The most disturbing aspect of viewing Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, half a century after its release, is how familiar the images of Western soldiers involved in a civil conflict in an Arab country now feel.

Its settings were Melbourne’s dimly lit streets and alleys, its public bars and cramped workers’ cottages. The show also presented a realistic portrayal of criminals, investigators and the methods used to solve crimes. This authenticity was the chief selling point of Homicide and its successors, Division 4 and Matlock Police. And crucial to this authenticity was the in-depth involvement of the Victorian police.

The majority of critics have seen The Americans as a show about relationships and marriage, a view reinforced by the show's creator, Joe Weisberg. But to me, regardless of the creator’s intentions, it’s a text about eighties politics and the decline of the traditional left in the US.

At its best, procedural crime fiction takes a scalpel to the myths and fallacies that have grown up around history, revealing the activities of previously marginalised characters within it.

During the recent Melbourne International Film Festival, I had an interesting discussion about whether genre films can ever deal with important social issues in a way that is not titillating or exploitative. One example of a genre film that does, shown at this year’s MIFF, is Peter Weir’s 1977 film, The Last Wave. The Internet Movie Database classifies The Last Wave as a ‘drama/mystery/thriller’ but it is also laced with supernatural/occult tropes popular in many horror films of the seventies. It’s a story about weather and the climate, in a way that can now be viewed as a remarkably prescient.

The Independent newspaper recently reported the British Broadcasting Corporation is designing a television program in which unemployed and low paid workers will compete against each other, The Hunger Games style, for cash prizes. The newspaper report is one of several recent things that have got me thinking about how aspects of dystopian cinema are bleeding into real life.

How did television, traditionally viewed as something of an artistic dead zone, get so good? Second, how can mediums such as cinema and free to air TV compete and what impact will expanded content and choice have on our ability to tell Australian stories with Australian voices?

Watching Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2015) reminded me of Sunday nights spent in front of the television with my parents in the late seventies and early eighties. It was a time before the plethora of viewing options available now and the Sunday movie was a big deal, sometimes the highlight of the week’s viewing.

On a recent visit to New York I was struck by how long-term residents talk about themselves like veterans who have survived a lengthy military campaign.

Reviewing Jacks and Jokers for the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this year, Queensland historian Ross Fitzgerald (no relation to Tony) wrote: ‘The reality is that few journalists, lawyers and academics in Queensland publicly protested against Lewis and especially against his powerful premier, who was eventually awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws by Queensland University.’

The last time Ng Shui Meng saw her husband, Sombath Somphone, alive was early in the evening of Saturday, 15 December 2012. Sombath was driving his old jeep home. Shui Meng, who was travelling in her own vehicle in front of his, noticed him being stopped at a police post on Thadeua Road, a main thoroughfare in Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

It is, by turns, a love letter to seventies science fiction; a study of the clash between Hollywood filmmaking culture and the mores of the European avant garde; and a celebration of unrestrained creativity and artistic determination. I don’t mean to sound trite, but it is a film every creative, whatever they do, should see.

The main reason I like Game of Thrones is because, at its core, it’s about power: who has it and what they do with it, who doesn’t and what becomes of them. It is a morality tale like The Sopranos or The Wire, but with swords and battle-axes. And in this respect, while it derives from fantasy, on another level it is remarkably realistic – it’s Tolkien’s world updated for our times.

A couple of months ago I had an interesting Twitter exchange with an outspoken opponent of Australia’s policy of warehousing asylum seekers in third countries such as Nauru, Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and, if media reports are correct, soon Cambodia.

‘Nostalgia’, both as a word and a concept, originated in the seventeenth century to describe a condition afflicting Swiss mercenaries on long tours of military duty. According to UK cultural critic Simon Reynold’s 2011 book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past, it ‘was literally homesickness, a debilitating craving to return to the native land. The symptoms included melancholy, anorexia, even suicide.’

As a seasoned habitué of second hand bookshops, and what is known in some quarters as ‘an early career author’, I often ponder the reality of literary obscurity. It takes stern stuff (or huge sales) to go into a large second hand bookshop and not feel humbled by the sight of shelf upon shelf of old books. All those hours, days, weeks, years of literary labour selling cheap, if they sell at all.

The first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, kickstarted the modern fascination with spies. Well-known spy novelists such as Richard Condon, Alistair MacLean, Frederick Forsyth and John Le Carré, as well as a legion of lesser-known writers and pulp imitators, all followed in Bond’s wake.

Long before it was a television series, True Detective was the name of an American magazine that specialised in lurid, sensationalised stories of real-life crimes, often told from the point-of-view of the grizzled police veterans who investigated them.

In the late eighties I visited Sydney with my girlfriend at the time. We stayed in a fleabag hotel in the middle of Kings Cross, walked around the neon-lit streets at night and bought a bag of marijuana off an emaciated dealer in an alley next to a strip joint. It turned out to be mostly dried parsley. Not much of a connection with Australia’s capital of sleaze and sin, I know. But what my real life interactions lacked, imagination made up for, fuelled by Kings Cross’s place in Australian popular culture.

You don’t have to be doing hard yards in some area of the creative arts to empathise with the lead character in the Coen brothers’ latest offering, Inside LIewyn Davis – but it doesn’t hurt.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the media’s treatment of Read’s death. Partly because as a crime writer I feel implicated by association in the media’s often-salacious interest in true crime, and it raises questions about aspects of what we, as writers of true or fictional crime, do and how we do it. It’s also interesting to ponder why Read became such a public figure and, by extension, why contemporary Australia is so fascinated with the criminal.

From the first scene – a bizarre musical number involving dancers emerging from the mouth of a giant fish ­– to the last, an old man being physically sick at the memory of his actions (whether genuinely or not, is unclear), The Act of Killing is a riveting, at times, unbelievable piece of documentary film making.