Culture

Todd Haynes’s revelatory documentary The Velvet Underground is the latest in a long career of portraying outsiders.

The boy says, ‘You’re the one who writes novels, aren’t you?’ Patrick doesn’t reply. He did, he wrote one, it won an award but no one would publish it, but he thinks now, this might make a good novel, about what happens when you fuck your employees around, when you give them two weeks’ notice when you know they’ve got a million-dollar mortgage. The boy says, ‘I was thinking of becoming a writer,’ and Patrick laughs, almost runs into a van, says, ‘That’d be the dumbest decision of your life.’

For choreographer Jo Lloyd, the discomfort of Leos Carax’s film Holy Motors is part of its uneasy brilliance.

The latest crowd-pleaser from Perth ensemble The Last Great Hunt bursts with ideas but struggles to bring them into focus.

The documentary Our African Roots uncovers the lost histories of Africans who came to colonial Australia.

Portraits are a constant in this year’s Ballarat International Foto Biennale, which rewards repeated viewings.

Behind Sjón’s multifaceted work – novels, poems, screenplays and some of Björk’s greatest hits – is a profound belief in the power of poetic imagination.

Atchison believed a church bell would be like the belt of his trousers. It would save him, save us all, from embarrassment. I have heard that many men in these parts see no need for conventional accoutrements such as underpants, but a bell was of a different order. It would keep us from being spiritually, civically, communally naked. Rung out and resonant rather than strung out and desperate. Selwyn Atchison, Presbyterian burgher, barley farmer and barely above the ruminant, would not settle for less. His happy collie came straight for me and my pocket of lozenges as Selwyn settled his dray and formally tap-tapped a bony knuckle on our rufous she-oak door.

Judy Watson has been enchanted for almost two decades by the lightness and ephemerality of Pat Steir’s Waterfall Mirage.

Stunning new albums from Lala Lala and Hand Habits disprove the adage that dealing with your inner demons is detrimental to art.