Rating: 3/5 Verdict: Beautiful but unfinished

Set in Mumbai, Saraswati Park is a vivid portrait of intergenerational family dynamics in an ever-changing, modern day India.

Theme-based anthologies serve several purposes. They explore and represent particular subjects from a thousand vantage points and they assemble diverse voices, both familiar and unfamiliar.

This is the first full biography written since the publication of the two-volume edition of Mansfield's Notebooks (2002), transcribed by Margaret Scott, and the final (fifth) volume in 2008 of her Collected Letters.

Rating: 3.5/5

Way back in the 1980s I was addicted to Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels.

Graham Reid rides to the shadowlands with Bruce Springsteen.

Rating: 3.5/5. Verdict: Thriller shoots first then asks existential questions later. For quite some time.

U2 last night paid tribute to the victims of the Pike River mine disaster. Scott Kara was there

Rating: 4/5. Verdict: This character just don't care.

Rating: 3/5. Verdict: The difficult instalment from the arthouse favourite.

Rating: 4/5. Verdict: Barely there beauty.

Rating: 1/5. Verdict: If cream rises, this sinks like a lead samosa.

Talk about a guilty pleasure. It's nasty, nonsensical and further evidence for the case that Robert De Niro will say yes to most anything these days.

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson's macabre romance Let the Right One In was an artful, unique, deeply disturbing and yet touching vampire film. Unexpectedly, so too is director Matt Reeves' Hollywood remake Let Me In.

Nicki Greenberg loves Shakespeare, she "gets" Shakespeare, and she has done something wondrous with him, a thing I have never seen done before.

David Hill reviews two new Australian novels depicting two very different sides of modern life.

It is a tricky little bugger of a book this one. Distant, confusing and perhaps a little cliched in parts, it is also compelling, subtle and maybe even brilliant.

Judge not a book by its title.

Rating: 5/5

Rating: 4/5

Rating: 3/5

The book that has everything, Kehua! offers murder, adultery, incest (and plenty of it), redemption and ghosts.

LOCALS: Alix Bushnell is one of a strong raft of characters in Mataraki.

The synopsis for Monsters makes it sound like a classic sci-fi flick about an alien invasion on earth, but it is far from it. Dreamy, allegorical and sparse.

The debut feature by Israeli director Maoz is a carnival ride designed by the devil. It's also a film of jaw-dropping mastery which manages, by dint of having no polemical intent at all, to be a powerful anti-war statement.