Francesco Ventriglia's telling of Dorothy and her journey along the yellow brick road opens under a wide, fresco sky.

Last year, Janine Jansen filled Auckland Town Hall playing Tchaikovsky with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, her performance melting all but the stoniest of hearts.

The two lead performances are worth the ticket price alone in this rough and tough buddy movie.

Happy Valley is a lot like other crime dramas on the surface, but it takes viewers where few others dare.

He's from Buckinghamshire, she's from Florida, but there's something about the duo that makes them sound like no one else.

Ariana Grande's new album, Dangerous Women, is a step up with its gritty, R&B sound with a dance-pop twist.

The Japanese master of domestic drama, and heir to the tradition of the great Yasujiro Ozu turns in another of his beguilingly simple family stories.

It's a rare artist who can wrap up the past, present and future in one unique package. But that's exactly what Skepta manages to do.

It's not an album without hope and there's plenty of softness and warmth to be found in the fragility and sadness.

With America's heartland falling under the spell of an unlikely saviour, a local revival of Evita couldn't be better timed.

Enso String Quartet still has the freshness and attack that spurred one critic to rationalise the group's smouldering power as half honey and half molten lava.

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling's 70s crime comedy suggests a Tarantino revival of Jake and the Fatman.

Take a bonkers ride into a bizarre and astonishing world of fringe fetish.

Neeme Jarvi and his Orchestre de la Suisse Romande have been immersing themselves in French music lately, with noteworthy albums of Massenet, Chabrier and Offenbach.

They don't build monuments to critics but this doco about a celebrated L.A. food writer is something to savour.

COMMENT: Who knew bipolar disorder was so damn funny? Not me. But then I'm not a doctor. I can barely diagnose a suitable parking space ...

It's nww surprise these albums by Bob Dylan (who turned 75 yesterday) and Eric Clapton (71) don't have much, if anything, to do with rock.

David Farrier climbed into a story you would never buy if it was fiction.

COMMENT: Doco Why Am I? unravels vast findings from Dunedin study following 1000 babies born in 1972.

COMMENT: Veteran film-maker Bryan Bruce delivered one of NZ's worst hours of television last night, as he took a ''rambling, incoherent" look at NZ's school system.

This is more of an illustrated lecture than a play; our presenters are purportedly two members of the first successful Everest expedition, but we don't really get to know them properly.

Experiencing Stephen Hough's magisterial Brahms Second Piano Concerto brought back a conversation in which the Englishman talked of the power that came from the work's sense of emotional containment.

In contrast to his usual doom-and-gloom, Michael Moore takes a more optimistic path.

A familiar voice sang on the opening scene's soundtrack of The Catch, (Wednesdays, 7pm, TVNZ OnDemand).

The problem with The Block Party is while the acts were excellent, everything else was plagued with problems.

Back in 2004, when he was visiting this country, Steven Isserlis told me categorically that Elgar and Walton had written two of the finest cello concertos of the 20th century.

Until last year 'competitive forklift driving' sounded like a TV idea Alan Partridge would have pitched to the BBC's Chief Commissioning Editor along with 'inner-city sumo' and 'monkey tennis'.

James Blake's new album is a spellbinding mixture of glorious vocals and spare electronica, which somehow manages to play in the dark side of life while also remaining light and free