Lauren Carroll Harris

‘Is Wuthering Heights amoral?’ asked the London Review of Books podcast late last year. Of course, and deliberately so, we evidently needed reminding.

In the wake of another disastrous budget, advocates for the arts sector remain trapped in the cursed logic of the free market economy. As an election approaches, we must not settle for crumbs but rethink what we value as a society.

Grants and prizes aren’t enough to sustain a career as a working artist. In a time of crisis, we need to radically reimagine what an equitable arts sector can look like, and offer creatives the job security others take for granted.

Australian war films are dominated by stories of individual heroism and nationalistic myth-making, without reflecting on why soldiers were fighting in the first place. A recent wave of films have sought to engage with uncomfortable aspects of Australia’s colonial and military history—but are we capable of a proper reckoning?

Reopening after its 2020 shutdown, the shape of David Walsh’s big experiment can be seen clearly: Both a subversion of the traditional museum and a reinforcement of it.

The arts industry in Australia is at a precipice—decimated by the pandemic and systematically starved of funding. Instead of advancing an economic and nationalist argument for the value of the arts, we need to confront Australia’s cultural estrangement and reorient the sector towards social justice.

As an Eastern Bloc story imagined by Westerners, HBO’s Chernobyl is escapism with an ostensible twist of political reality – allowing us to watch in horror while recusing ourselves from facing the crises of the present.

Thomas M. Wright’s Acute Misfortune, based on Erik Jensen’s biography of artist Adam Cullen, explores both the destructive masculinity upon which Cullen built his personal mythology, and the way Australian culture romanticises blokey dysfunction.

More concerned with celebrity than song, Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux is a playful and deeply ironic ode to the allure, euphoria and grand American myth of pop stardom.

An immersive, hallucinatory story of an Amazon Indian woman’s journey to becoming a shaman, Lynette Wallworth’s virtual reality project Awavena uses cutting edge technology to connect with ancient ideas about spirituality and connectedness with nature.

A plotless, hypnotic progression through the starscapes of movie history, the Austrian filmmaker confronts our attempts to represent the unknowable, and demonstrates that cinema is about much more than storytelling.

New HBO series Sharp Objects continues prestige TV’s departure from the era of the male anti-hero to one of difficult, troubled, everyday women – and a more nuanced perspective on what it means to live through and with trauma.

A story about KGB spies living undercover in Cold War USA, The Americans rejects stereotypes of action-packed spy thrillers, instead turning its gaze towards personal trauma and the human cost of espionage.

Initially conceived as an anti-censorship project, a new documentary compiled from decades of material cut by Australian film censors instead reveals a time capsule of cinematic misogyny, raising complex questions around the role of moral judgement in storytelling.

Shot entirely on an iPhone, Unsane couples the American auteur’s interest in pushing genre boundaries and his obsession with paranoid individuals resisting oppressive institutions.