role of Dorothy Gale and the man in the grey suit, while appearing to have her best interests at heart, is slyly grooming her, as he both soothes and at the same time subtly threatens: ‘Judy, you give those people dreams . . . ‘The rest of America is waiting to swallow you up’.

Winning the role away from Shirley Temple, Garland finds that her contract has reduced her to nothing more than studio property, at times working up to eighteen hours a day and watched over by a pair of the studio’s henchwomen. Beneath the pair’s unforgiving gaze, even sneaking a single fried onion ring, or maybe two, as she sits in a café attempting to flirt with Mickey Rooney is taken as a serious breach of the rules. Lonely, sleep deprived and starving, the price of Garland’s success is to wage a war on her body that denies the most basic of human needs. And to ensure that her needs stay denied, the Wicked Witch of the West and her eagle-eyed sister are prepared to do whatever it takes: whisking away hunger with amphetamines and granting sleep with barbiturates.

In any contest, the man in the grey suit was always going to win.

Flash forward thirty years and Garland is alone in the bathroom of her hotel suite, unable to finish dressing and barely able to raise a croak from her damaged vocal chords. She is a broken woman. It takes a fairly brutal shove from her production assistant Rosalyn Wylder (Jessie Buckley) to get her onto the stage. But when the lights come up and the beat counts in, Judy sings. And the audience is entranced. Until the lights are dimmed, when once again she is a broken woman surviving on pills and unable to sleep.

While Garland might have been one of the first to succumb to America’s amphetamine epidemic, that’s not the focus of this drama.

Woven through the story of Garland’s titanic struggle with her gift is a very personal search to find love and her pursuit of it eventually does bring a sense of what love is for her. In the title role, Renée Zellweger is unflinching and her portrayal of Judy Garland deeply affecting, while Finn Wittrock is irresistible as Garland’s dashing lover and husband number five.

The Eulogy

Rated: MThe Eulogy

Directed and Edited by: Janine Hosking

Produced by: Janine Hosking, Katey Grusovin, Trish Lake

Music Performed by: Geoffrey Tozer

Featuring: The Honourable Paul Keating, Richard Gill AO

I don’t know about you, but for me a film titled, The Eulogy does not sound like easy viewing. In this instance, though, the story behind the eulogy is so improbable that it has been described as sounding like, ‘A Story someone might have made up in a pub’.

The documentary opens as ex-prime minister Paul Keating delivers a fiery eulogy hailing classical pianist Geoffrey Tozer the musical prodigy Australia shunned. Keating is incensed and his eulogy is both an ode to the soaring beauty of Tozer’s music and an excoriating rebuke to a mediocre and mean-spirited arts establishment who shut him out. Keating lashes out at them as, ‘A cottage industry in nastiness’.

If Tozer was the extraordinary talent described by his peer, internationally lauded concert pianist Arthur Rubinstein, ‘Possibly the finest pianist of the twentieth century’, why has his memory been virtually expunged from the national consciousness? Music educator and conductor Richard Gill AO has set himself a mission to find out. Was Tozer a prodigy? And if he was, Gill asks:

‘What. Went. Wrong?’

The first hint that Tozer might be the virtuoso that Keating claims is a cutaway to a concert pianist in the opening scenes: fingers dance so lightly across the keys, releasing a rapturous cascade of music. Gill’s students listening in, describe the subtlety of the touch, every note in the performance ‘en pointe’, but none recognise the musician.

Gill’s search for the life story of this neglected artist begins in a trim and freshly painted backyard shed, a miniature museum as part of Tozer’s estate, filled with letters, journals, drawings and photographs. While, at the same time as he sifts through the artefacts, Gill also ponders the nature of genius. Speaking to his students, he notes: ‘Originally prodigy was linked to omens and the foretelling of monstrous events, but now it has come to mean a special gift.’

Certainly, Tozer’s genius was not difficult to identify in his early years. At the age of thirteen, he became the youngest ever recipient ever of the Winston Churchill Fellowship and he made his debut on the international stage at the age of fifteen, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 15 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Although, by the time he was thirty two, Tozer was eking out an existence by teaching part-time at St Edmunds College in Canberra.

It was there that Paul Keating met and befriended him. Keating was at the St Edmunds Christmas recital to watch his son, but Tozer’s performance stole his breath away. Their meeting, the beginning of an enduring friendship, would eventually see a, ‘Prime Minister so passionately avenge the death of a musician’.

Not only does, The Eulogy offer a unique glimpse into the genesis of prodigy, Richard Gill’s quest contains all the ingredients of a decent mystery story, with Tozer’s playing a sublime counterpoint and his, Medtner Concerto Number One an epiphany for the senses.

Halston

Rated: MHalston

Directed by: Frédéric Tcheng

Produced by: Frédéric Tcheng

Starring: Roy Halston Frowick, Liza Minnelli, Joel Schumacher, Elsa Peretti, Tavi Gevinson.

Jackie Kennedy was surrounded. Everyone else was dressed in fur when Jackie appeared in her cloth coat and iconic pill-box hat designed by Halston for JFK’s presidential inauguration in 1961.

‘That was a day that changed fashion in America.’

Throughout the 1970s Halston was possibly the America’s most influential designer, before mysteriously disappearing from view in the ’80s.

In an attempt to piece together the life of this quintessentially American designer, a lone researcher paws through the few remaining snippets and artefacts in a basement archive when the documentary opens.

As she sifts through the meagre remnants the researcher turns to the camera and says: ‘They bought his name, sold off his work for pennies on the dollar; they took his studio and erased 250 tapes’. At the same time she coyly refuses to reveal her own name.

For a country bent on taking over the world with Coca Cola and culture, this radical erasure of an artist from the cultural pantheon is tantamount to treason. What was it about Halston that could have elicited such a dire response?

As the nameless researcher asks, ‘Whatever happened to Halston?’

That is certainly one of the questions begging an answer about this boy from the Midwest who began his career as custom milliner to New York’s wealthy elite at Bergdorf Goodman.

Early on though, the question being asked was, ‘Was Halston at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball?’ It was the event of the year for the rich the social and the beautiful, and Halston was not invited. Or was he? ‘He must have been there.’ Since it was a masked ball, no-one could be absolutely certain, but he definitely went to the ball in one sense: his masks and hats covered virtually every face and head of the attendees.

When he launched his own fashion label in 1968, Halston’s creations were designed to ‘honour the body’. Cut on the bias, the fabric moved and flowed and spiralled around the figure. Famed for cutting from a single piece of cloth, Halston’s patterns were not unlike abstract art, ‘Design reduced to its common denominators’. His elegant simplicity, an antidote to the exuberance of the ’60s.

All the society ladies were there for Halston’s first outing as a fashion designer, and before each model stepped onto the catwalk, he leant in and whispered: ‘Don’t forget, you’re the best.’

Almost overnight Halston was a sensation, but he loved to be controversial: from dressing Iman for her first runway event to staging a show as a happening, where the models sang and played guitar and clarinet.

That show was not so well received.

Fortunately Halston had other strategies.

Realising the boost that celebrities could give his name, he was the first to bring in movie stars, with Liza Minnelli enlisted for his overseas debut. With no time for rehearsals, ‘the event was directed more like a musical’. The Palace of Versailles was in uproar. ‘It was fashion in your face and it was modern.’ Halston’s name was on the international map.

‘Whatever happened to Halston?’ With his career captured in a rich cache archival footage, you will have your answer by the time the credits roll, but you may still find yourself asking: what is in a name?

Downton Abbey

Rated: PGDownton Abbey

Directed by: Michael Engler

Written by: Julian Fellowes

Produced by: Gareth Neame, Julian Fellowes, Liz Trubridge

Co-Produced by: Mark Hubbard

Executive Produced by: Nigel Marchant, Brian Percival

Starring: Maggie Smith, Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael, Imelda Staunton,Tuppence Middleton, Joanne Froggatt, Allen Leech, Jim Carter.

It’s 1927, the roaring twenties. English-style. The Charleston is an underground dance craze and the plots and schemes are swirling, above and below stairs.

Beginning with the nib of a fountain pen as it traces a loop in glossy, black ink, the opening scene follows the byzantine logistics of a royal missive. With the precision of finely-tuned clockwork, the envelope then travels from steam train to a maze of narrow backstairs corridors before it is finally placed on a silver tray and delivered to Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) as he ambles down to breakfast with his favourite retriever in tow.

The king wishes to visit, even though the upstairs coterie are harbouring an Irish republican in their midst. Worse, Lord Grantham  looks set to miss out on his inheritance and Violet Crawley, the imperious and incorrigible Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), is not prepared to stand for it. Above stairs the scene is set.

Below stairs, apart from a few minor skirmishes, all is humming along nicely. The Downton staff are thrilled to be showing off their domestic skills to the royal couple; that is, until the king’s personal valets, the king’s chef Monsieur Courbet  (Philippe Spall) and the ‘terribly scary’ royal butler (David Haig) arrive to take over the household duties and steal their moment of glory.

Although deeply miffed at the royal interlopers, the Downton staff are sufficiently cowed to stand aside. That is, until scheming pair Anna Bates (Joanne Froggatt) and her husband (Brendan Coyle ) hatch a plot: ‘We’ll meet in the wine cellar.’ Over the protests of the butler (Jim Carter), ‘it’s ‘treason’, the household staff agree to fight back, and, in so doing, find themselves rather perversely staging a minor revolution in order to perform their own cooking and waiting duties.

From the clatter of new millennium machinery to the dinging and tinkling of bells on shop counters, we are subtly drawn in to a world in transition. Not only from an era where handcrafted workmanship is giving way to the age of the machine, but to a time where the old certainties and the precisely ordered clockwork society that king and queen represent are being almost invisibly eroded from beneath. Not only are the staff getting uppity, but the women are more openly standing up to the men. Although, in the world of Downton Abbey, they’ve been arranging affairs all along.

Not that Downton Abbey sets out to deliver any type of lesson, unless that lesson be in the art of Machiavellian intrigue. Rather, the experience is a heady cocktail of tomfoolery and power moves. While some may find the setup lengthy, aficionados will appreciate the clever dialogue, the exquisite costumes, the sense of romance that perfumes the air and the devious minds at work.

When the credits rolled on opening night, the entire theatre offered up a round of applause. And that is something that doesn’t happen very often.

Late Night

Rated: MLate Night

Directed by: Nisha Ganatra

Written by: Mindy Kaling

Produced by: Mindy Kaling, Howard Klein, Jillian Apfelbaum, Ben Browning

Starring: Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, John Lithgow, Amy Ryan, Hugh Dancy, Denis O’Hare, Ike Barinholtz.

They say that the 1970s was the decade that fashion forgot, but I’ve always thought it was the ’80s.

With her big padded shoulders and power dressing suits Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson), television’s first ever female late show host and comedian, has become sewn into an image she should have abandoned long ago, and her show has morphed into an outfit that is gradually making its way to the back of your wardrobe. You know the one, it has to go but you can’t quite bear to part with it.

With the axe swinging and credible rumours that she is about to be replaced with a younger male comedian, Katherine is forced into crisis mode. That means sitting down with the writers of her show for the first time ever, as she tries to work out a way to reinvent herself. Despite a steady decline in the ratings over the previous decade, Katherine’s writing team are equally wedded to their worn out methods and lame humour. That is, until their cosy boys’ club is disrupted by newcomer Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling), token female writer and woman who is not afraid to take her place on an upturned bin.

To appease the head of the network, Katherine eventually accepts that her approval rating might improve if the guests she interviews were less august. Accordingly, YouTube sensation Mimi is booked and Katherine’s steady decline is brought to a spectacular halt, when the interview goes viral:  ‘For all the wrong reasons.’ Overnight Katherine is dubbed, ‘America’s least favourite aunt’.

But Katherine has even further to fall.

After a brief stint performing stand-up where she manages to raise a laugh for claiming that she is losing her show because she’s, ‘a little bit old and little bit white’, Katherine becomes convinced that the way to save herself is to find a way to address her own white privilege. Appointing herself ‘White Saviour’ is a move in the right direction, and a very funny one, but it’s not enough to quell the forces ranged against her. They’re still gunning for her show.

And they are about to pull out the big artillery.

Unless she can uncover the real reason for her failing popularity, Katherine stands to lose everything, and maybe she should. She has already skipped out on telling a socially relevant joke that Molly wrote for her, baulking at the last minute when a well-meaning colleague whispered, ‘Be careful of showing who you are, once you turn that tap on you can never turn it off again.’ Katherine’s struggle between her desire to conceal herself behind the façade of her power suits and her need to reveal her authentic self is a dilemma many of us face.

In a movie without a laugh track, I found my laughter bubbling up in an unforced way to join with the rest of the audience, even though I had expected the humour to fall flat after watching the trailer. While Mindy Kaling was a delight, it says a lot about Emma Thompson’s performance that she was able to play such a prickly, unsympathetic character, with just the tiniest glimmer of vulnerability. Without that, I might have been cheering for the other side.

Destroyer

Rated: MA 15+Destroyer

Directed by: Karyn Kusama

Written by: Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi

Produced by: Fred Berger p.g.a. Phil Hay p.g.a. Matt Manfredi p.g.a.

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Tatiana Maslany, Jade Pettyjohn, Scoot Mcnairy, Bradley Whitford, Toby Kebbell and Sebastian Stan.

A watery pair of blue eyes flicker and open, their colour washed out by the blazing sunshine. After what appears to be a night of heavy drinking slept off in the car, hungover and burnt out LAPD detective Erin Bell lumbers along to a crime scene. An anonymous victim lying in a drain bears the markings of a gang affiliation and with a dye stained note on his body. To Bell, this is a warning. Her long time arch nemesis, Silas (Toby Kebbell), is back and Bell will stop at nothing to track him down.

Whether we are introduced to him propped up at some bar or nursing a shotgun on the front porch, we can be pretty sure that a grizzled loner will somehow be redeemed by the end of the film. Things are more complicated when a female takes on this traditionally male role.

While many of the overseas reviewers have hailed Kidman’s role as a bravura performance, an almost equal number have described her character as a ‘demon-haunted’, ‘zombie,’ ‘crypt keeper’s bff,’ and ‘luxuriating in the flames of a personal hell’. At issue is the use of wigs and makeup, with many of the critics claiming the props overwhelmed the role and the Bell’s disintegration could have been more convincingly portrayed through acting. So, with the controversy in full swing, I was very curious to find out which side I would take.

One of the reasons for the differing views, is the way the film crosses genres, with some reading it as a cops and robbers thriller, others perceiving a horror movie slant, while Bell’s relationship with her estranged sixteen year old daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) lends a dramatic overtone.

Initially, the horror stems from unacknowledged trauma, when Bell as an undercover rookie was forced to watch on while a gang member is bullied into putting a loaded gun to his temple and made to pull the trigger. It is a seminal moment. If a life can be taken away as the mere setup for a joke, the change is profound. The future disappears.

For Bell, the trauma from that earlier life has been deeply etched into her being and any hope for herself abandoned long ago. That is until her fury is reawakened by Silas’s re-emergence. As she pursues her quarry through the fierce sunlight and blinding shadows of L.A’s seedier parts, Bell’s self-imposed mission takes on a more surreal and nightmarish cast, and the feeling is amplified by the parallel timeline that entwines the past and present. It is a montage of sensation, not unlike consciousness, and it creates a sense that we are viewing Bell’s quest through the unforgiving prism of her own interior reality.

Compounding Bell’s desperation, Shelby has been caught in the thrall of a charismatic but treacherous small-time thug, and seems hellbent on obliterating her own future as efficiently as possible. Even if Bell were prepared to forego redemption for her own sake (which she is not), nothing will stop her fighting for her daughter.

In her role as lone vigilante, Bell pulls out all the stops, at times breath-takingly so, and Kidman turns on an equally intense performance.  Whether she has taken a step too far into ‘hellmonster’ territory is up to you, but for me a ‘hellmonster’ is exactly what’s needed.

Everybody Knows (Todos Lo Saben)

Rated: MEverybody Knows

Directed and Written by: Asghar Farhadi

Sound: Daniel Fontrodona, Gabriel Gutiérrez, Bruno Tarrière

Composer: Javier Limón

Produced by: Alexandre Mallet-Guy and Álvaro Longoria

Starring: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Ricardo Darín, Carla Campra.

Even as it delves deeply into the convoluted ties of love that bind a family and a community, and the underlying tensions roiling beneath the surface, this film is above all a taut psychological drama and an exquisite slow burn mystery.

‘Laura is a woman with a secret, and suddenly she finds herself faced with a crisis,’ says Penelope Cruz of her character.

Laura has returned to a small village in her native Spain to attend her sister’s nuptials, bringing with her Diego, her young  son, and Irene (Carla Campra), her beautiful but wild sixteen year old daughter, while her husband remains in Buenos Aires to attend to business. Before their car even reaches its destination, Irene sets the village boys agog and she is soon hooning around the countryside on a trail bike with a smitten local boy in tow. Laura’s extended family is a jovial, rumbustious and permissive clan, at once completely modern but with an abiding sense of its long history and changing fortunes.

When Irene falls asleep in the middle of the wedding festivities it is initially put down to the effects of jetlag and mischief, since she has been sneaking cigarettes and illicit sips of wine all evening. It is only when Laura finally turns in for the night that she discovers that Irene’s bed is empty. In her daughter’s place is an ominous pile of newspaper clippings about a long ago abduction where the lifeless body of the victim was pulled from a well.

One of the criticisms often levelled at mysteries and thrillers is that character development is sacrificed at the expense of plot. Not in this case. According to screenwriting lore, the deep truths at the heart of a character are only revealed under duress, and here the pressure is tremendous as the moral dilemmas multiply and the thumbscrews tighten.

Fifteen years on from the time Iranian director Asghar Farhadi originally conceived the idea, Everybody Knows has been lovingly produced. The subtitles are effortless to read and the sound design subtly underpins the drama. As Laura and her former lover Paco (Javier Bardem) set out in an unseasonal downpour to search for the missing girl, the wipers in Paco’s four wheel drive beat a heavy tattoo echoing the thrumming rain and the collective heartbeat of occupants.

The cinematography and mise-en-scène have also been skilfully designed, with the outer landscape closely mirroring the inner. Lush greens and the golden hues of early summer give way to autumn’s stubble and dust, while the graceful sandstone buildings of the plaza cede to the crumbling ruins that dot the surrounding countryside. Paco in particular is closely identified with the land through his cherished vineyard, and his transformation over the course of the ordeal is remarkable. Indeed, the entire cast have turned in compelling performances.

While this film is a beautifully nuanced portrait of characters under extraordinary pressure, it is also a tightly scripted mystery, where the boisterous and joyful wedding party gradually comes to learn that the perpetrators must be from among them: ‘Watch everyone you know, carefully.’

Matangi /Maya /M.I.A.

Rated: MA 15+Matangi /Maya /MIA

Directed: Stephen Loveridge

Featuring: Maya Arulpragasam

‘This is what happened to a kid whose dad ran off to be a terrorist:’ Life doesn’t turn out the same way as someone whose dad is a banker, a lawyer or a fireman.

Maya’s choice of words is interesting. Usually, it would be the other side using such highly coloured and provocative language to describe the man behind the Tamil Tiger resistance movement. Partisans might be expected to use terms such as liberator or freedom fighter.

Maya was eleven when her mother and her siblings fled the war zone in their native Sri Lanka, to resettle in the refugee enclave in London. Although, the family was warmly welcomed into the fold, life was still harsh. Maya felt as if she didn’t fit in anywhere: she was ‘shot at in Sri Lanka’ and ‘spat at in Britain’. Music was her consolation and she would drift off to sleep listening to British pop through her headphones. That was, until they were burgled. Maya could do nothing but watch as her radio was carried off to a neighbouring flat.

It might have been one of the lowest points in her life as she lay awake listening to the music spilling out from the flat across the way, but it was a turning point, too. Up until then music was Madonna and the Spice Girls, but when Maya heard her first hip hop beats it was an epiphany. She was listening to people with something to say, and hip hop was the way to say it.

While her sister was lamenting the lack of birthday and Christmas cards from their father, Maya found a source of strength and identity in his absence. Her father was fighting for ‘a human rights problem’, everything was ‘inhumane’ for the Tamils in Sri Lanka. ‘What he’s done to us, made us so strong. We are so independent. Fearless fighters.’ But, rather than taking up arms, Maya turned to documentary film making to express her activism.

Haunted by footage of a women her own age in the jungle armed with assault rifles, Maya returned to Sri Lanka hoping to reconnect with her extended family and find some answers: ‘How do women survive in the jungle’ just on a day-to-day practical level and ‘Why was it me that got away?’ Following that visit, MIA was born, and she released her debut album, Arula (named after her dad). A million copies were downloaded from Napster. ‘It happened so fast.’ Finally. MIA had a microphone, and there was no question she was going to use it.

Subversive and defiant, instead of ‘cookie cutter videos with beautiful girls’, MIA started out with a clip of, monkeys and the jungle, before moving on to exploits and video clips that would bring her both international stardom and notoriety. Because, ‘the worst thing they can do to you is make you irrelevant’.

Well, they can try …

But the woman who infamously flipped the bird to the audience during a half-time performance with Madonna at the Super Bowl in 2012 and the singer/songwriter of ‘Born Free’—a song that accompanies a deeply disturbing music clip where pale-skinned, red-haired boys are brutally hunted down by faceless military types clad in black body armour—will not be going quietly.

Kusama Infinity: The Life and Art of Yayoi Kusama

Rated: MKusama Infinity: The Life and Art of Yayoi Kusama

Directed by: Heather Lenz

Produced by: Heather Lenz, Karen Johnson, David Koh, Dan Braun

Edited by: Keita Ideno, Sam Karp, John Northup, Nora Tennessen

Composed by: Allyson Newman

Director of Photography: Hart Perry

Featuring: Yayoi Kusama

From international scandal when she notoriously crashed the Venice Biennale in 1966 to Japan’s first female representative of in 2003, Yayoi Kusama is possibly the highest selling female artist on the planet today, and the queues for her exhibitions can be so long they can only be described as preposterous.

But, any exhibition is just a tiny window onto a body of work that, in this case, spans around 80 years. So, an opportunity to observe the genesis of the ideas and view a curated selection of the artist’s entire oeuvre, to see the various strands through the eyes of the artist can elicit that special thrill of recognition when you know that you get it, too.

In 1957, Kusama arrived in New York during the heyday of Minimalism with almost nothing but her talent and her boundless ambition. When she left Tokyo, flying first to Seattle, Kusama was mesmerised by the endless crests and swells of the sea below. Later, standing on the point of the Pacific Ocean, she felt as if she was poised on the edge of infinity. In a departure from her signature dot motif, Kusama produced a series of large canvasses, richly patterned with thick, impasto arabesques brushed over a thin stain. Superficially at one with the spare, self-referential style of Minimalism, Kusama’s Infinity Nets were inspired by the diametric opposite.

Instead of reduction, Kusama’s Nets represent a highly tactile and exuberant accumulation: ‘I am obsessed with Nets, they fascinate and haunt me.’ Rather than an art that speaks only to itself, Kusama’s work began with her deepest private experience, moving out to embrace the world and the infinity beyond: ‘I convert the energy of life into the dots of the universe.’

In her response to Minimalism, Kusama found herself among a cohort of white males, the rising stars of Pop Art, but the career trajectory was very different for the young Japanese émigré. In lieu of sales and grants, she worked tirelessly to secure patronage and, while she often achieved her goal, her desperation translated as aggression, further distancing her from the rarefied circles she hoped to move among. Since her goal was no less than, ‘To create a new history of art for the USA’, Kusama increasingly sought ever more radical and subversive avenues to bring attention to her practice.

Even so, Kusama was showing more in Europe than in America by 1966 when artist Lucio Fontana invited her to exhibit in front of the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She assembled an installation composed of 1500 reflective silver spheres with a sign in the middle that read, ‘Your Narcissism for Sale’. When asked to desist—despite the invite, Kusama was exhibiting without official permission—she had the perfect Pop Art comeback: ‘Why cannot I sell my art like ice-creams and hotdogs?’

By turns luminous and illuminating, this is the story of an artist who refused to accept oblivion. In response to decades of stonewalling by the art establishment, Kusama has sought ever more varied avenues to express her vision, from painting and sculpture to pioneering installation, naked happenings, performance and film. Very much aware of ‘the publicity that got a lot of attention’, Kusama has frequently waged her art as a guerrilla campaign. But at its heart are Kusama’s dots, ‘because stars don’t’ exist by themselves’.

Creed II

Rated: MCreed II

Directed by: Steven Caple Jr

Story by: Sascha Penn, Cheo Hodari Coker

Screenplay by: Juel Taylor, Sylvester Stallone

Produced by: Irwin Winkler, Charles Winkler, William Chartoff, David Winkler, Kevin King-Templeton, Sylvester Stallone

Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson, Sylvester Stallone, Florian ‘Big Nasty’ Munteanu, Dolph Lundgren, Phylicia Rashad.

‘Don’t do this.’

‘I ain’t gotta choice.’

‘That’s the same thing your father said and he died right here in my hands.’

Two sons: each unbeatable on their home soil, each bearing the scars of a mortal wound, each with a score to settle.

Toe to toe, the two couldn’t be more different.

The challenger, Viktor Drago (Florian ‘Big Nasty’ Munteanu), is a man with absolutely nothing but his towering physique and the will to ‘break’ his opponents.

Thirty years earlier, Viktor’s family was left fractured and demoralised following a grudge match between his father, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), and Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone).

Growing up in the Ukraine, Viktor has spent his whole life preparing to avenge his family’s honour. Looming over his American rival Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), Drago presents a brooding mountain of raw-boned muscle with nothing to lose.

Significantly shorter with a much lighter frame, Creed has everything to lose, as his trainer and mentor Rocky Balboa points out. Despite a loving mother (Phylicia Rashad), his adoring partner Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and a comfortable existence, Creed grew up without his father and he risks exposing his baby daughter to the same fate if he agrees to meet Viktor Drago in the ring.

While dedicated buffs may find some of the action slightly implausible—even on the movie poster Creed has dropped his guard on the left and is telegraphing his right, leaving himself open (if that makes perfect sense, you might need to suspend your disbelief)—for the rest of us the movie delivers an immersive experience.

Even on set, a sense of danger was present, with director (Steven Caple Jr) describing the choreography of the action as ‘a hardcore musical’. A single misstep and a real punch would have impacted on real flesh, and all of the blows in the slow motion sequences between Drago and Creed were real: ‘Florian said it was only fifty per cent, but it felt like ah a car crash.’ Even the camera operator, Mike Heathcote took a few hits as Florian was stepping up to the lens to simulate the fight from Creed’s point of view.

More than any other, even Clint Eastwood’s harrowing 2004 Million Dollar Baby, this movie brought home to me how primal that space inside the ring actually is. Even with all of the rules, the referees, the high pants and the gloves, in those three minutes between the bells, two men are locked in a struggle not only for the integrity of their vital organs but, ultimately, for their own consciousness.

With so much at stake, the question Balboa poses to Creed before he steps into the ring is: Why are you doing it?

At once he is asking Creed to seek out that nub of grit in his core, at the same time as he asks him whether he should even be stepping into the ring at all.

Haunted by Apollo Creed’s death, the ambivalence in Balboa’s question lends depth to the drama and the feeling is echoed by Bianca when she asks Creed as he lurches around the ring after winning the World Heavyweight Championship, ‘Do you know what’s happening?’