Arts In 30

Ce and Sky share their favourite picks of 2025. Movies mentioned includes Freaky Tales, KPop Demon Hunters, Twinless, Sirat, The Secret Agent, Sinners, One Battle After Another, and One of Them Days. Music mentioned includes Kathryn Joseph - We Were Made Prey, Ethel Cain - Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You; Perfume Genius - live & Glory; Billy Woods - Golliwog; Backxwash - Only Dust Rema...

Rudi Bremer from Awaye joins the team to take us to the NGA where After The Rain, the fifth National Indigenous Art Triennial is bringing together a remarkable collection of work under the supervision of Artistic Director Tony Albert. And with Summer holidays ahead, we recommend our TV shows of the year for your binge-watching pleasure. Ce chooses Wayward, Sky picks The Lowdown, and Rudi argues fo...

Last week, the federal government passed legislation that will require video streaming services with more than 1 million Australian subscribers to invest 10 percent of their Australian expenditure or 7.5 percent of their gross Australian revenue into new Australian productions each year.  The bill passed with the support of the Greens, and as part of the negotiations, the ABC will also receive $50...

Three films in, at a point where most franchises have run out of ideas and started phoning it in, Knives Out has returned with its best episode yet in Wake Up Dead Man. With a star turn by Josh O'Connor and an exceptional ensemble, it's an examination of faith and belief, of the potential for good will and redemption, and of the negative power of anger, corruption, and hatred, all wrapped up in a...

Wicked: For Good has launched to a big opening weekend, taking in $226 million US in worldwide box office revenue, a substantial improvement on the already successful first film. But that makes it something of an outlier for Hollywood this year. Industry experts have pointed out that - accounting for inflation - the Summer tentpole season in the US had lower numbers than we’ve seen in decades. Is...

Everyone in the world has come together in a single voice: shared perspective, shared understanding, shared goals - harmony.  That's both the plot of Pluribus and a rough summary of how critics have reacted to the show. But Ce and Sky aren't entirely won over and share their concerns about the hive mind. Wicked: For Good looks set to be one of the biggest releases of the year and, despite some str...

Arts degrees are expected to cost $55,000 next year, but despite the rising cost to students, we’re seeing restructures, closures, and redundancies at one university after another. And the strain between the tertiary sector and the arts has been a consistent theme throughout 2025, with Meanjin , the Bendigo Writers Festival and MUMA all making headlines. What’s gone wrong? What’s the impact for bo...

Rose Byrne puts in an award-winning performance as a woman under pressure in the excellent If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. Glen Powell takes on an all-powerful media company in a dystopian future for the sake of his sick daughter in The Running Man. And Sergei Loznitsa returns to tragic flaws of the Stalin-era legal system in Two Prosecutors. Jason di Rosso from The Screen Show joins the team to talk...

The Federal Government has announced plans for a local content quota for streaming video services in Australia. Any service with more than one million subscribers will be required to spend a percentage of their revenue on Australian content. Julianne Schultz and Guy Morrow take us through the details and consider whether the policy goes far enough. And Hungarian-British author David Szalay has won...

There’s a simple pleasure in seeing competent people doing their job well, which is one of the draws of The Diplomat, a show that follows in the tradition of the West Wing in balancing high stakes political drama with chaotic personal drama to great affect. As it enters season 3, and the chaos begins to overwhelm the competence, the team discuss whether it manages to keep meeting audience expectat...

The board of the Australian Design Centre has announced that the centre will close on June 30, 2026, unless additional funding can be secured. The call comes after the centre lost out on significant ongoing funding from both Federal and State governments. CEO Lisa Cahill discusses the ADC’s options going forward. Ahead of International Day for People With A Disability, we’re looking at accessibili...

It's Halloween, so Ce and Sky are diving into horror films and exploring what they love about the genre alongside a few picks - some famous and some a little more niche. One horror film that's out this week is Bugonia, by Yorgos Lanthimos. It's a remake of the South Korean film Save The Green Planet, which is, if anything, better than the original and marks another chapter in the Lanthimos-Emma St...

The Federal Government has announced that it won't institute a Text and Data Mining exception on copyright, an idea raised as a possibility in the Productivity Commission's recent report. Arts organisations across Australia are hailing the decision, and Nicholas Pickard from APRA-AMCOS discusses the implications of the announcement for the music sector. A number of prominent Australian artists hav...

It’s 1982 and Bruce Springsteen is on the verge of super-stardom, but the Boss, unready to leave the past behind, holes up in a house in New Jersey and records Nebraska on a four-track tape deck. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a new biopic charts the making of this classic album, but the team have some serious concerns, beginning with the choice of this time period. Guillermo Del Toro has...

After a three-year pilot program, Ireland has made a basic income scheme for artists a permanent policy, citing not only increased productivity and mental health, but a positive return on investment for the money spent. Moira Fleming, from Ireland's National Campaign for the Arts shares details about the scheme and Dr Jo Caust looks at the Australian context and why a basic income is worth conside...

Featuring troubled children in a small American town, an outsider who can sense that something is wrong, and hints of the supernatural, Wayward seems influenced by the work of Stephen King, but Ce argues that the new Netflix series fares a lot better than most of King's actual adaptations. The new Luca Guadagnino film, After the Hunt, is aiming for ambiguity, but lacks the strength of its convicti...

A “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” That’s how the jury for the Nobel Prize for Literature described the work of Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the 2025 prize. For those of us who haven’t had a chance to dive into the novels, Julian Murphet, Jury Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Adel...

Taylor Swift's twelfth album, Life of a Showgirl, has broken sales records and immediately jumped to the top of the charts across the world, but critical praise has been in shorter supply. Has a return to the production team of Max Martin and Shellback led to a reinvigorated pop star? Or are the lyrics to Wood a sign of things to come? Sky makes a pitch for The Invocations, a great YA novel that j...

The Riyadh Comedy festival continues this week and while comedians like Louis CK and Bill Burr defended their decision to perform, many of their colleagues and fans have been forthright in their critiques.  The festival is one small part of a major investment in the arts by Saudi Arabia as part of their Vision 2030 strategy. Andrew Leber , assistant professor of Political Science at Tulane Univers...

Bad Bunny is one of the biggest musicians of the 2020s, with multiple hit records and a massive worldwide fanbase. With the recent announcement that he'll be headlining the Super Bowl half-time show, we look back at his 2025 album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, and discuss why the announcement has raised the ire of some people on the far right of American politics.  Sky explains why The Lowdown, a Souther...

Two major prizes — The Prime Minister's Literary Award and the Queensland Literary Awards — have announced their choices over the last week, adding an exciting new pile of books to the must-read pile that we're all trying to work our way through. We meet two of the authors who are being recognised: Krystal Sutherland, winner of the Prime Minister's Award for Young Adult Literature for The Invocati...

With two major films launching this week, The Screen Show's Jason Di Rosso pops in to share his thoughts. One of Hollywood's major auteurs, Paul Thomas Anderson, brings us his second adaptation of Thomas Pynchon, turning Vineland into One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in an alternate near future not too different than our own. It's a propulsive action film, with a healthy sense...

Last week, ABC chose to suspend Jimmy Kimmel Live! from broadcast, after criticism from the Chairman of the FCC. The network has now reversed that decision and Kimmel will be back this week, but the decision has led to protests, boycotts, and a lot of concerns about the state of free speech in the US. David Dayen , executive editor of The American Prospect , explores why ABC initially folded so qu...

Claire Nichols from The Book Show joins the team to talk through the biggest name in comedy at the moment: The Studio. With a record-breaking 13 Emmys at the 2025 awards, we share our takes on what's made the show such a critical darling.  Sky makes the case for The Names , by Florence Knapp, a novel that hinges on a sliding door moment, but is actually a deep examination of the impact domestic vi...

The state of television and streaming is perhaps more precarious than it’s been since before the “streaming revolution”... so what do this year’s Emmys tell us about which way the industry is going?  ABC News' Velvet Winter takes us through the stats and the pleasant surprises.  Arts Project Australia has been around for 5 decades now: the first full-time art studio in Australia for artists with a...