Just in time for Christmas, The Sopranos is getting the collectors’ item treatment with a complete box set with all 86 episodes remastered in 4K – plus an extensive bunch of extras.

All of which reminds me of a review I wrote a couple of years ago for the Substack newsletter:

I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of The Sopranos, and not likely to persevere beyond that, but I am extremely interested in its place in the pantheon of prestige series television and the growth of HBO over the past 25 years, so I was glad to watch Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos, a new two-part documentary by Alex Gibney.

The first thing it taught me was that for years I have thought that David Chase (The Sopranos) and David Milch (Deadwood) were the same person and I’m glad to be able to make that distinction finally.

The second was the realisation that in 1999, when The Sopranos first aired, HBO was mainly known for movies and boxing and that the executives who greenlit the show didn’t really know what they were doing either, giving Chase plenty of leeway to basically invent 21^st century television as he went along.

Gibney’s film is built around an extended – and somewhat reluctant – interview with Chase and the abundant behind-the-scenes material that HBO have made available. Fans will love the insights into favourite characters and moments but I enjoyed the insight into the mysteries of storytelling and how important casting is. And what a gamble it is.

The prolific Alex Gibney has a new film in festivals at the moment – an incendiary four-hour documentary called Musk. Three guesses who it is about (and how he feels about it).

That September 2024 newsletter also featured reviews of Blumhouse horror Speak No Evil with James McAvoy, Kiwi body-horror Grafted, French drama Marguerite’s Theorem and excellent Aussie sports documentary The Blind Sea.

Where to watch Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos

Aotearoa: Streaming on HBO Max

Australia: Streaming on Binge, FoxtelNow and HBO Max

Canada: Streaming on Crave

Ireland: Streaming on Sky

India: Streaming on Hotstar

USA: Streaming on HBO Max

UK: Streaming on Sky

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I wasn’t planning on posting anything to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11¹ but the other night I watched the handsome new 4K disc of Phil Joanou’s 1990 neo-noir State of Grace which features the twin towers in almost every exterior shot.

It feels like it was some kind of Manhattan bylaw that filmmakers couldn’t go more than five minutes before including another angle of the World Trade Center. It’s still haunting and probably will be for the rest of my days.

Joanou had come to prominence directing the1988 U2 documentary Rattle & Hum (dismissed by many because it was about U2 but it’s a good film) and State of
Grace was his entry into the big time world of feature films. Set among the Irish criminal gangs of Hell’s Kitchen, it starred three hot young actors: Sean Penn as the undercover cop asked to rat out his best friends; Gary Oldman as the hot head, Jackie, and Robin Wright as Kathy, Jackie’s sister who is trying to escape the criminal life that her family leads.

Maturity comes in the form of Ed Harris as Jackie and Kathy’s older brother, Frankie. He recognises that the Westies (as the film was originally going to be called) are small potatoes in the New York organised crime scene and tries to forge an alliance with one of the Italian families, a choice that will lead to tragedy².

It’s interesting to note that baby Sean Penn looks more like his brother Chris in this picture than he does Sean, and Oldman is in the same ‘letting it all hang out’ mode that he showed us in Sid & Nancy and Prick Up Your Ears. Wright also climbs the walls in a couple of scenes mainly because there’s not enough on the page for her to latch on to. And they all get handed a lesson when veteran Burgess Meredith turns up for one scene as a frightened old man with a debt to the gang and important plot information to impart.

This was a touchstone film for me when it came out – I’ve been carrying around the VHS copy I recorded off Sky for years – but I remember it being much more atmospheric than this. It degenerates into repetitive sweary screaming matches too often for its own good.

Apparently, coming out the same week as Goodfellas did the picture no favours at the box office (and a comparison between the two does it no favours at all) but the new 4K transfer looks beautiful in the wide exteriors and a bit soft in the close-ups and Joanou’s music selections are as choice today as they were then – Lyle Lovett!

Jordan Cronenweth’s cinematography gets a really good showcase here: the rain soaked streets lit by fluorescent streetlights and neon signs and the swirling smoke from the ever-present cigarettes that Penn himself remains addicted to³.

Incidentally, Frankie’s right hand man, Nicholson, is played veteran character actor R.D. Call. Call got his first pro gig on an episode of the TV show Barnaby Jones that was directed by Sean Penn’s father, Leo Penn, and he seems to have been something of a good luck charm for Sean, appearing in about half a dozen pictures with him⁴.

Where to watch State of Grace

Physical media: Imprint 4K UHD limited edition from ViaVision. The UHD format is region-free by design.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Prime Video

Australia: Streaming on Prime Video

Canada: Streaming on Prime Video or Tubi (free with ads)

Ireland: Not currently available online

India: Not currently available online

USA: Streaming on Prime Video, Fubo, MGM+, Philo or Roku (free with ads)

UK: Streaming on Prime Video

1. I’ve covered that a few times here. ︎
2. The story of the Irish mob in Hell’s Kitchen is being told once again in the new series The Westies, starring J.K. Simmons. Streaming on Neon in Aotearoa. ︎
3. He was asked to stop smoking three times at this year’s Golden Globes, apparently. ︎
4. And one that Penn directed – Into the Wild. ︎

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After two well-received feature films in cinemas, Goodbye Pork Pie and Utu, Geoff Murphy clearly felt that he’d earned enough respect to credit himself as Geoffrey Murphy¹ on his next film, the adaptation of Craig Harrison’s acclaimed local science fiction novel, The Quiet Earth. This was a prestige production, a serious piece of cinema, after all.

Scientist Zack Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) wakes one morning to find the global experiment he has been working on has caused all life on Earth to instantly vaporise. As he searches Auckland for signs of any other survivors, he gets more and more unhinged, eventually proclaiming himself President of the World from the balcony of a local mansion.

It’s a typically bravura performance by Lawrence, rendered all the more impressive by how he dials it back when he finally comes across a couple of other people – young feminist Joanne (Alison Routledge) and Māori hunter² Api (Peter Smith).

Hobson’s observations suggest that “the Effect” that caused the annihilation is ramping up to the finish the job unless they pack the New Zealand Army’s entire stocks of gelignite on to the back of a truck and destroy the facility that’s key to the global network, but before that he has to reckon with the twisting relationships between the unlikely allies.

In the mid-80s, we were all painfully aware of how close we were to global nuclear catastrophe but there was also the fear of the “Neutron Bomb”, an American invention intended to wipe out humans while leaving irradiated infrastructure intact. Cities emptied of life but still functioning – at the time that seemed like the worst kind of war crime.

Watching Murphy’s film for the first time last night (it screened at the Wellington Film Society but wild weather kept us home so we simultaneously watched Umbrella’s superbly restored Blu-ray), I was taken by how mid-80s it was – so much a product of its time. For a while our protagonists hold up in an 80s modernist white concrete mansion overlooking the Hauraki Gulf, a house that would be seen as deeply aspirational not long after in TV shows like Gloss.

Murphy (and writers Bill Baer, Sam Pillsbury and Lawrence himself) weren’t to know this at the time but what they were making was a metaphor for New Zealand itself in 1985. One country – the conservative one led by the authoritarian Rob Muldoon – was rapidly disappearing to be replaced by something else. But what?

Perhaps they did sense it. You can read the film as a prediction that the stale white middle-class males would become extinct and the future would be led by groups that old New Zealand had consciously marginalised – women and Māori³.

That wasn’t entirely misplaced – David Lange’s fourth Labour government made genuine attempts to open things up socially, for example with the expansion of the Waitangi Tribunal’s remit and homosexual law reform – but the real winners from the seismic shifts in New Zealand in the mid-80s were the same people who always seem to win.

Where to watch The Quiet Earth

Aotearoa: Digital rental from AroVision

Australia: Streaming on Prime Video

Canada: Streaming on Tubi or Cineverse (both free with ads) or Midnight Pulp

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Not currently available

USA: Streaming on The Roku Channel, Cineverse (free with ads) or Midnight Pulp

UK: Streaming on Arrow Video

Further listening

It’s been a busy old time for radio gigs recently, hence why sitting and typing here hasn’t been a priority.

On Sunday 30 August, I joined Perlina Lau on RNZ Culture 101 to review Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, James Ashcroft’s Netflix thriller The Whisper Man, and the new documentary Lomu.

Then, last Thursday I was chatting to Susana Lei’ataua on RNZ Nights about the 35th anniversary of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The West Wing finally arriving on New Zealand’s version of HBO Max, and the superb kiwi gothic horror Mārama on Māori+.

And – two Sundays in a row! – last weekend, I was on Culture 101 with Perlina Lau once again to talk about some female-focused genre films: Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant!, Fall 2: Deadpoint and The Runner.

1. For a vivid portrait of the larrikin world that Murphy, Lawrence and the Blerta collective inhabited in the 1970s, I commend Nick Bollinger’s book about the New Zealand counter-culture, Jumping Sundays. In it he tells a story of Murphy, between jazz and film gigs, taking a job as a Wellington primary school relief teacher and growing 30 marijuana plants in the classroom as a science experiment. ︎
2. That’s a hunter who is Māori, not a hunter of Māori, to be clear. ︎
3. The sequence where the trio rest up in the wharenui of Api’s home marae was especially touching. ︎

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What’s that saying? “History. It’s just one bloody thing after another.”

A great film about good intentions and unintended consequences has just landed on Netflix. Charlie Wilson’s War is a great combination of writer and director (Sorkin and Nichols) and effortless star power (Hanks and Roberts). It’s brilliant¹.

I reviewed the cinema release in the Capital Times in January 2008:

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day in 1979. They remained in the country, brutally suppressing the local resistance, until they were forced to leave in 1989: almost ten years of occupation that destroyed one country and ruined another. One side of the story was told in the recent film The Kite Runner: in it we saw a vibrant and cosmopolitan culture bombed back to the stone age by the Soviets and their equally one-eyed Taliban replacements.

For peaceniks like myself, the Soviet aggression was an inconvenient fact, difficult to acknowledge during our efforts to prevent nuclear annihilation at the hands of war-mongerers like Ronald Reagan. While we were marching for peace and disarmament, playboy Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) was secretly funding the Mujahideen insurgents to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, providing them with the weapons that would bring down the Russians.

With the help of a renegade CIA-man (wonderful Philip Seymour Hoffman), a Texan socialite (Julia Roberts), an Israeli spy (Ken Stott) and President Zia, dictator of Pakistan (Om Puri), Wilson persuaded, cajoled, threatened and coerced Congress to pay for all this – without them even knowing what it was for. Aaron Sorkin’s script is razor-sharp, often very funny, and does a great job of not spelling out all the lessons we should be learning. Charlie Wilson’s War may have brought about the end of the Cold War but it also opened up Afghanistan to the brutal fundamentalism of the Taliban, increased the influence of the Saudis in the region and indirectly led to the Iraqi poo-fight we are in now. As Wilson says, it’s all about the endgame.

Also in that January 2008 Capital Times column (if you feel so inclined): Jason Reitman’s comedy Juno (which I imagine plays pretty differently since Elliot Page’s transition), found footage monster movie Cloverfield, lame parody Meet the Spartans and “well-intentioned” literary adaptation The Jane Austen Book Club.

Where to watch Charlie Wilson’s War

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix

Australia: Streaming on Netflix

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland:Streaming on Netflix

India: Streaming on Netflix or Hotstar

USA: Digital rental

UK: Streaming on Netflix

Further listening

I have been given the secret method of embedding RNZ audio here after a long period where I assumed it was just broken². On Sunday 16 August, I gave & Sons a pretty scathing review which you can listen to here:

In a rare occurrence, Michelle Langstone last Sunday gave me a bit of a serve by way of reply. It’s totally cool for us both to see the same things in a film and react in completely opposite ways (especially when she expresses her opinion so credibly and enthusiastically). It reminded me of the old podcasting days, when we would get in a room and spar about things. Maybe I should bring back a podcast here …³

1. I even own a copy. ︎
2. Now I have to go back through dozens of posts here and update the code. Sigh. ︎
3. Maybe I will. ︎

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This has been a holy grail for me for 20 years. I saw it at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2006, was blown away, and then waited in vain for it to come back to cinemas or get any kind of a home release.

Imagine my surprise then, while I was digging into the deeper recesses of my local library’s Kanopy streaming service, to find it lurking there. Would it still hold up after all this time?

It’s not a promising premise: an alcoholic widower living alone with his cats in a Bucharest apartment, has a headache and then a stomach ache. Eventually a neighbour persuades the ambulance service to come and visit but it’s a Saturday night and there has been a big bus crash in the city with lots of casualties.

Across the night, he is shuttled around several different hospitals while his condition continues to deteriorate. We meet several different teams of medical professionals, none of whom are particularly committed to his welfare once they smell the alcohol on his breath.

It won the Un Certain Regard prize for best first film at Cannes in 2005¹ and it was the first big hit² in an exciting run of Romanian New Wave films that included 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Beyond the Hills, Sieranevada and Graduation.

When I realised that I was going to get another chance to see the film, I wondered how the problems that Mr. Lazarescu encounters would compare with the documented experiences that New Zealanders are having with our own health system. My memory of the film was of a scathing indictment of systemic failure and I was all primed to use it to have a go at our own.

But a second viewing suggests that I would be wrong. There is overcrowding but the patients are patient. Patronising doctors refuse to listen to other opinions but that’s more of a ‘them’ thing than something baked in to the system. What director Cristi Puiu does here is create fascinating, defined characters every step of the way, all of whom come with their own baggage, all of whom wish they were somewhere else in the middle of a stressful Saturday night. It’s a production line and Mr. Lazarescu is just another product being passed along it. (And for some reason, all of the young female doctors and nurses look like supermodels.)

But there was something else that hit even harder this time around – how close to home the story has become. Mr. Lazarescu is only 63 but looks a lot older. His neighbour calls him “Engineer” so he may have been somebody once. His living room has posters of the English 80s pop star Kim Wilde.

I was 58 last birthday and had a brief spell in our local hospital system earlier this year. The care was exemplary and the follow-up has been deeply gratifying. But I am now in the target market for stories like this. It’s no longer theoretical. I found it to be more personally confronting than I was ready for, to be honest.

Back in 2006, Bill Gosden practically begged audiences to come to the NZIFF screenings:

It’s sometimes the case that the greatest movies are the hardest ones to persuade an audience to see, and this truly great movie is surely one of them. But if you don’t believe that a Romanian drama about a 63-year-old drunk trying to obtain the medical attention he’s convinced he needs could be the year’s most mesmerising, suspenseful, darkly funny, shrewdly humane and spiritually challenging movie, then it can only be because you have not yet seen The Death of Mr Lazarescu.

…

Puiu’s spectacle of life going on is as daunting in its heedless inexorability as death itself. Magnificent.

As I said, this has been almost impossible to see here in NZ since 2006 and the version that is streaming on Kanopy seems to be of dubious origin. Looking like a badly ripped copy of a Hong Kong fleamarket pirate DVD, it’s hard to recommend spending two and a half hours with this version.

I see that Criterion Channel has it in the US so I’ll check that version and report back.

Where to watch The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Aotearoa: Streaming on Kanopy³

Australia: Digital rental (Google)

Canada: Not currently available

Ireland: Not currently available

India: Not currently available

USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel

UK: Not currently available

Further listening

Had a great time last night talking screens with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights. Made the case that the next season of Sugar on Apple TV should be more like The Rockford Files; gave a shoutout to Gavin Shoebridge for his YouTube motoring reviews; and also reviewed the Anthony Bourdain portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-dickhead movie, Tony.

1. Unlike now when Cannes titles arrive almost immediately, this one took a year to get to Wellington. ︎
2. “Big hit”. ︎
3. Available through participating public libraries. Titles may vary by library. ︎

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Holy macaroni, this has been sitting in draft for a while. So long that at least one of these titles is now on a streaming service and I don’t think any of them are still in cinemas¹. Let’s see how much of these I can remember!

How lucky are we that we get to see the greatest filmmaker ever to do it still working in front of us? Classical music? Mozart’s been dead for centuries. Painting? Rembrandt knew a thing or two but we’ve got all we are ever going to get from him. But in cinema, Steven Spielberg is still pumping them out at the age of 79, still making hugely entertaining but highly personal works that make brilliant use of all the tools that he has in his toolkit.

Disclosure Day is more overtly personal than most Spielberg films. He gets a story credit (regular collaborator David Koepp punched it up into a screenplay) and that story returns him to his endless fascination with the question, are we alone in the universe?

Whistle-blower Josh O’Connor has a backpack full of evidence that the government – and its shady corporate allies – have kept the existence of aliens secret for decades so that we can exploit their technologies and experiment on their physiology. As O’Connor tries to stay one step ahead of the Feds, TV weather presenter Emily Blunt (a career best performance) is receiving mysterious transmissions straight into her noggin, allowing her to read, understand – and most crucially – empathise with the people that she meets on her own journey to find out why she has been chosen to receive this gift.

It’s a propulsive chase movie and every episode shows off Spielberg’s talent for visual storytelling – some of the chase scenes reminded me of his debut feature, The Sugarland Express back in 1974 – and it builds to an emotional climax where Mr. Spielberg gives the big payoff to a character we have only just met – “NBC Anchor” played by Courtney Grace. A bravura climax².

You can hear my audio conversation about Disclosure Day with Perlina Lau for RNZ Culture 101 here.

Backrooms starts out unsettling and ends up unsatisfying. Prodigy Kane Parsons has expanded his web series about abandoned urban interiors and their potential for nightmare into a feature that tries to wrap a narrative around his disturbing images, but he’s a much stronger image maker than he is a storyteller. At least for the time being.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the owner of a failing stripmall discount furniture store, disappearing into an alcohol-fuelled world of bitterness and frustration. Investigating some flickering lights, he discovers that his basement contains a portal to some mysteriously surreal rooms that eventually become populated with creatures from his own subconscious. His therapist (Renate Reinsve) finds herself being tormented by these characters, much as she was in their therapy sessions.

While Backrooms has joined Obsession as one of the breakout box office indie horrors of the year, I found myself wanting more than a 90-minute meme, no matter how visually striking it was.

I watched Backrooms on the same day as Masters of the Universe and was surprised to find the latter got more interesting the more I thought about it while the first one got less so.

Travis Knight’s reboot of the toy franchise adventure plays to the story’s weird strengths rather than trying to overcome its weaknesses and is decent campy fun as a result. I’ve heard people say that it reminded them of the animated series more than the 80s Dolph Lundgren feature but as I have seen neither of those, I can’t comment. What did come through is a respect for the wildly inappropriate imaginations of the toy designers – characters named Meckaneck and Fisto, for example – and the way that children would play with them. It reminded me a bit of the Lord Business aspects of the Lego Movies – a child’s fantasy brought to live with action figures.

Amazon contract player Nicholas Galitzine³ leads the ensemble – funnier as He-Man than as the stranded-on-Earth fish-out-of-water Prince Adam – and Jared Leto channels Terry-Thomas as arch-villain Skeletor.

Ed Solomon was a writer on one of the most inventive sitcoms of all time, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. Now, 40 years later, he’s written a screenplay that on the surface is less innovative but is precisely … precise enough to give a craftsman like Steven Soderbergh plenty to get his teeth into.

Mostly a smart two-hander showcasing the contrasting styles of Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen, The Christophers delivers scene after scene of insightful and amusing drama.

McKellen is, I suppose, a former artist. Is that an appropriate description for a painter who no longer paints? Does he remain an artist forever, even if the actual work has dried up? He makes a living trading on the notoriety of his past work, recording birthday messages for fans. His children (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) are concerned that he is frittering away whatever they might expect as an inheritance. Relatively talentless themselves, a final payout from the great man is their last best hope.

All that’s left is a final series of his most famous works. The Christophers are tender portraits of a former lover but that relationship ended in such a way that the final run of Christophers were never finished and lie unloved in the artist’s garret. If he were to finally pull his finger out and complete them, they would surely be worth millions.

But the grumpy old bugger will do no such thing. The children hatch a plan to steal them, have another artist finish them and them hide them away to be “discovered” after he dies. This is where Ms Coel comes in. A thwarted artist herself, with a talent for imitation, they ask her to become his assistant, secure the Christophers and spirit them away and finish them.

Except that McKellen’s artist is too canny and too unpredictable for that plan to go smoothly. A satisfying caper from beginning to end.

I reviewed The Christophers for RNZ Nights and you can hear my conversation with Emile Donovan here.

Parody movies like Scary Movie (aka Scary Movie 6, a name which is more accurate) are by their nature hit-or-miss. What interested me watching it was, which bits worked and why. The franchise has been returned to the Wayans Brothers⁴ who started it nearly 30 years ago

One of the notable outcomes of this reversal is that the Black humour (as opposed to the black humour) has much more bite to it than the rest which feels very tired. The film comes alive when it leans in to the topic of race. Interesting but not enough to make me think about it again for nanosecond after I click send on this review.

I reviewed Scary Movie in the same Culture 101 segment that featured Disclosure Day.

Brian Cox has been on a lot of film sets in his time but Glenrothan is the first where he has had the director’s chair to sit in. He also acts as Sandy, head of the family distillery in picture postcard west of Scotland. At first glance you think he is playing his usual curmudgeon but the arrival of his estranged brother Donal (Alan Cumming) from a multi-decade American exile reveals that there is much more to both their stories.

Donal left when their mother died, driven away by the constant bullying of their father. But it was Sandy who really needed to leave and when he’s beaten to the punch, he reluctantly stays to mind the business, despite the fact that Donal was the whisky blending genius.

Glenrothan is a neat little portrait of two brothers finding their way back to each other with the help of Shirley Henderson’s much put-upon distillery manager and Donal’s daughter (Alexandra Shipp). When this turns up on one of your streaming services, give it some of your time. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

I reviewed Glenrothan for RNZ Nights.

1. At least not in Wellington. ︎
2. “Bravura Climax” could be my drag name. ︎
3. He has been in several Prime Video movies including The Sheep Detectives, The Idea of You, Red, White & Royal Blue and Cinderella. ︎
4. Or more accurately, the Wayans family as the name Wayans is all over the credits for the picture. ︎

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Every so often an anniversary sneaks up behind you and smacks you on the arse.

Neill Blomkamp’s genius science fiction thriller District 9 was released in Australia and New Zealand this week in 2009 – 17 years ago¹. In my review at the time, I waxed lyrical about how it signalled a golden age of commercial filmmaking in Wellington – while District 9 was shot in South Africa, Blomkamp was taken under the wing of Peter Jackson and Wētā, etc. and the effects and finishing were done here:

It’s going to be a massive few months for Wellywood – District 9 seems to have come out of nowhere to take the world by storm (Currently #35 in the IMDb All Time list, just below Citizen Kane. I kid you not) and The Lovely Bones trailer is whetting everyone’s appetite at just the right time. This Friday, Wellington audiences are the first in the world to see a fifteen minute sampler of the locally shot Avatar (Readings from 11.45am, free of charge) and three more Film Commission features are due for release between now and Christmas: The Strength of Water, Under the Mountain and The Vintner’s Luck, all of which have a significant Wellington component to them.

I haven’t rewatched District 9 since I obtained the Blu-ray (probably 16 years ago) but reading my review tempts me to get it down off the shelf and give it another spin. If you don’t have a disc handy, there are other ways to watch listed below.

Aliens have arrived on earth but unlike in the 70s and 80s they aren’t here to tell us how to connect with the universe and expand our consciousness. And it isn’t like the 90s when they arrived to caramelize us with their death rays. These aliens have arrived for remarkably 21^st century reasons – their ship is crippled and with no way home they are destined to become refugees, outcasts, misunderstood second-class citizens.

So, of course, it’s only appropriate that they arrive in Johannesburg where until recently vast numbers of people were kept in sub-human conditions, living in shanty towns. The parallels are obvious but not hammered home too heavily but this is a Wingnut film first and foremost so the satire is covered in body parts and human and alien fluids of various viscosities. The heretofore unknown (but brilliant) Sharlto Copley plays the hapless Wikus Van Der Merwe, ordered to lead a forced relocation of the alien “prawns” to a new tent city, but is it slum clearance or ethnic cleansing?

I predicted great things for young Blomkamp but his career seems to have gone off the boil – he fell out with Jackson at a fairly early stage and, while I am very fond of Matt Damon in Elysium, Gran Turismo was not much of a return to form. The latest news stories are of Blomkamp experimenting with generative AI so I fear his actual filmmaking skills may be lost to us.

Also in that October 2009 Capital Times column: former Wellingtonian Christine Jeffs’ Sunshine Cleaning (starring Emily Blunt and Amy Adams), Wellington documentary maker Luit Bieringa’s film about the legendary art dealer Peter McLeavey, The Man in the Hat², 2001 “Ealing-style romantic comedy, The Rocket Post, and Renée Zellweger in the horror film Case 39.

Where to watch District 9

Aotearoa: Digital rental

Australia: Streaming on Prime Video

Canada: Streaming on Crave, Starz or Hollywood Suite

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Not currently available

USA: Digital rental

UK: Streaming on Sony Pictures Core³

1. I know the review I’m linking to is dated 9 October. I’m not sure why. Maybe, the 13 August release date on IMDb was for a premiere? ︎
2. Not to be confused with The Man in the Hat. ︎
3. Whatever that is. ︎

The post Something to watch tonight: District 9 appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

The arguably unnecessary¹ fourth season of Ted Lasso has just started streaming on Apple TV. I’d like to take this opportunity to have a wee skite about being the first NZ critic to spot the show and respond to it.

From September 2020:

Dan Slevin hates it when he likes things he is supposed to hate.

It’s a very odd feeling – to stumble across a TV show late on a Saturday night that in every aspect appears to be something you’ll hate but then find after about ten minutes that you love it and you binge all six currently available episodes in one go.

I don’t really do comedy. I’m more of a prestige drama man, now. 30-minute sitcoms are even less my style. I’ve watched the greats, obviously. Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers and a few episodes of Cheers, but for the most part I have found life to be too short and there are too many good actual films to get caught up in “shows about nothing” or “shows about groups of friends”.

I’m not a big fan of Jason Sudeikis, either. In fact, I have given him scathing reviews for this very website. I usually find his pseudo-likeability to be the opposite of charming – a one-joke schtick that gets old very quickly.

And don’t start me about football. Football is the blood running through my veins, a source of distress and drama. As a West Ham fan, football is tragedy played out every week². Football is not a source of comedy, especially not an easygoing, soft-centred, delightfully watchable comedy like this one.

You can read the rest here. I think I called it pretty well.

Where to watch Ted Lasso

Worldwide: Apple TV (formerly known as Apple TV+)

1. But is any television really necessary? ︎
2. This was written before West Ham became Lasso’s nemesis club and we became the butt of even more jokes. ︎

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I’d like to thank everyone for their patience while posts and newsletters have been so sporadic recently. Since moving everything back here from Substack, I’ve had a tendency to want to fix things that are annoying me here rather than do the hard stuff which is writing. You might say that it’s a bit like washing the car every Sunday and then never taking it for a drive and you may be right, but some of the recent changes have meant that the site actually crashes every night and the server has to be restarted. Not a problem I ever had with Substack but at least I can vouch for the absence of Nazis in my bar.

I’d like to apologise especially to Auckland readers who are now seven days in to a 12-day Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival that I’m only just getting around to previewing. As I said to RNZ Culture 101’s host Anna Thomas the Sunday before last, I’m not sure that previewing about five percent of the titles in the programme allows me to comment on the quality of the whole event, but that’s never stopped me before.

Anyway, here are some capsules of the films I have managed to beg, steal or borrow before kick-off.

Every generation needs an animated movie that makes them cry and the current one is a better candidate than most. Ugo Bienvenu’s (brilliant name, by the way) Arco manages to tug on the heartstrings pretty effectively while also having a fundamentally optimistic view of the far-off future. (The near future, less so.)

Ten-year-old Arco lives in the late 30th century where people use time travel suits to visit the flora and fauna of the past and preserve it for the future. Pissed off that he is too young to go and see some dinosaurs, Arco borrows his sister’s outfit and stumbles back as far as 2075 – a recognisable future of our own that at first seems like it ain’t too bad but we soon discover the dark side of it. Arco makes friends with Iris who is being raised by a combination of a domestic robot called Mikki and holograms of her actual parents who are busy working in the city.

The film is essentially about Arco’s attempts to return home before a) his parents find that he is gone and b) civilisation collapses due to climate devastation.

Incidentally, the listing on the NZIFF website has Arco down as in French with English subtitles but the printed book says that most of the sessions are actually of the English dub featuring producer Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo, Will Ferrell and America Ferrera. I previewed that version and can vouch for it as suitable for most kids.

Arco’s time travelling power comes from a diamond that attaches to his forehead and coincidentally, an identically shaped piece of costume jewellery is the totem that runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini) carries with her in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s chilly mystery, The Ice Tower. Stumbling into reinvention, Jeanne becomes Bianca when she takes shelter for a night in a building that turns out to be a film studio where an unenthusiastic crew is shooting a version of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen.

The crew are unenthusiastic because the Queen is being played by a tyrannical movie star (Marion Cotillard) but also because there is a dreamlike quality to the entire exercise – as if this is fantasy, or faded memory or, you know, dreams. Cotillard’s Cristina takes a shine to Jeanne/Bianca as the pair realise how many parallels they share with each other’s life.

As chilly as it sounds, The Ice Tower also feels like a passing of the torch between Cotillard and the star-on-the-rise Pacini. Also of note, the fictional film’s director is played by Hadžihalilović’s life partner and regular collaborator, Gaspar Noé (in case you’ve ever wondered what he looked like).

Every year under the directorship of Paolo Bertolin, the NZIFF gets more up-to-date and the dinkum Aussie comedy The Fox is so new that there isn’t even a proper poster image for it yet.

A bunch of talented Australian comedians (and Jai Courtney) have been gathered together by Dario Russo for a deliciously dark romantic fable. Courtney plays boofhead Nick, who doesn’t know that his fiancé Kori (Emily Browning) is cheating on him with the local vet (Damon Herriman) who is, in the process, cheating on his wife (Claudia Doumit).

When he discovers the betrayal, Nick is persuaded by a talking fox with the voice of Olivia Colman that there is a solution – pushing Kori into a magic pit where she will re-emerge as a much more compliant participant in the relationship. The foul-mouthed magpie who is watching on (Sam Neill) isn’t so sure.

Vulgar, sexy and very, very Australian, The Fox is a grown-up crowd-pleaser and gets delightfully weirder the longer it goes on.

National Geographic bought the documentary The Tale of Silyan right out of Venice last year and it’s also going to be a crowd-pleaser (although of a very different kind). As the North Macedonian economy founders – no European Union to be an export market – farmers like Nikola struggle and the young people seek better opportunities in the West. When his children – and eventually his wife – leave for Germany, Nikola is left alone to either sell the farm and join them or slowly wither away.

In Disney fashion, he instead discovers a wounded stork – a bird that is not only symbolically important in Macedonia, their fertilising of the crops is vital to the continued health of the soil – and nurses it back to fitness, and get this, healing himself in the process.

A very pleasant 90-or-so minutes, I did find myself wondering how much manipulation there might have been behind the scenes and how much was actually organic.

Another documentary from the National Geographic family, Time and Water is a horse of a different colour. A kind of psychogeographic portrait of Iceland through the lens of poet Andri Snær Magnason and his remarkable family.

What happens when the glaciers that define the Icelandic culture and character recede at the same time as the memories of his grandparents, among the first people to unlock the remarkable secrets that those glaciers contain?

As Magnason goes back and forth between his fading grandparents and the disappearing glaciers, we get to understand the fragility of memory and of how it makes us who we are, whether we are people or a nation.

Understated but quietly devastating at the same time.

The German powerhouse Sandra Hüller reaches even greater heights as Rose, a female veteran of the Thirty Years War who has gone through life as a man. Somehow in possession of a document that entitles them to some property as an inheritance, they persuade the village elders to authorise the transfer and start her new life.

It’s not all that simple, however, as she is expected to take full part in village life, including marrying one of the local daughters and producing an heir. This is understandably challenging for Rose but before she can solve it, a child is actually born meaning that both Rose and her wife (Caro Braun) have secrets that they don’t want to have revealed.

Shot in striking black and white by Gerald Kerkletz, Markus Schleinzer’s film is formally satisfying and emotionally gripping. I think we are going to be hearing a lot about it when awards are handed out next year.

After Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie rocked my world a few weeks ago, it’s good to know that the Canadian freak flag continues to be flown by the crazy gang behind Buffet Infinity, a horror-satire told entirely using the media of cheap 90s late-night local TV commercials.

The battle between competing restaurants in the Westridge, Alberta, mall soon pales into insignificance when a giant sinkhole opens up in the car park. Except, it doesn’t. The mysterious hole is soon forgotten even though evidence suggests that it may be a demonic portal of some kind, but the battle between one café’s homemade special sauces and the constantly growing all-you-can-eat offering next door spills out into the community and every small business owner who fronts their own handheld commercials is now a target. Or a perpetrator. Or a vessel for the delivery of an unspeakable evil. Or something.

It loses its commitment to the bit at the end, in favour of something more explanatory, but it’s an extra fun ride while it lasts.

The New Zealand International Film Festival has already started in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland (until 9 August) and also plays:

Ōtautahi Christchurch – 6 August to 23 August
Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington – 12 August to 23 August
Ōtepoti Dunedin – 14 August to 30 August
Ahuriri Napier – 27 August to 6 September
Kirikiriroa Hamilton, Matakana, Ngāmotu New Plymouth, Tauranga-Moana Tauranga, Whakaoriori Masterton, Whatū Nelson – 27 August to 9 September

Further reading

I managed to get myself quoted in Rolling Stone Australia’s preview of the anniversary NZIFF screenings of Duncan Sarkie’s Out of the Blue. My quote comes from this appreciation I wrote for NZ On Screen back in 2024. Out of the Blue was also a recommendation here in 2023 as well as an original review when it hit cinemas in October 2006.

It has just struck me that I am coming up to the 20th anniversary of my first reviews here (and at Capital Times). Blimey.

The post NZIFF Preview: 2026 edition appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

Roughly a year ago, I was guest hosting the late and lamented At the Movies show for RNZ and was lucky enough to feature this weird little gemm:

Universal Language is an absurdist comedy in the spirit of Wes Anderson, the deadpan comic stylings of Aki Kaurismaki or the visual non sequiturs of Jacques Tati.

But it’s also entirely its own. If I told you that one of the plot points turns on a prize turkey being given its own seat on a bus to the turkey retailer who’s going to love, cherish and respect it before, well, you know the natural end of that story, you might get a sense of the delightful weirdness on offer.

…

Universal Language could only have emerged from an ultra-specific location, the extraordinary noggin of Rankin, but that uniqueness is what makes it so precious.

Filmmakers around the world should take the lesson from this, that any effort you make trying to please an audience and not trying to work out what is uniquely you, is wasted effort.

I’m not going to pretend that Universal Language is for everyone – although the Audience Award at Cannes and 24 other wins around the world might suggest otherwise – and I feel sure that this isn’t the kind of film you wander into because the Superman session was sold out, but if this sort of thing sounds like you, then it will be very you. It was for me.

You can read/listen to the whole thing at the RNZ website.

Incidentally, I also featured it in the old Substack newsletter along with James Gunn’s Superman, Rebel Wilson in Bride Hard and the latest Smurfs reboot (which I didn’t mind at all).

Where to watch Universal Language

Aotearoa: Digital rental from AroVision

Australia: Digital rental

Canada: Streaming on Crave

India: Streaming on Prime Video

USA: Streaming on Kanopy (from participating libraries) or My Film Friend (free with ads)

UK: Not currently available online

The post Something to watch tonight: Universal Language appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

The revered critic David Thomson has a new book out¹ in which he questions many of his own long-held assumptions about cinema itself. At the age of 85, Thomson is having second thoughts about whether the greatest art form of them all has actually been a net good to society or not.

I haven’t read the book yet, just this profile of Thomson by the NY Times’ A.O. Scott (gift link), so I may not have apprehended his point fully, although Scott describes it thus:

According to Thomson, movies — especially American movies — have whitewashed history, glorified violence and made role models out of thugs, narcissists and murderers. The consequences shape our public life. Donald Trump “is our movie man,” Thomson writes, meaning that Trump’s presidency, which Thomson sees as a catastrophe, was foretold and to some extent made possible by Hollywood.

Thomson’s main example is Coppola’s The Godfather, a masterpiece (obviously) but one in which the audience finds themselves being won over by the character of Michael Corleone whose moral corruption begins explicably – and tactically – but who grows into a monster. But he’s our monster, the character we are asked to engage emotionally with, and (arguably) identify with:

“You could argue that ‘The Godfather’ is the key film,” Thomson said. “It did everything the medium is meant to do. It had a gang of absolutely brilliant people. That film brought together talents of an incredible nature.” In addition to Coppola and a cast that included Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and a parade of first-rate character actors, the movie owes its place in the canon to people like Dean Tavoularis, the production designer; the cinematographer Gordon Willis; and the sound editor Walter Murch.

“It was a smash hit,” Thomson went on. “It won all the prizes, and yet what is not talked about very much is what the film is about. For me what the film is about is persuading men that they want to be in the gang and in the family, and they want to do the terrible things the guys do and they want to shut the women out of the room.”

As I say, I haven’t read Thomson’s book yet, but I wonder whether there isn’t an even better example of that pernicious way that art can find to make the utterly immoral attractive.

In Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break – celebrating its 35th birthday this week – the ambitious young FBI detective hero (played by Keanu Reeves) is corrupted by the target of his investigation, a free-spirited surfer bank robber named Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). The pseudo-spiritual libertarianism of Bodhi’s lifestyle contrasts with the tightly knotted world of law enforcement – “Guess we just have an asshole shortage,” Reeves’ Johnny Utah is told by his manic boss (John C. McGinley). Under his breath he replies, “Not so far.”

Before watching ViaVision’s handsome new collectible 4K disc, I hadn’t seen Point Break since it came out in 1991 and it had settled into my memory as one of the 90s high concept dumb action films that had also become a bit of a punchline in films like Hot Fuzz. The taut set-pieces – the foot chase through the backyards and homes around Venice Beach is a highlight – the lovingly photographed damp male bodies in the late California sun, and that phenomenal skydiving sequence, are what we recall. That and the eternal question of whether Bodhi surfs his way to freedom off the coast of Australia² at the end.

But here is where I come back to Thomson’s “what is not talked about is what the film is about.” From his very first appearance, Swayze is so magnetic and so attractive, it is as if he’s walked on to the screen from a different film entirely. All of the tribal groups presented – cops and crims – are like carnival sideshow characters but Bodhi feels real, comfortably inhabiting his own skin in a way that Utah can only dream of. What a movie star Swayze was! His presence unbalances the film in a way that I think is not accidental.

We fall for him like Utah does but then we find out what he is capable of – his psychopathic disregard for anyone but himself and his capacity for violence to get what he wants. But by then it’s too late – for Utah and for the audience. We want Utah to get his man, of course, we are not totally amoral.

Or are we? By the end, even Utah doesn’t want that and he throws away his badge in disgust. Bodhi wins. One of the worst people in the world gets what he wants and we have been entertained watching him get it. The curse of Hollywood.

Where to watch Point Break

Physical media: 4K UHD from ViaVision. Available in NZ from JB Hi-Fi.

Aotearoa: Digital rental

Australia: Streaming on SBS On Demand or digital rental

Canada: Streaming non Criterion Channel, AMC+ or Crave (free with ads)

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Digital rental

USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel, AMC+, Peacock, Philo, Roku or Kanopy (from participating libraries), Fubo (free with ads) or Shout TV (free with ads)

UK: Streaming on Prime Video

Point Break (2015)

The 2015 remake of Point Break starring Edgar Ramirez as Bodhi made it into the “Shun at all costs” section of my RNZ survey of the films of 2016.

Sam Neill

The news of the week has been dominated by the sudden passing of New Zealand actor Sam Neill. Shortly after the news broke on Monday, RNZ asked me to write an appreciation of some of Sam’s films and I came up with Sir Sam Neill: A life in ten performances.

If you want to take a look at the video that I mention in the article, here it is.

1. A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies (Simon & Schuster) ︎
2. That scene doesn’t look very much like Australia and turns out to have been shot in the Pacific North West ︎

The post Something to watch tonight: Point Break appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

Back in the early months of 2020, I was filling in for Simon Morris on RNZ’s At the Movies and – because of the lockdowns – my topics were restricted to films we could all watch at home.

On 29 April that year, I reviewed the Chris Hemsworth action flick Extraction, animated family film The Willoughbys (both Netflix) and the Apple TV+ documentary Beastie Boys Story. Those first two I had completely forgotten until typing their names out just now but the Spike Jonze collaboration with the two remaining Beasties has lingered longer:

Music documentaries don’t tend to be the most experimental of art forms. Frankly, they can often be a bit samey. Interviews with talking heads, cut alongside archive footage that illustrates the incidents they recall – concerts, studios, contracts, drugs – it’s nice to come across a film that tries to take a different approach.

In Beastie Boys Story, just arrived on Apple TV+, the subjects are all the same – concerts, studios, contracts, drugs – but the format prioritises the voices of the group themselves rather than commentators or other witnesses.

The film is essentially a filmed live performance, not of the Beasties in concert because as Adam Horowitz (aka Ad-Rock) says, they ceased to be a band when the third member, Adam Yauch (“MCA”) died of cancer in 2012. It’s a spoken word reminiscence, designed to be filmed but also designed for a live audience, and designed to bypass the usual gatekeepers of a band’s story. This is defiantly first person but, to the remaining Beasties’ credit, it’s a story told with considerable insight and humility.

The Beastie Boys grew up in a New York music scene that was centred around the largely white boy world of what Americans call Punk Rock. That was a musical style that was a kind of distilled essence of the UK punk scene but it didn’t take the Beasties long to realise that there was an arguably more vital, and certainly more indigenous, music scene right on their doorstep.

Hip hop did not come easily to the Beastie Boys but they were nothing if not game and it is thanks to the self-interested guidance of Def Jam’s Russell Simmons and the single-mindedness of producer Rick Rubin that that first album tore up the charts in 1986. Everyone in the business knew that a white rap group was going to be a license to print money and so License to Ill was born.

The Beastie Boys Story stage show and the resulting film is directed by Spike Jonze, collaborator on many of the Beasties most memorable mid-career videos, like for the song Sabotage that we heard about a little earlier.

Jonze is something of a prankster himself, the director of frankly not enough feature films  but including Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are and there’s a looseness about the Beastie Boys Story that reflects the fact that neither he nor his Beastie friends have ever taken themselves too seriously.

At least not since they got off the Licensed to Ill treadmill back in 1987, when they realised that the trap of a management Svengali and a guru producer was only going to hold them back creatively.

For dedicated fans many of these stories won’t be new but I’m not one of those people so the even-handedness and willingness to share credit and blame – even when detailing how they were ripped off as naïve young musicians was one of the pleasures of Beastie Boys Story.

I’m not going to pretend to you that Beastie Boys Story is one of the classics of the rock biopic genre. Its insights are more about what it’s like to look back on these young and restless versions of yourself from the position of a comfortable middle-age rather than detailed chapter and verse stories about how songs and sounds came to be – although there is a little of that.

Some of the most interesting moments in the film are bits that a more detached director might have missed. It’s ultimately about a lifetime of friendship, that recognition of when you didn’t always do right by the people you love but that you want to make it up to them now, if it isn’t too late.

Finally, I recommend you watch this film right to the end because many of its greatest pleasures and surprises arrive after the final credits have finished. I’m not sure whether watching streaming films at home encourages sitting right through the credits or not – Netflix makes it almost impossible – but it’s still something that we¹ like to do and I think it’s worth it this time.

If you prefer to listen rather than read, you can do so here – you’ll get the benefit of several clips from the film at the same time.

Where to watch Beastie Boys Story

Worldwide: Apple TV (formerly known as Apple TV+)

Editor’s note

I’m still well behind on writing up new and current releases, sorry, but you can always listen to my most recent appearance on RNZ Nights with guest host Susana Lei’ataua. Topics covered include Bernard Herrmann’s birthday, Supergirl, One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix and British panel game Would I Lie to You?

1. That would be the editor-in-chief and myself. ︎

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I come to you now from the sleepy city of Sydney in Australia where I am experiencing that weird mix of being sick – I’ve been coughing for about ten days straight – and also on holiday.

Yesterday, I paid the eye-watering amount of A$29 to go and see Supergirl at a lunchtime weekday screening so I can review it for RNZ’s Nights programme (tonight) and, friends, how is this possible? Never have I been more grateful for the support I get from cinemas and distributors in Aotearoa to be able to do this work. I’m pretty sure that if RNZ had to reimburse paid movie tickets for all their reviewers each week the whole system would collapse.

Anyway, it has been brought to my attention that Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun has landed on TVNZ+ in New Zealand – a film I described for RNZ’s At the Movies in March 2023 as “Not only one of the very best films of the 21^st century, so far, but one of my favourite films of all time.”

This is one of those reviews that was turned into an article for the RNZ website, so you can read/listen to it there, but here’s an extract:

It’s the turn of the 21^st century and eleven-year-old Sophie is taking a holiday to Turkey with her dad Calum. Calum and Sophie are Scottish (from Edinburgh) but Calum no longer lives with them, he’s trying to make something happen for himself in England. But this week together is important to them both.

Calum, played with astonishing grace by Academy Award nominated Paul Mescal, is a loving father and even signs off his calls to Sophie’s mother with “I love you”, something that Sophie notices. In fact, she notices a lot – she’s at that age – but there are connections she can’t make, something that continues to trouble grown-up Sophie, through whose emotional memories the story is told.

For the first few scenes of the film, Calum is often slightly out of frame or out of focus or shot from behind or in a mirror, emphasising that these are Sophie’s memories and that like all memories they are incomplete, a puzzle that continues to be put together over time.

But then are sections when Calum appears full frame and face on, often in scenes when Sophie isn’t present. Does that mean he is clearer to her in her imagination than in her memories?

Also reviewed in that particular At the Movies show: Elizabeth Banks’ weird and wonderful Cocaine Bear and the sequel to the unlikely smash-hit Fisherman’s Friends 2: One and All.

Where to watch Aftersun

Physical media: The Madman Blu-ray is out-of-print at the distributor but there’s a seller on TradeMe who has a copy.

Aotearoa: Streaming on TVNZ+ (free with ads) or Mubi

Australia: Streaming on SBS On Demand (free) or Mubi

Canada: Streaming on CBC Gem (free) or Mubi

Ireland: Streaming on Netflix or Mubi

India: Streaming on Mubi

USA: Streaming on Roku (free with ads)

UK: Streaming on BBC iPlayer (free), Netflix or Mubi

The post Something to watch tonight: Aftersun appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

Just landed as a digital rental is the excellent Japanese video game adaptation, Exit 8.

I was lucky enough to review it for the RNZ website when it was in cinemas earlier this year:

Anomalies like that are the driving force of Genki Kawamura’s fascinating video game adaptation, Exit 8. A commuter on his way to a temp job exits his train at an unfamiliar station. As he heads to the exit, the same four sections of subway repeat in a loop and he learns that his only way out is to solve a puzzle that requires his close attention.

If the next loop is identical to the original – i.e. no anomalies – he should continue and he will get one exit closer to his escape. If he encounters an anomaly, he should retreat and the next exit number will still increase by one. When he gets to Exit 8, he will be free to return to his life outside. We think. He hopes. But if he makes a mistake – fails to notice an anomaly and advances, or retreats when he didn’t have to – he will return to Exit 0 and start all over again.

Some of these anomalies are benign (a door handle in a different position) and some are creepy – the eyes in the subway advertising posters following him around. Some are downright freaky. The main character, appealingly played by singer and actor Kazunari Ninomiya, is called The Lost Man for more reasons than one. It turns out that this puzzle is designed to teach him something about himself, especially when he discovers that he is not alone in this supernatural subway.

As an audience member, you will be invested in the outcome.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, at least I hope you’ll agree. it’s one of my favourite written reviews of the year.

Where to watch Exit 8

Aotearoa: Digital rental from AroVision

Australia: Digital rental

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Not currently available

USA: Digital rental

UK: Digital rental

Further listening

Exit 8 was also my choice for the ‘in cinema’ section of my weekly appearance on RNZ Nights – this time with fill-in host Mark Leishman. We also talked about the two Tom Hanks streaming films Greyhound and Finch, and the Anthony Hopkins drama about Sir Nicholas Winton, One Life.

The post Something to watch tonight: Exit 8 appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

I’m going to be a bit cheeky today but I hope the original author won’t mind. Today marks the 16th anniversary of the first Some Came Running Blu-ray disc Consumer Guide by critic Glenn Kenny. Some of you may have noticed that the archive is now housed here as the original host (Typepad) shut down last year.

Glenn managed to cover a lot more ground in the years since than I have managed – especially when it comes to the classics – and he continues to produce posts at the new home of Some Came Running.

From that first entry on 8 June 2010, I have chosen a film that connects back to Homicide last week via David Mamet and also has a homegrown connection through the director, Lee Tamahori:

The Edge (Fox): Not remembered as any kind of masterpiece, and noted more these days as the source of a scabrously funny story about Alec Baldwin and his beard than for anything else, this men-who-hate-each-other-but-are-nonetheless-forced-to-face-the-elements-together thriller, scripted by David Mamet and directed by Lee Tamahori before he threw in the towel and turned semi-hack, is well worth rediscovering, and this superb disc is the best available way to do so. It offers an excellent image—fantastically sharp, with very accurate color. The video compression is better than competent: look at the gas lamp flares in costar Anthony Hopkins’ face as he explores an Alaskan cabin in the dark before stumbling into his own surprise party: they have the solidity and reality you’re looking for. True, in some of the aeriel scenes objects do pop against the background in that fake‑3‑D way you sometimes get with overprocessing, but it doesn’t happen all that much and the effect isn’t as disorienting as it is in the legendarily problematic Blu-ray of Patton. Pretty skimpy in the extras department, though, I must say: there are none.— A-

Also featured in Glenn’s first Blu-ray consumer guide (which covered a couple of months of releases): Cameron’s Avatar, a Hong Kong release of the 2006 film The Banquet, Battleship Potemkin, Criterion’s collection By Brakhage, Carlito’s Way, Murnau’s silent masterpiece City Girl, Franco Nero as Django, an A+ restoration of Dr. Zhivago, 1984 sci-fi Dreamscape, Lynch’s Dune, Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, David Caruso in Jade, Who documentary The Kids Are Alright, Lang’s M (#36 in the S&S Greatest films of all time), Minority Report, Out of Africa, Ang Lee’s western Ride with the Devil, Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes, Shutter Island, the Criterion edition of Ford’s Stagecoach, Assayas’ “sublime” Summer Hours, late-period Coppola Tetro, Vampyres, Walkabout, and Benicio Del Toro taking on The Wolfman.

None of the images in Glenn’s original posts made it over from Typepad but the words are the thing, aren’t they?

Where to watch The Edge

Physical media: It’s not entirely clear whether the Blu-ray that Glenn writes about here was ever released in Aotearoa. There are quite a few copies listed on eBay.

But there’s always streaming, right?

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland & UK: Streaming on Disney+

India: Digital rental

USA: Digital rental

Further reading

On the subject of Tamahori’s The Edge, I reviewed Alec Baldwin’s autobiography Nevertheless back in 2017 and he had a bit to say on the subject;

Baldwin is surprisingly inarticulate about the art and process of acting. He’s stronger when he’s being generous about talented co-workers but he can occasionally be dismissive too. In the chapter about working on Mamet’s The Edge, NZ director Lee Tamahori’s second Hollywood picture after the success of Once Were Warriors, Baldwin is scornful of Tamahori’s cutting of Mamet’s dialogue – “He does go on a bit” – when that dialogue was one of the reasons he signed on for the role in the first place. The other reason he chose to go to the Canadian wilderness was to work with Anthony Hopkins, an experience he is a lyrical fanboy about.

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In the meantime, my attention has been on the commercial cinema and they don’t come much more commercial than a Star War.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is utterly inessential but that inessential nature is also its charm. The very first Star Wars back in 1977 was inspired by the Saturday morning serials of George Lucas’s youth¹ and while some of the stories that have been told since then have attempted to carry greater weight (successfully with Andor, of course), there’s nothing wrong with innocent adventures in space² provided they’re done with energy and good humour..

The big screen instalment of the story of a bounty hunter (Pedro Pascal, Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder) finding a sense of purpose through the accidental parenting of a mischievous young kid (who looks a lot like a certain puppet Jedi from the main timeline) feels about as close as Star Wars has come in along time to those serial roots. It’s episodic – a bit of a road movie in fact – and each stage in the journey results in an unlikely, but satisfying, escape from peril.

Our plucky pair are hunting down the scattered Imperial leadership on behalf of the successful rebellion. A deal is truck by which they return the kidnapped son of the famous criminal Jabba the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White) to his family in exchange for important intelligence that the Hutts hold. Except he doesn’t want to go back. Yes, he’s one of the good Hutts.

Writer-director Jon Favreau is clearly having fun by including references to many of his own favourite cinematic set-pieces – some of which would be inappropriate viewing for the target audience here but will delight the adult film fans who have to chaperone them. Including a cameo from Martin Scorsese (as a four-armed fast-food cook) is our first clue and I counted references to Blade Runner, Scarface, Apocalypse Now, Gremlins, the Harryhausen stop-motion monsters from films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and there’s even a nod to the Minions (although that might be inadvertent).

As someone whose first (and only) stage play was about an imagined meeting between Michael Jackson and Benny Hill, I really can’t complain about a film that imagines the unlikely real-life friendship between supermodel Kate Moss (Ellie Bamber) and the elderly Enfant terrible of the art world Lucian Freud (Derek Jacobi). Using the public perceptions of famous people can be a useful short-cut to character for a screenwriter – a platform to build on. In the case of James Lucas’ Moss & Freud, it helps that he has Moss as an executive producer.

And the film is less about art than it is about the conversations that can happen between an artist and model during the arduous process of making the art. Freud’s finished portrait of Moss was not a favourite of either of them but it was symbolic of her escaping the pressures of her stardom, all the tabloid nonsense and the misogynistic world of fashion, and becoming a mature independent woman.

She chose to be naked for the portrait – unlike all those other times in her career where other people made that decision for her.

Daniel Roher is a documentarian who won an Oscar for his film about the Russian opposition leader Alexander Navalny in 2023. He’s now turned his eye to fiction with Tuner (which he co-wrote with Robert Ramsay).

Sleepy-eyed English actor Leo Woodall (excellent in Nuremberg last year) plays a New York piano tuner, apprenticed to ageing jazz musician Dustin Hoffman. Woodall’s character has an affliction which makes him overly sensitive to sound but when you combine that with perfect pitch, you get a great exponent of a misunderstood (and unappreciated) profession.

Working alone one night in the mansion of one of his rich clients, he stumbles across a safecracking – an inside job by the security company. They are trying brute force methods but our hero realises that his ears can help him hear the tiny crackles and pops of the levers as he turns the combination wheel. A new – and more lucrative – career appears in front of him, except he is ill-equipped to deal with the genuine ugliness of the crowd he has fallen in with.

Interesting to me in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on, both the protagonist and the antagonists in the film are Jewish and a “Holocaust watch” is a central bone of contention. In fact, the arrival of that watch signals the moment at the beginning of Act III when a promising film goes flying off the rails due to a ridiculously unlikely coincidence. Very enjoyable up to that point – less so, afterwards.

Speaking of Russian dissidents, Words of War is a worthy British film about the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (Maxine Peak) and the train of events that turned her from a lifestyle journalist at an independent Moscow newspaper to a crusading Chechen War correspondent and then a martyr.

The most interesting thing about the film is current tendency to either let actors use their own accents or to give them regional British accents – perhaps as a way of showing audiences how vast and culturally diverse Russia actually is.

In A Private Life, Jodie Foster shines as a Jewish-American psychiatrist in Paris, letting her curiosity about the death of a patient overwhelm her. Again, Jewishness is central to the story – or is it? This is a film that thrives on misdirection and the audience is encouraged by Foster’s performance to go along with every wrong turn she takes.

Reviewing this for RNZ Culture 101 the other day, I described writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski’s script as “tidy” which seemed to throw host Perlina Lau who asked me what I meant. I meant that the script gives everyone clear tools and boundaries – nothing wasted and nothing out of place – but it doesn’t have much of a spark either.

Finding Emily snuck up on me, I must confess. It’s one of those rare things – a romantic comedy that is both romantic and funny. It’s also grounded in its sense of place – Manchester – and its characters. You get the sense that everything that happens has actually happened to someone at some time even though when you put them all together the package is completely ridiculous.

Spike Fearn is Owen, struggling musician and sound tech at the local university. One night working at the student union, he meets Emily and they hit it off. She gives him her number but when he tries to send a message the next day, there’s a digit missing. Thinking he has found the love of his life, Owen starts a campaign to try and find the mysterious Emily.

He is aided in this by another Emily (Angourie Rice), a psychology student who sees his quixotic quest as the topic for her thesis – that romantic love is a form of mental illness. You can see where this is headed, I’m sure, but it’s the getting there that’s fun.

Daft and charming in equal measure, Finding Emily should find plenty of admirers over time and also be a decent calling card for the two leads.

Finally, a film that made me laugh more than any other in recent weeks. You know, with celebrity documentaries a lot of the fun is usually down to nostalgia. You remember laughing at something first time around and you laugh again in recognition. Well, in Marty, Life Is Short the clips are old but they play fresh and new and you laugh because they are damn funny. Still.

Martin Short seems to have been around forever without ever being the superstar he wanted to be, but it looks like he’s at ease with that now.

It’s such a pleasure to watch a film about someone so deservingly beloved and to be reminded that if you are decent and fun to be around, people will always want to work with you. Oh, and talented. I almost forgot. Decent, fun to be around and enormously gifted – then people will always want to work with you.

1. I’m reading Michael Ondaatje’s conversations with editor Walter Murch who insists that Lucas was originally down to make Apocalypse Now in the early 70s, but it was all too close to home for the studios while the Vietnam War was still raging. So, instead he decided to take the story about plucky insurgents resisting an imperial war machine and set it in space instead. ︎
2. We enjoyed the TV serial Skeleton Crew which has been described as “The Goonies in the Star Wars universe” – I reviewed it for RNZ Nights a couple of months ago. ︎

The post Recent releases: The Mandalorian and Grogu, Moss & Freud, Tuner, Words of War, A Private Life (Vie privée), Finding Emily, Marty, Life Is Short appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

We don’t talk much about David Mamet these days but for a while he was all the rage.

Mamet regular Joe Mantegna plays Bobby Gold, a homicide detective and hostage negotiator who is on his way to a big bust when he comes across a small-time convenience store murder. Because the victim is the elderly Jewish proprietor of the store and Gold is also Jewish (although non-observing and not particularly interested) his bosses take him off the big case and put him on the local one – to his frustration and disappointment.

But the plot immediately thickens when Gold discovers evidence that the victim had been trafficking weapons for a Jewish group attempting to defend their community from antisemitic violence. Their fervour appeals to Gold, who struggles to fit in with either the police culture or his ethnic background, and he is unwisely drawn into helping them bomb a neo-Nazi centre and break his own code by handing over evidence in the murder case.

Ultimately, he realises that the group’s single-minded, multi-generational, commitment to Zionism (or anti-antisemitism if you want to localise things) might not be consistent with, you know, the rule of law, by which time he’s already dropped the ball on both the investigations he was supposed to be involved with.

Mamet was on an absolute tear in this period, Homicide coming after his first two crackerjack features, House of Games and Things Change. The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or that year and is notable for Mamet’s nuanced take on being a Jew in America. His views – shall we say – hardened a lot after 9/11.

Where to watch Homicide

Physical media: In the Imprint Films After Dark Neo-Noir Collection Three boxset along with White Sands, The Crossing Guard, Heaven’s Prisoners, Under Suspicion and Dirty Pretty Things.

Aotearoa: Not currently available online

Australia: Digital rental from Google or YouTube

Canada: Streaming on Criterion Channel, Hollywood Suite, Crave or CTV (free with ads)

Ireland: Not currently available online

India: Not currently available online

USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel or Fubo

UK: Digital rental

Further reading

Glenn Kenny, wrote about Homicide in 2009 for his blog Some Came Running which is now archived on this site:

Of all of Mamet’s self-written feature films, this strikes me as the most thoroughly,well, Mametian in terms of performance style and writing—the flat, almost incantory delivery of dialogue combined with the iambic rhythms and the repetition of phrases: “I’ll find the killer. I’ll find the killer, I swear.” The effect is even more bracing than it was in House of Games, I think in part because House of Games was introducing viewers to an unfamiliar, circumscribed world—the mien of the super-secretive con man—that the viewer had few expectations about as far as behavior was concerned. Much of Homicide takes place in a precinct house and on the street, and the theatricality of the exchanges in these settings we’re familiar with from cop shows and cop movies is bracing, maybe a little alienating at first. But it’s Mamet’s world, and he’s got utter confidence about how things work in it, and the film builds a unique, almost hypnotic power. An unusual picture, a unique picture, one that’s certainly well worth reviving a conversation about.

The post Something to watch tonight: Homicide appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

The relentless passage of time means that even relatively recent streaming releases are supressed by the algorithm, buried under the weight of the titles that they want you to watch now, dammit.

Even I had totally forgotten about They Cloned Tyrone until it showed up in a site search here recently. I originally reviewed it for the old Substack, back in July 2023:

John Boyega (the Star Wars sequels, Small Axe and The Woman King) plays Fontaine, a struggling drug dealer in a semi-rural Southern location called The Glen. When he is stiffed on his share by a pimp named Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) he goes to the motel where Charles is lying low, retrieves his money and is then shot several times by a rival in the parking lot.

Imagine everyone’s surprise, then, when he wakes up the next morning in the same bed, and proceeds to do the same things he did the day before. It’s not Groundhog Day – he himself is unaware that he died the previous night until it is pointed out to him.

Fontaine, Slick Charles and one of Charles’ hookers Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) rather reluctantly at first, attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery, which turns out to involve bizarre mind control experimentation and a massive government conspiracy.

It’s played at a fun and furious pace – older viewers might require subtitles – and the direction, editing, art direction and performances all combine to make it a thoroughly entertaining, if ultimately enraging, two hours. To throw back to Slumdog Millionaire, I once said that after seeing that at the Embassy Theatre, every film for the next few weeks felt old fashioned and that’s what I think about this one, too.

The final third isn’t as thrilling as the first two but that’s because the film reveals what it has on its mind. And it’s a lot.

Also in that July 2023 newsletter, the Aussie music documentary John Farnham: Finding the Voice (now available as a digital rental) and another forgotten Netflix documentary, Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, about the Webb telescope project and its mind-boggling images of the galaxy. I suspect that will play slightly different now, after the swingeing cuts made to Nasa under the current regime.

Where to watch They Cloned Tyrone

Worldwide: Streaming on Netflix

The post Something to watch tonight: They Cloned Tyrone appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

RNZ commissioned me to write a review of Caterpillar - Chelsie Preston Crayford’s debut feature – but have chosen, so far, not to run it. Whether that’s because they don’t like the writing or aren’t happy with the opinion, I can’t be certain.

I won’t excerpt any of it here as they still get first dibs, but seeing as the film opened in cinemas over a week ago the moment may have passed.

Caterpillar is a disappointment when you consider the calibre of people behind it. Preston Crayford is one of New Zealand’s most talented and successful actors, around her mother Gaylene’s film sets since early childhood and an industry professional since her teens¹. She’s put together a top team of local talent including Maria Ines Machego (We Were Dangerous) behind the lens, Jonno Woodford-Robinson (Mortal Engines) at the editing workstation and her father Jonathan Crayford (Ruby & Rata) writing the score.

And then there is the formidable shadow of Gaylene Preston herself – mentor and promotional engine, subject as well as object. There’s a Preston-like character played in the film by Australian Marta Dusseldorp. She is Maxine, a filmmaker in early-oughts Wellington. She and her teenage daughter Cassie (newcomer Anais Shand²) share a Newtown villa with Maxine’s mother Huia (Lisa Harrow). There three generations of women live largely self-absorbed and under-fulfilled lives until a tragic medical situation serves to bring them together.

Part of the problem here is that Preston Crayford’s script is undercooked, relying on a central metaphor – butterflies and caterpillars – for artistic weight and tired scenarios (like driving instruction and awkward family dinners) to deliver dramatic weight. I used to manage the Wellington 48 Hour film competition and we used at advise all the teams who were about to off and brainstorm their stories to put aside the first idea they have because there would be a strong possibility that their first idea would be the same as every other bugger’s. That’s what this feels like – lots of first ideas going unchallenged.

Comic relief – in the form of Matt Whelan’s school Shakespeare director – falls flat and I wonder why Preston Crayford felt the need to go so broad when her strengths are clearly in teasing out intimate moments from quality actors. Set in the early 2000s, Caterpillar feels like that’s when it was made.

Check out the poster for In the Grey (either above or to the left). Don’t those two look like the most self-satisfied pair of numpties imaginable? Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal play two private contractors working for debt collection lawyer Eiza González. All three of these actors have worked with director Guy Ritchie before and clearly there is appeal in working with him in the sunny Canary Islands, even there isn’t much to be found in Ritchie’s holey script.

A dodgy Latin American billionaire named Salazar (Carlos Bardem) has borrowed another billion from a New York investment bank with no intention of paying it back. After an attempt to recover the money goes murderously wrong, the case is escalated to González and her crack team – the best of the best, etc. A combination of legal and illegal efforts – hence “the grey” – are required to put enough pressure on to get the debt repaid but it’s not going to be easy.

There’s a lot of talk about how Salazar operates in the shadows and how his dealings are often untraceable but he has his name on an oil rig and owns a private island full of tourists so he’s clearly not all that mysterious.

Anyway, it pays not to fixate too hard on the plot problems. The action sequences are good and the whole “setting up the heist, executing the heist” structure works better than the limp banter between the two leads.

Obsession is our ‘horror of the week’, another debut from a YouTuber who studios hope will bring an audience with them. Curry Barker’s film is a variation on the ‘be careful what you wish for’ trope that goes all the way back to Rumplestiltskin. Nervous lad Bear (Michael Johnston) has a crush on co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarette) but can’t muster the courage to tell her. Given the opportunity to make a single wish he asks for her to be into him and, of course, a lack of attention to precise wording means things go flying off the rails big time.

Unfortunately, the moral of the tale is undercut by the delivery which leans in hard on misogynistic stereotypes that are barely saved by Navarette’s star-making performance. There’s a nastiness about Obsession and it seems to recognise that in itself with an ending that acknowledges – too late – who the victim of this story has been all along.

Last Friday night on RNZ Nights, I played a little bit of the closing theme³ for The Sheep Detectives purely so I could tell Emile how good it is and how – despite how unlikely it may seem – everyone should find a way to see it.

A heart-warming talking animal movie – squarely in the Babe tradition – The Sheep Detectives took me a little while to get on its wavelength but once I was? Marvellous. Set in a fantasy version of an English country village, solitary vegan shepherd Hugh Jackman loves his flock and reads murder mysteries to them every night before bed. When he is found dead in the field one morning, the sheep – led by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss – are determined to use the knowledge gained from the books to find the killer.

Critical to the charm of the film is the fact that the sheep – with one sad exception – have the ability to simply forget things that are upsetting or inconvenient. The stellar voicework – Bryan Cranston, Regina Hall, Chris O’Dowd, Bella Ramsay, Patrick Stewart and others – is a testimony to Minions director Kyle Balda and the unanticipated depth of the story must be down to the script⁴ by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Last of Us).

Final thought – Nicholas Galitzine appears to be a kind of contract player for Amazon with all of his big hits coming from that studio. Is that a thing now? Studios having long-term favourites⁵?

Despite the weirdness of inserting himself into the film as an interviewer, James Cameron proves with Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft that there’s no director alive who understands how to use 3D better than he does. I went in knowing very little about Ms. Eilish’s music and came out, not only headache-free from either audio or the visuals, but having enjoyed a show that is relatively light on spectacle but heavy on connection to the fans.

On a technical level, it’s remarkable that 3D cameras are now light and manoeuvrable enough to be carried hand-held by a 71-year-old man. I was reminded of the potential I felt when I watched the second 3D concert film⁶ – and only the second digital 3D film I had seen projected in cinemas – U2 3D back in 2008. I recall seeing a shot from behind Bono at the tip of thrust stage in Rio de Janeiro, hundreds of thousands of people stretched out into the distance, and thinking that if that was what I saw when I went to work every day, I might have a bit of an ego, too.

I probably shouldn’t relegate the streamers to the end of these summaries, especially when we are talking about a perfectly nice film with a good heart and nice performances. Remarkably Bright Creatures is based on a bestselling novel and I suspect it will become a Netflix favourite for quite a while.

Sally Field plays an older single woman who is the night cleaner at her local aquarium where she talks to the animals without realising that some of them are watching her, too. Marcellus is a giant squid who narrates this story of loss and recovery with a voice and cynical air courtesy of Alfred Molina (uncredited).

Into this small world comes an itinerant musician (Lewis Pullman) who has arrived in the small town looking for his absent father. Some extraordinary coincidences later, we have a conclusion that prompts a few tears and more than little respect for everybody concerned.

1. I’m old enough that one of my university drama student colleagues had a job looking after her when she was a baby. ︎
2. A newcomer in some respects but as the daughter of oft-seen local actor Erroll Shand, she also doesn’t arrive without some tools. ︎
3. The music gets cut out of the online version for copyright reasons which is another reason why you should try and tune in live. ︎
4. Adapted from a German novel, of all things. ︎
5. Also in the Amazon camp is Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Reacher’s Alan Ritchson. ︎
6. Turns out that Hannah Montana was the first. I’d completely forgotten. ︎

The post Recent releases: Caterpillar, In the Grey, Obsession, The Sheep Detectives, Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft and Remarkably Bright Creatures appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

Subscriber BF of Twizel wrote in to thank me for the Young Pope / New Pope recommendation last week but pointed out that on New Zealand’s Neon streamer, the show has no subtitles for the Italian language content. What with the problems that people have been having with the new TVNZ+ app, it’s obvious that local streaming technology is struggling to keep up with the global offerings.

Neon is about to lose all of its HBO and HBO Max content to the Aotearoa version of that behemoth so the silver lining there might be that presentation will meet some basic standards of accessibility.

I was checking earlier Diane Keaton mentions last week for that Young Pope recommendation, I stumbled across this rave for a film that is easily (and in my case actually) forgotten.

Australian Phillip Noyce¹ did an excellent job of directing this Apartheid-era story and the review reminds me that I had high hopes for Derek Luke² back in the day:

Returning from the World Cinema Showcase earlier this year is the splendid Apartheid-era political thriller Catch a Fire starring Tim Robbins and (one of my favourite actors) Derek Luke from Antwone Fisher. The film is set in the North Eastern Coal Fields of South Africa in 1980 where all communities live in the shadow of the huge Secunda Oil Refinery. Luke plays apolitical refinery worker Patrick Chamusso who becomes politicised after being accused and tortured over a terrorist attack at the refinery.

He travels to Mozambique to join the ANC and plot the destruction of the refinery, and the overthrow of the hated apartheid system. What he doesn’t realise is that the moral corruption of apartheid reflects itself in real world corruption everywhere and that his movements have been watched by policeman Nic Vos (Robbins).

Catch a Fire is a testament to the many sacrifices of those years disguised as a fast-moving thriller and it works on both levels. Written by Shawn Slovo, herself the daughter of white ANC freedom fighters, the film also takes a sensitive approach (in the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation) to the white side of the story, showing the spiritual damage done to them by apartheid. You won’t find many more satisfying (or more beautifully photographed) films this year.

Also in that August 2007 Capital Times review: Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore in the romcom Because I Said So and John Krasinski and Mandy Moore – again- in the romcom License to Wed (“There are two kinds of Robin Williams film nowadays: the serious kind and the crap kind and this is the latter. Krasinsky³ is quite watchable though and I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of him over the next wee while – he’s like a young Tom Hanks with a pair of comedy ears on.”)

Where to watch Catch a Fire

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, India, USA, Ireland & UK: Digital rental

1. Noyce’s Graham Greene adaptation, The Quiet American, has just been re-released by Imprint on Blu-ray. I used to own it on DVD and am looking forward to giving it another go soon. ︎
2. Luke may not have reached the giddy heights but IMDb tells me that he is still working pretty consistently. ︎
3. Krasinski’s action hero career continues with a new Prime Video feature dropping tomorrow: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. ︎

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