The Lion King review – Disney’s Broadway juggernaut roars to life in Sydney

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Capitol theatre, Sydney With breathtaking aesthetics and joyous performances, the audacious adaptation – now almost 30 years old – is greater than the sum of its parts Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email The opening of The Lion King is a bona fide five-star moment that reminds you why this musical still rules the theatrical savannah. Forgoing the sentimentality of the 1994 film and the razzle-dazzle of its Broadway peers at the time, it taps into more primal, powerful delights. From its first incantation (translated as “All hail the king” – or “Look, a lion, oh my god”, depending on who you ask ), it builds with a chant, a gathering of human bodies, and finally a procession of animals that leaves the stage to come into the audience, enveloping you in a kind of choreographed ritual. (This is a good moment to check in on your date; if they’re not Having Feelings, they may be some kind of joyless ghoul.) This sequence encapsulates the best of the show: director Julie Taymor...
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The Exorcist review – Friedkin’s head-swivelling horror is still diabolically inspired

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The 50th anniversary extended director’s cut of the 1973 tale of teenage possession still shocks

William Friedkin’s deadly serious contemporary horror, adapted for the screen from the bestseller by novelist William Peter Blatty, is back now in cinemas for its 50-year anniversary in the extended director’s cut. This is the film that whispered its evil into the ears of US audiences traumatised by political and generational upheaval. It is also the great ancestor of the entire horror genre: a 132-minute jump scare – with horribly malign slow sections – taking place in upper-middle class America rather than some exotic central European locale. (I have in the past suggested that it brought supernatural fear into the American suburbs; well, I should admit that Georgetown in DC is hardly a suburb, in fact the point is that it is very near the political centre of the free world.)

Ellen Burstyn plays movie actor Chris MacNeil, a single mother ordinarily resident in California but currently renting a handsome townhouse in Washington as she shoots a film called Crash Course; she is playing a liberal academic at odds with the student body who are violently possessed with revolutionary ideas. Her director is a louche and boozy Brit called Burke Dennings, whose persona is maybe inspired a bit by Ken Russell, who is played by veteran Irish stage actor Jack MacGowran and whose death shortly after shooting helped create the “cursed film” aura that surrounds The Exorcist.

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