Gerard Elson
Reviews
Grant & I by Robert Forster
As Robert Forster tells it near the end of his affecting, up-tempo memoir, the decision to write Grant & I was not his. The morning after his death by heart attack in 2006, aged 48, the voice of Gran…
Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Cards on the table: at time of writing I haven’t yet finished this, the fourth volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘autobiographical novel’ cycle. In his almost punishingly expansive style previous volum…
Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec
The works of the late Georges Perec are as difficult as they are sundry. Portrait of a Man was written several years before Perec’s first published novel, Things, a book which also has the distinctio…
10:04 by Ben Lerner
Every moment is charged with illimitable potential in Ben Lerner’s great second novel, and every action pregnant, however involuntarily, with the played narratives of both history and personal past. …
The Woman In Black
His Hogwarts days now behind him, Daniel Radcliffe here joins the ranks of another noble British institution: the newly revived Hammer Film Productions, who from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s were …
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia
Although I’m loath to reduce this masterful sixth feature from Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Three Monkeys) to a trite ‘it’s X meets Y’ comparison, in this instance, I’ll relent: imagine Cormac McCarth…
Boardwalk Empire: Season 2
Nucky’ Thompson (Steve Buscemi) is back, along with everyone left standing at the conclusion of the first season of this Prohibition-era gangster drama from HBO.
Bootlegging, malfeasance, poetic vio…
Le Quattro Volte by Michelangelo Frammartino
The list of films prompted by the writings of Pythagoras must surely be brief. Indeed, were it comprised of nothing but this remarkable debut from Milanese filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino, it woul…
The Two Frank Thrings by Peter Fitzpatrick
The rise of commercial cinema in Australia and the nascence of our independent film industry provide a fascinating backdrop to this meticulous academic biography of the two Frank Thrings, father and …
The Artist by Michel Hazanavicius
Silence was golden at this year’s Oscars, with this charming throwback to Hollywood’s black-and-white heyday soft-shoeing away with statuettes for Best Picture, Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius) an…
Arrietty
Studio Ghibli – Japan’s finest purveyors of earthy handdrawn animation (Ponyo, Spirited Away) – lend their gentle sensibility to the story of The Borrowers.
Although every bit as charming and excit…
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
David Fincher’s (Zodiac, Fight Club) take on the first of Stieg Larson’s Lisbeth Salander novels fascinates most for its utter lack of extraneous content. No moment is wasted, no detail immaterial. …
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
When the Chauvet Cave was discovered in southern France in 1994, it was rightly realised as perhaps the most significant site of prehistoric art the modern world has ever seen. The lone filmmaker per…
Mildred Pierce
Todd Haynes could hardly have picked a more pertinent time to revisit this depression-era saga from novelist James M. Cain, concerned, as it is, with bourgeois ambition run shockingly, silently amok.…
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Hardly famed as an instrument of understatement, Gary Oldman nevertheless proves just that as George Smiley, John le Carré’s frog-mouthed MI6 spook in this new adaptation from Tomas Alfredson (Let th…
The Skin I Live In
Like Frankenstein reassembled as a modern revenge melodrama, this is the first exercise in out-and-out sci-fi/horror from the matchless Pedro Almodóvar.
The result is expectedly baroque. Antonio Ba…
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar) summons startling cinema from Lionel Shriver’s bestseller about a mother whose son has perpetrated the unthinkable. As Eva, the shell-shocked woman struggl…
Melancholia
Melancholia is the most accessible film yet from self-styled provocateur Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist) and it’s likely to go down as his masterwork.
Like other recent stand-out rel…
Autoluminescent: Richard Lowenstein
The late Rowland S. Howard, elegant gloom poet of Melbourne’s early post-punk scene, is given worthy valediction in this illuminating documentary. So fully transformed was Nick Cave’s band of high-sc…
Drive: Nicolas Winding
Ryan Gosling is the world’s most handsome blank slate in this so-chic-it-hurts homage to the wave of spacious 1980s crime thrillers that launched the careers of Michael Mann and Walter Hill. Gosling’…
News
Gerard Elson wins Young Bookseller of the Year
Two books I always enjoy sending to good homes are Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Sarah Bakewell’s gen…
Choose your own adventure: the John Darnielle edition
Summer, St Kilda. Strolling Acland Street, you dispose of your empty frozen yoghurt cup and peel off into Readings Books. The store’s cool interior is a welcome respite from the cramming heat outside: perfect conditions for browsing. You clock the new releases, turn the latest Murakami over in your hands. It’s a lovely object, though not what you’re after today. You saunter around a bi…
Shame in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series
I can’t think of a less appropriate descriptor for Knausgaard than ‘shameless’. He’s the converse of that, its blue, black and white photo ne…
What I Loved: House of Pleasures by Bertrand Bonello
When it screened at last year’s Alliance Française French Film Festival, Bertrand Bonello’s lavish, lugubrious fin de siècle bore the superior title House of Tolerance. The term was a euphemism for a brothel around the turn of the twentieth century and, given the tenor and milieu of Bonello’s film (which is set in the languid world of high-end prostitution), this was perhaps a far more befitting …
The Best DVDs of 2012
This year we’ve seen a bumper crop of books, music and film and over the next few weeks we’ll be presenting a series of our favourites, voted for and selected by Readings staff.
Here, our film specialist Gerard Elson shares his top ten DVDs of 2012.
*Inner Space: The Complete Series*
Self-styled sub-aquatic adventurers Val and Ron Taylor wrote the book on vanguard underwater photography. In …
Five Scary Films To Watch This Halloween
Our film specialist, Gerard Elson, picks out five great DVDs to watch this Halloween.
Scripted by geek doyen Joss Whedon, this is a gleeful subversion of every hackneyed trope in the horror movie handbook, made electric by its creator’s knack for pithy, pop-culture-savvy dialogue and wicked character-based gags. By its apocalyptic end, this ultimately offers no less t…