Tom Ryan

Tom Ryan is an Australian film and arts critic and author. He lives in Melbourne. His commentary has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers both in Australia and internationally and he currently writes regularly for The Age in Victoria and its associated interstate mastheads (owned by Nine Publishing). Early Life, Education & Key Influences 
 Born on December 21, 1945, in Lismore in country Victoria, Ryan spent his formative years in Mirboo North before moving with his school-teacher parents, Thomas Michael Ryan (1904 – 1980) and Eileen Margaret Ryan, née Porter (1908 – 1995), twin sisters Margaret/“Maggie” (1938 – 2024) and Mary (1938) and younger brother William/“Bill” (1949) to Greensborough, an outer suburb of Melbourne. He was educated at Parade College in Alphington (Flowerdale) and East Melbourne before his initial tertiary training as a primary teacher at Coburg Teachers College, where he came under the influence of film studies pioneer John C. Murray (1932 – 2019). (1) He completed an Arts degree at Monash University in 1969 and a Bachelor of Education at LaTrobe University before pursuing postgraduate study at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, where renowned British film critic Robin Wood (1931 – 2009) served as his mentor. (2) Career Ryan spent two years teaching at Watsonia High School in the early 1970s before being seconded to head up the film studies area in the English Department at Coburg Teachers College during Murray’s two-year leave. In the UK, he worked as a tutor and an occasional lecturer at the University of Warwick and the University of Leicester. On his return from the UK, he taught briefly at Thornbury High School before, in 1978, being appointed lecturer in the Film, Radio & Television Department at Melbourne State College, which was then headed by Brian Sheedy (the College has now been subsumed into the University of Melbourne). He was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Film Studies at the University of East Anglia in 1982. In 1984, he was appointed as lecturer in the Film & Media Studies Department headed by Trevor Barr at Swinburne University in Melbourne, where he remained until his official retirement from academia in 2000. Among his esteemed students have been film producer and critic Don Ranvaud (1953 – 2016), much-loved comedian Glenn Robbins, highly regarded actors Nadine Garner and Radha Mitchell, noted actor-writer-director Kick Gurry, award-winning journalist Karen Kissane, and distinguished author and university professor Adrian Martin. (3) He began his writing career as a student reviewing films for Lot’s Wife at Monash University in 1966, subsequently contributing to a wide range of magazines and newspapers, both in Australia and abroad, including Rabelais (at LaTrobe University), Cinema Papers, Lumiere, The Film Appreciation Newsletter, Metro, Video Age, The Australian Journal of Screen Theory, Freeze Frame and The Herald (in Australia), The Times Educational Supplement and Movie (the UK), Film Comment (the US), and Positif (France). He also worked without credit as a consultant on his longtime friend Richard Franklin’s 1981 film, Road Games, subsequently appearing in the film in a bit part as “a menacing jackaroo” (his “star turn” the fee for his advice). (4) In 1989, he was appointed film critic and feature writer for The Sunday Age, a position he held until his resignation in 2012. (5) Since then, he has contributed regularly to the arts pages of The Age as well as to The Australian, The Financial Review and The Australian Book Review, and, on-line, to Senses of Cinema, Screening the Past and Film Alert 101. Described by leading film commentator David Stratton (1939 – 2025) as “the estimable film critic of The Sunday Age” (6), Ryan is, in the view of author Ross Campbell, in Melbourne and the Movies: Confessions of a Certified Cinephile, “one of our best writers on film”. (7) He is the author of The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions (2019), described by famed film historian Thomas Elsaesser (1943 – 2019) as “the definitive account of the personality and work of this much-admired yet self-effacing director”. (8) In the University Press of Mississippi series devoted to filmmaker interviews, he has edited books on Baz Luhrmann (2014), Fred Schepisi (2017) and Alan J. Pakula (2024). (9) He’s also contributed to numerous anthologies about film and cricket, including books about Australian cinema, Samuel Fuller, Peter Weir, Steven Spielberg, John M. Stahl and Bill Lawry. (10) He was a longtime film reviewer on Melbourne radio, first on 3ZZ, where he hosted Talking Pictures, then on 3RRR, before working as a regular film reviewer on 3AW in the early 1980s (for hosts Muriel Cooper and Derryn Hinch), and then for the ABC from the late-1980s into the early 2000s (including weekly contributions to shows hosted by Lawrie Bruce, Ramona Koval, Virginia Trioli and Lindy Burns). Personal Life Ryan played cricket professionally in Australia and England. He represented Northcote for a decade in the 1960s and ’70s in Melbourne’s District Cricket Competition, and was a member of the team that won the famous premiership in the 1965-6 season. 11. During the 1970s, he played for Smethwick in the UK’s Birmingham League and for Warwickshire in the County Seconds competition. 12. Also during the ’70s and into the 1980s, he was captain-coach of Kew in Melbourne’s Sub-District competition 13. and later played for Ivanhoe in the same competition. 14. He married journalist Debi Enker in 1985. Their daughter, Madeleine Ryan, is a novelist and filmmaker. Footnotes 1. https://filmalert101.blogspot.com/2019/06/vale-john-c-murray-june-13-1932-may-1.html 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Wood_(critic) 3. https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=Adrian+Martin.+Tom+Ryan+teacher&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 4. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083000/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov_sm_3#amzn1.imdb.concept.name_credit_group.7caf7d16-5db9-4f4f-8864-d4c6e711c686 5. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/farewell-20120315-1v6a5.html 6. David Stratton, I Peed on Fellini: Recollections of a life in film, William Heinemann, 2008, p. vii 7. Ross Campbell, Melbourne and the Movies: Confessions of a Certified Cinephile, MM Publishers, Australia, 2024, p. 387 8. Tom Ryan, The Films of Douglas Sirk – Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions, University Press of Mississippi, 2019 9. The New Australian Cinema, ed. Scott Murray, Thomas Nelson, Australia, 1980 Samuel Fuller: Interviews, ed. Gerald Peary, the University Press of Mississippi, 2012 Peter Weir: Interviews, ed. John C. Tibbets, University Press of Mississippi, 2014 The Take 2 Guide to Steven Spielberg, ed. John Pruzanski, Take2 Publishing, 2014 The Call of the Heart – John M. Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama, eds. Bruce Babington and Charles Barr, John Libbey Publishing, UK, 2018 Bill Lawry: Chasing a Century, ed. S.B. Tang, Hardie Grant Books, Australia, 2018 10. Baz Luhrmann: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2014 Fred Schepisi: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2017 Alan J. Pakula: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2024 11. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965–66_Victorian_district_cricket_final 12. Keith Warsop, Sports Argus (Birmingham), May 25, 1974, p. 4 13. https://www.kewcc.com.au/club-history 14. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5973e3fa1b631b9a768a36e8/t/5e267e9f63ef4f758b8f1fac/1579581103289/ICC+History+1906-2006+%281%29.pdf

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