Concrete Playground

Thursday, 11th February - Monday, 15th March
@ Various cinemas

Jacques Audiard serves up another searing character study of crime with his taut portrait of A Prophet. Following up the beautifully realised The Beat My Heart Skipped, Audiard journeys into... Read More »

Thursday, 4th February - Tuesday, 16th March
@ Various cinemas

Precious was never going to be a light-hearted trip to the cinema. Harrowing to the point of being labeled “poverty porn,” it is the story of Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey... Read More »

Wednesday, 3rd February - Wednesday, 17th March
@ Various cinemas

At first glance, one of Australia’s most anticipated films of 2010 hardly looks like a local. With Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe taking the leads, Australian twin brothers Peter and... Read More »

Thursday, 4th February - Thursday, 18th March
@ Various cinemas

Mad Mel is back. After seven years off screen, he’s stepped in front of the camera and into very familiar shoes, once again playing a police detective driven to the... Read More »

Monday, 18th January - Friday, 19th March
@ Parramatta Artists Studios

Bear Witness is the artistic output of Ehren Thomas, a multimedia artist, DJ and filmmaker from Ottawa Canada. He remixes appropriated images and sound to create video assemblages that speak... Read More »

Thursday, 4th March - Saturday, 20th March
@ Chalk Horse

Tara Marynowsky’s faint, whispering watercolors appear to float within the canvas like nebulous snapshots of REM-state imaginings, their pale delicacy unencumbered by the volumes of idea, history and myth of... Read More »

Wednesday, 13th January - Saturday, 20th March
@ North Sydney Oval

Taking up residence at the North Sydney Oval, the 2010 Starlight Cinema kicks off with a preview screening of the hilarious British political satire In the Loop. Then for the next two... Read More »

Tuesday, 2nd March - Sunday, 21st March
@ Palace Academy Cinemas

Each year the French Film Festival arrives in Sydney brimming with cinematic gems and a splash of Parisian chic. This year is no different, with the programme featuring a glittering... Read More »

Thursday, 11th March - Tuesday, 23rd March
@ Gaffa

Putting birds beside guns may seem a dangerous move, ripe for violence. Actually, it makes for quite a nice dialogue between two new solo exhibitions at the recently relocated Gaffa... Read More »

Thursday, 18th February - Thursday, 25th March
@ Various cinemas

War is a drug.Or so Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break) and journalist turned screenwriter Mark Boal (In the Valley of Elah) would have us believe. After being embedded with an Explosive... Read More »

Thursday, 11th March - Friday, 26th March
@ Old Fitzroy Theatre

There is something in the water in Adelaide. Strange things are happening with theatre there: it's hilarious and down to earth, but somehow revealing and vibrant at the same time.... Read More »

Wednesday, 27th May - Friday, 26th March
@ Cockatoo Island

I can still hear the rousing tune that plays to William Kentridge's video installation, "I am not me, the horse is not mine." Such is the infectious effect of this... Read More »

Thursday, 11th March - Saturday, 27th March
@ Bicker Gallery

Wanderlust: getting itchy dust in your travel knickers. Kissing your mum goodbye and bikies, Euro-gays, gypsies, dreadlocked backpackers, earnest eco-warriors, conservatives, Mongolian goat herds and endless strange and wonderful vistas... Read More »

Saturday, 13th March - Sunday, 28th March
@ PACT Theatre

Three men of different, but easily identified, nationalities walk into a bar and in the space of one sentence demonstrate a well-established stereotype of their culture. Go on, laugh. But,... Read More »

Saturday, 6th February - Sunday, 28th March
@ Object Gallery

Object Gallery is reinvigorating the sustainable design/eco-friendly/carbon neutral debate just when it was starting to sound like a whole lot of codswallop - I mean what a life-cycle; from being... Read More »

Thursday, 11th March - Wednesday, 31st March
@ Horus & Deloris

In an odd, tucked-away little gallery in Pyrmont are two odd little exhibitions, one boarding a tripped-out ship to Planet Suburbia, the other stepping into a SUPERDOOPER HYPERDOME heaving with... Read More »

Monday, 1st March - Wednesday, 31st March
@ Various Sydney venues

If your normal intake of art plateaus out at a monthly round of the AGNSW and a field trip during the Biennale, March is here to turn things up a... Read More »

Thursday, 25th February - Thursday, 8th April
@ Various cinemas

There was little doubt fashion designer Tom Ford’s debut film was going to have style, but what about substance? Effortlessly silencing doubters, Ford has taken Christopher Isherwood’s novel, infused a... Read More »

Wednesday, 10th March - Saturday, 10th April
@ Sydney Opera House

For many actors, it is playing Hamlet, Macbeth or Lear that marks their career success. Perhaps not playing them in the local church town hall, but certainly on a recognised... Read More »

Saturday, 13th February - Saturday, 10th April
@ Anna Schwartz Gallery

As a prodigy of sorts, with his work One and Three Chairs in 1965, Kosuth began a career of questioning the nature of art. He and his peers (the conceptual... Read More »

Thursday, 10th December - Sunday, 11th April
@ Museum of Contemporary Art

In a world where the new is often demanded but rarely considered or discussed for any length of time, the Berlin-based Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is a memorable exception. A... Read More »

Thursday, 4th March - Thursday, 15th April
@ Various cinemas

Tim Burton’s obsessively anticipated adaptation of Alice in Wonderland finally hits cinemas in all its three-dimensional glory. Burton has transformed Lewis Carroll’s Alice Kingsley into a 19-year-old dreamer (played by... Read More »

Wednesday, 3rd March - Sunday, 18th April
@ AGNSW

As kimono clad onlookers a few floors above traipse around the Hymn to Beauty: The Art of Utamaro exhibition ogling delicate ukiyo-e woodblock prints, rest your weary geta clogs in... Read More »

Friday, 12th March - Saturday, 24th April
@ Wharf 1, Wharf Theatre

Theatres in Sydney over the last 12 months have been brimming with anti-epic domestic snapshots of fraught intimate relationships, and the latest from UK physical theatre company Frantic Assembly continues... Read More »

Wednesday, 17th February - Monday, 26th April
@ Museum of Contemporary Art

You’re likely to have heard of 'Pavlov’s dog', but did you know famed physiologist Ivan Pavlov actually had four dogs — Druzhok, Sultan, Zhuchko, and Tsygan? It was with Druzhok... Read More »

Saturday, 13th February - Sunday, 2nd May
@ Art Gallery of New South Wales

Ukiyo — most often translated as ‘the floating world’ — refers to hedonistic Edo Japan, in particular the ‘pleasure quarters’ of Yoshiwara where brothels, chashitsu tea houses, sumo wrestling... Read More »

Wednesday, 27th January - Sunday, 2nd May
@ University of Sydney Art Gallery

Comprising two shows across three spaces, Mirror Mirror Then & Now looks at mirror as material in art from both historical-international and contemporary-Australian perspectives. Curated by Ann Stephen, the exhibitions... Read More »

Friday, 5th March - Sunday, 23rd May
@ Art Gallery of New South Wales

Let's begin by admitting that we, Australians, have a bit of a complex about being on the edge of things. Convicts, immigrants and the dispossessed, so far from the centre... Read More »

Monday, 21st December - Sunday, 23rd May
@ Australian Maritime Museum

I was about just verging into adolescence when my parents took me to Loch Ness. It was painful attempting to keep up that despondent, outsider teen thing when all I... Read More »

Thursday, 11th March - Sunday, 30th May
@ Various cinemas

France’s illegal immigrant population is given an earnest, charming face in Philippe Lioret's affecting portrait, Welcome. The irony of the title is only the beginning of Lioret’s stirring, incisive look... Read More »

Saturday, 27th February - Sunday, 30th May
@ Powerhouse Museum

If fashion is your passion, as the great Henry Roth said (often) throughout the highly addictive Project Runway, then best get those obscure designer boots down to the Powerhouse Museum... Read More »

Tuesday, 9th March - Wednesday, 16th June
@ State Library of NSW

David Scott Mitchell’s bequest of his books, papers and pictures to the State Library in 1907 came with the condition that it be housed and displayed in its own wing.... Read More »

Friday, 22nd January - Sunday, 1st August
@ The White Rabbit

Kerr and Judith Neilson of The White Rabbit Gallery describe their extensive and dramatic collection of contemporary Chinese art as a ‘personal anthology’. Indeed The Tao of Now, an exhibition... Read More »

Saturday, 20th February - Sunday, 8th August
@ Museum of Sydney

There was a note stuck to the back of a Darlinghurst bus stop seat. "ROSE," it read, "Gone up the Cross. Ring me! Trevor." The year wasn't 1970, it was... Read More »

Sunday, 13th December - Wednesday, 1st December
@ Powerhouse Museum

Bleached perms. Feathered earrings and feathered hair. Acid-wash. Ra-ra skirts. Rayban Wayfarers. Swatch watch envy. Eyeliner for all. Crop tops over leotards. Bangles, tons of bangles. They may be 80s... Read More »