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Wondering what movies are worth it? We review the latest releases for you.
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Simon Morris goes off the beaten track this week, including two features found on streaming services – Netflix’s Havoc and Prime Video’s My Old Ass. He also finds a surprising number of self-funded New Zealand movies this month, including romantic comedy The People We Love. He talks to director Mike Smith about the pros and cons of independence.
Independent film The People We Love is that very rare thing, a Kiwi romance. Writer-director Mike Smith (TV’s My Life Is Murder and Siege) wonders we’re so reluctant to make such a popular genre, and how to negotiate the perils of the indie film-maker. The People We Love stars Neill Rea (Brokenwood Mysteries) and Alison Bruce (Tinā).
Prime Video’s My Old Ass and Netflix’s Havoc have one thing in common – neither was exactly what their trailers promised. The first promises more of TV favourite Aubrey Plaza (White Lotus) than it delivers, while the latter offers rather more Tom Hardy (Venom) than anyone asked for.
Dan Slevin reviews three new films in local cinemas: In Sinners, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler tells a Southern Gothic horror story with Michael B. Jordan playing identical twins; in Warfare, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza collaborate on what’s been described as the most authentic modern war film ever, and in Small Things Like These, Cillian Murphy plays a family man troubled by the secrets being kept by his community.
Dan Slevin reviews an adaptation of Claire Keegan's 2021 novella about an Irish family man prompted to confront his community about the secrets that they have been keeping (starring Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy).
Civil War director Alex Garland collaborates with that film’s military advisor – and real-life Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza on the story of a platoon of Navy SEALS having a bad day in Ramadi.
Ryan Coogler writes and directs a Southern Gothic horror film featuring gangsters, vampires and the Klan, reviewed by Dan Slevin.
The Penguin Lessons is based on an unlikely true story of an English teacher in Argentina who finds himself stuck with a penguin at the height of a military coup. Written by Jeff Pope (Philomena) it stars Steve Coogan.
The Correspondent tells the true story of Australian journalist Peter Greste, covering a military coup in Egypt for Al Jazeera. His arrest on trumped-up charges became a worldwide scandal. Directed by Kriv Stenders (In the wake of Captain Cook with Sam Neill), it stars Richard Roxburgh (Rake).
The Amateur sees a back-room boffin in the CIA turn himself into an avenging killer when terrorists kill his wife. Starring Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody) and Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix), it’s directed by James Hawes (TV’s Slow Horses).
Simon Morris occasionally finds himself out of his comfort zone - but not this week. Three films right up his alley – a true story of a journalist arrested for doing his job, The Correspondent… a straight, old-fashioned thriller, The Amateur… and The Penguin Lessons, a blend of Steve Coogan, a military coup in Argentina and a penguin.
The death of a Unicorn sees a father and daughter (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega) hit a mysterious entity on the way to a weekend with an unscrupulous pharmaceutical family. An entity with the ability to heal any disease. What can go wrong – particularly when the unicorn summons assistance?
Queer sees Daniel Craig (No time to die) shake off Double Oh Seven in an adaptation of a book by William S Burroughs (Naked Lunch) about an American writer hiding out in Fifties Mexico who falls in love. Directed by Luca Guadagnino (Challengers).
Grand Tour starts out like a Merchant Ivory passage to Southeast Asia about a man running away from the prospects of a wedding, before turning into a very strange travelogue. Directed by Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes (Arabian Nights) who won Best Director at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for it.
Simon Morris realizes people go to the cinema for different things. Some go for the humble “movie”, some for the elevated “film”, some for the even more pretentious “cinema”. Which are this week’s choices: the Portuguese Grand Tour… Queer, starring Daniel Craig… and horror-comedy Death of a Unicorn, with Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega?
The return sees Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche (The English Patient) reunite to tell the classic tale of Odysseus’s return home after masterminding the fall of Troy. Written and directed by Uberto Pasolini (producer of The Full Monty) it’s a fascinating look at one of the first ever works of fiction, by Greek poet Homer.
Simon Morris looks at films about rebellion – from Iranian Oscar nominee The Seed of the Sacred Fig, to the biopic of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German cleric who tried to stand up to Hitler. And The Return is a new take on one of the oldest stories ever written, Homer’s Odyssey.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig – the story of an Iranian judge at odds with his daughters over their campaign for women’s rights – made its own headlines when the Iranian government forbade the director from going to the Cannes Film Festival. But when he defied them, the film picked up four awards there.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin tells the story of a dissident German cleric who was one of the few local voices raised against the might of the Nazi party. He was even prepared to risk his faith to support a plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Written and directed by Todd Komarnicki (Sully).
Simon Morris joins the rest of the world in being unimpressed by the new Snow White, though he wonders how much worse it is from a string of Disney cover-versions over the years. He also checks out The Last Showgirl, featuring the return of Pamela Anderson, and New Zealand horror film The Rule of Jenny Pen, with an A-List cast.
The Rule of Jenny Pen is the latest by New Zealand director James Ashcroft (Coming Home in the Dark), about a rest home terrorised by a patient and his sinister doll. Starring Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow, it became a favourite of horror legend Stephen King (“one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.”)
The Last Showgirl tells the story of a 50-plus Las Vegas dancer suddenly forced to confront her life and her future when her show Le Razzle Dazzle finishes after 30 years. Featuring a Golden Globes-nominated performance by Pamela Anderson (Baywatch) with Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All At Once) and Dave Bautista (Dune).
Snow White is the controversial remake of the Disney animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. StarringRachel Zegler (West Side Story) and Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), it’s currently scoring a record low 1.9 on IMDb. Can it be as bad as they say? Directed by Marc Webb (500 Days Of Summer).
Hard Truths is Mike Leigh’s Bafta nominated study of a woman consumed by anger at the world, despite the best efforts of her family. Featuring a multi-award-winning performance by the brilliant Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies).
Firebrand tells the story of Catherine Parr, the sixth and last wife of the brutal Henry the Eighth. Can she keep her head while staying true to her faith? Stars Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina) as Catherine, Jude Law (The Talented Mr Ripley) as Henry, with Erin Doherty (TV’s Adolescence) as the “firebrand heretic”, Anne Askew.
Black Bag sees American director Steven Soderbergh (Magic Mike) get into John Le Carre territory – a spy drama where two married agents suspect each other of leaking valuable information. What’s more important, their marriage or their country? Stars Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds), Cate Blanchett (Borderlands) and Pierce Brosnan (Mamma Mia).
Simon Morris accepts that, for all the hard work of everyone on a movie, most people are just looking at the actors. Three character studies this week, including Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, based on weeks of actors’ improvisations… Black Bag, in which a spy investigates six possible traitors, including his own wife... and the last – and some say the best – of the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth, Catherine Parr in Firebrand.
White Bird is a spin-off from the movie Wonder, in which young Auggie’s tormentor learns a lesson from his grandmother, a survivor from the Nazi occupation of France. Stars Dame Helen Mirren and directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland).
Mickey 17 is Bong Joon Ho’s (Parasite) unique take on science fiction, in which a lowly worker is regularly killed doing dangerous jobs, only to be revived to die another day. Stars Robert Pattinson (Twilight), Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things), Naomi Ackie (Blink Twice) and Steven Yeun (Minari).
Simon Morris looks at life after the glitter of the recent Oscars, in particular three more modest films, all coincidentally connected to earlier hits. Sci-fi comedy Mickey 17 is the belated followup to Korean hit Parasite. Spit follows a character from Australian crime spoof Gettin’ Square. And the villain from tear-jerker Wonder learns a lesson from Grandma in White Bird.
Spit sees low-life criminal John Spitieri (Gettin’ Square) return after 20 years for his own movie. Can Spit conquer the bad guys, bond with his young nephew, get his new Syrian mate safely employed, all the time staying out of jail? As he says, everyone deserves a seventh chance. Stars David Wenham (Lord of the Rings).
Simon Morris glances at the recent Oscars, and finally gets to see the last nominee for Best Picture, Amazon Prime’s Nickel Boys. Also on this, the Millenial At The Movies, Swedish mockumentary The Last Journey, and a new take on legendary Swiss hero William Tell.
William Tell rounds up some big theatre names (Jonathan Pryce, Rafe Spall, Sir Ben Kingsley) to back up Danish star Claes Bang (TV’s Bad Sisters) as the famous Swiss archer and rebel. Directed by former resident director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Nick Hamm, it surprisingly does without Rossini’s well-known Overture.
The Last Journey is a Swedish The Trip-style blend of fact and fiction by popular TV documentary stars Filip and Fredrik (Hasselhoff – A Swedish Talkshow). Filip wants to retrieve his father’s lust for life, and comes up with a novel way of doing it.
Nickel Boys may have been overshadowed at the Oscars, but it was already a critical favourite before it finally dropped on Amazon Prime this week. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad), it’s directed by RaMell Ross and stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (King Richard).
Tinā is another crowd-pleasing Kiwi Samoan film, like Three Wise Cousins, Sione’s Wedding and The Orator. Directed by Miki Magasiva (TV’s The Panthers), it stars the great Anapela Polataivao as a grieving Mum who forms a choir at an exclusive – and very white – school in Christchurch.
Mozart’s Sister is a documentary of the other Mozart, Wolfgang’s sister Maria Anna. Like her famous brother, she was a child prodigy musician, by all accounts she was a very talented composer, so why is she all but forgotten? Until now, that is.
Simon Morris checks out another week entirely devoted to women-driven movies, and wonders if, finally, it’s no longer an issue. They include Mozart’s Sister, Neneh Superstar, New Zealand-Samoan feelgood tale Tinā, and Oscar-nominee I’m still here.
Neneh Superstar is a French film about a little, second-generation African girl who aspires to dance at the world-famous Paris Opera Ballet. It seems all the odds are against her – particularly her hostile teacher, ballet superstar Marianne, played by French superstar Maïwenn (Jeanne du Barry).
I’m Still Here is a multi-award winning film from Brazilian director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries). It stars Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres as a mother whose husband has been “disappeared” by the military dictatorship, and what she has to go through to find the truth.
Captain America: Brave New World sees a brave new Captain – former Falcon Sam Wilson – and several old friends and enemies facing new dangers – including a gigantic Red Hulk. Starring Anthony Mackie, with Harrison Ford as the President of the USA.
Bird is the latest from critically acclaimed British film-maker Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Big Little Lies.). It was a nominee at both the Cannes Film Festival and the Baftas, and tells the story of a 12 year old girl with an unexpected new friend. Also stars Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Innisherin).
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy sees the former Noughties party girl struggling with solo motherhood, and also juggling two conflicting suitors. Starring Renée Zellweger, with Hugh Grant, Leo Woodall, Emma Thompson and dozens more familiar faces!
Simon Morris looks at two films with a lot riding on them – the new Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, and the introduction of a new Captain America: Brave New World. But he wonders if Andrea Arnold’s miniscule Bafta nominee, Bird, might be a more helpful way to go.
The Order adapts a best-selling book about a real-life group of domestic terrorists turned armed bank-robbers. Starring Jude Law (The Talented Mr Ripley) and Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy), it’s directed by Australian Justin Kurzel (True History of the Kelly Gang). Showing on Prime Video.
September 5 is a blow-by-blow coverage of the story of how a terrorist invasion of the 1972 Munich Olympics was sent out to the world by a sports TV crew. Stars Peter Sarsgaard (Memory), Ben Chaplin (The Dig) and Leonie Benesch (The Teachers Lounge).
Simon Morris looks at the art of “true-ish” movies based on real-life events. When does tweaking a story to make sense bury the whole point of a true story? He looks at three films that try and stick to the facts – September 5, Widow Clicquot and Prime Video’s The Order.
Widow Clicquot tells how the manufacturer of Veuve Clicquot champagne became the most successful businesswoman of her era. Produced by and starring Haley Bennett (Hillbilly Elegy), with Tom Sturridge (TV’s The Sandman) and Sam Riley (Control).
Nightbitch is a Disney Plus semi-fantasy about a mother of a toddler being driven into unexpected territory. Can she be turning into a dog? Starring Amy Adams (Arrival), Scoot McNairy (Woody Guthrie in A Complete Unknown) and Jessica Harper (My Favourite Year).
Babygirl sees Nicole Kidman in a Golden Globe-nominated turn as a frustrated CEO of a big tech company, who finds herself being lured into dangerous erotic territory by her new intern. Co-starring Antonio Banderas (Puss in Boots) and Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness).
Simon Morris returns, having missed out on a bumper summer of good movies all lining up for the awards season. He’s less than impressed with his first selection, involving slightly kinky women CEOs – Babygirl - mothers turning into dogs – Nightbitch - and renegade robot girlfriends - Companion.
Companion is a twisted tale of a man who ropes in his sex-bot…. or rather, his “emotional support companion” – to a plot not covered by her User’s Guide. Starring Sophie Thatcher (Heretic) and Jack Quaid (TV series The Boys).
Dan Slevin reviews three new films in cinemas: In The Brutalist, Adrien Brody plays a Hungarian emigré architect looking for a new life in post-war America, in the documentary The Haka Party Incident, an Auckland University drinking party is disrupted by Māori activists, and in Maria, Angelina Jolie plays the prima donna Maria Callas during the last days of her life.
Legendary diva Maria Callas is in denial about her waning powers.
An Auckland University drinking party is disrupted by Māori activists.
A Hungarian architect escapes Europe ravaged by World War II for a new life in America.
At the Movies full episode.
Maximum-security prisoners discover an escape through the performing arts.
A young couple find their dreams of a long and beautiful relationship threatened by serious illness.
A family on holiday get more than they bargained for when dad gets bitten by a mysterious creature.
Timothée Chalamet shines in his portrayal of the protean Bob Dylan in director James Mangold's A Complete Unknown, writes Dan Slevin.
An animated Spanish-Chinese co-production featuring the voices of Bill Nighy and Bill Bailey, about a young girl who goes on a journey to hatch a dragon egg and save the species from extinction. Dan Slevin reviews.
Golden Globe winning musical about a Mexican drug cartel boss who undergoes gender reassignment treatment, reviewed by Dan Slevin.
Dan Slevin reviews four new films in cinemas: Emilia Pérez is a musical about Mexican cartel boss who goes through gender reassignment; Flow is an animated film from Latvia about a cat and his animal friends escaping a catastrophic flood; Dragonkeeper is an animated Chinese-Spanish co-production with the voices of Bill Nighy and Bill Bailey, and Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. reunite for the sequel to Den of Thieves, Pantera.
Dan Slevin reviews the sequel to the 2018 crime thriller starring Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr.
Dan Slevin reviews an acclaimed animated film from Latvia about a black cat and his animal friends escaping a catastrophic flood.
In Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film, Tilda Swinton plays a dying woman who asks a final favour from a friend (played by Julianne Moore). Dan Slevin reviews.
Dan Slevin reviews the Robert Eggers’ remake of the 1922 vampire classic, which features Bill Skarsgård as the monstrous Count Orlok and Lily-Rose Depp as the object of his affections.
The Pope has died and 118 cardinals must gather to elect a new leader of the Catholic Church. Mystery, intrigue and politics abound and it's up to the Cardinal-Dean (Ralph Fiennes) to lead the process and find the best man for the job.
94-year-old Clint Eastwood directs a courtroom drama about a man on a jury who discovers he may have an intimate involvement in the death of the murder victim. Dan Slevin reviews.
Dan Slevin reviews three new films in cinemas and one on digital: in Conclave, Ralph Fiennes and 117 other cardinals attempt to elect a new Pope; Robert Eggers remakes the 1922 horror classic Nosferatu; Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore team up for Pedro Almodóvar’s first film in English, The Room Next Door and 94-year-old Clint Eastwood has made a courtroom drama called Juror #2.
The third film in the popular franchise sees the most famous refugee bear in the world finally get a UK passport so he can visit his beloved Aunt Lucy at the Home for Retired Bears in Peru. There he stumbles across a mystery that only he (and the Browns) can solve. Dan Slevin is the reviewer.
Estranged cousins, played by writer-director Jesse Eisenberg and Succession’s Kieran Culkin, travel to Poland to honour their beloved grandmother by taking a Holocaust tour. Dan Slevin reviews.
Dan Slevin reviews three new films in cinemas: Paddington in Peru sees our favourite refugee bear visiting his Aunt Lucy at the Home for Retired Bears and stumbling across a mystery; in All We Imagine as Light, three women in modern-day Mumbai navigate challenges of love and friendship; and in A Real Pain, Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg are estranged cousins taking a Holocaust tour around Poland to honour their beloved grandmother.
Dan Slevin reviews the winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2024, an Indian drama about three women navigating love and friendship in modern Mumbai.
The 2024 winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or is a comedy/drama about a Brooklyn lap dancer (Mikey Madison) who is given a shot at new life when the big spending son of a Russian oligarch falls head over heels for her. Reviewed by Dan Slevin.
Biography of Robbie Williams in which the English pop star is portrayed as a performing chimpanzee (digitally created by New Zealand’s Wētā Digital). The film is directed by Michael Gracey (The Great Showman). Dan Slevin reviews.
Dan Slevin reviews three new films arriving in cinemas for the summer holidays. Mufasa: The Lion King is a prequel about the patriarch Mufasa and how he came to lead the animals of Pride Rock. Anora is a Cannes award winner about a Brooklyn lap dancer given a shot at a new life. And Better Man is a biography of Robbie Williams in which the pop star is portrayed as a performing chimpanzee.
Dan Slevin reviews a prequel for the popular Disney musical franchise, directed by Oscar winner Barry Jenkins and featuring the voices of Aaron Pierre, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Tiffany Boone.
Simon Morris looks back on 2024, a year initially damaged by writers’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood, and still wondering what happened after Barbie and Oppenheimer changed the rules last year. This year was a bumper year for non-American films, for sequels and prequels, for horror films, and for some reason films about 1970s television! It was also a pretty good year for New Zealand films, low budget films and the best films from Pixar and Marvel in years. All this plus the hotly-contested Cate Blanchett They’re In Everything award. No, Cate didn’t make it this year.
Goodrich finds an LA father of 10-year-old twins in trouble when his wife books herself into rehab for a few months. He calls in his daughter from a previous marriage. Can he become the father he never was with her? Starring Michael Keaton (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice) and Mila Kunis (Bad Moms).
The Problem With People follows a dying man’s wish to bring together the American and Irish sides of the family after a century-old dispute. Starring and written by Paul Reiser (TV’s Mad About You), with popular Irishman Colm Meaney (TV’s It’s Always Sunny In Philadephia).
The Teachers’ Lounge is a German Oscar-nominated drama about what happens when an investigation into thefts at a school escalates out of control. Starring Leone Benesch (Babylon Berlin).
Simon Morris is underwhelmed by what’s on offer before the holiday movie riches. They include The Problem With People, an American/Irish comedy about a family feud; Goodrich, a comedy-drama about blended families in LA, and, raising the level, an Oscar nominated German drama, The Teachers' Lounge.
There’s Still Tomorrow is a hugely popular Italian comedy-drama, set in Rome immediately after World War Two. Fascism may be over, but for Italian women their home is still a battleground. Can Delia get out from under the tyranny of her violent husband and take charge of her own life? Starring, written and directed by TV comedy favourite Paola Cortellesi it cleaned up at the Italian Academy Awards.
Heretic confronts two young Mormon missionaries with their worst nightmare – a man determined to challenge their beliefs in the worst possible way. Starring, of all people, Hugh Grant (Four Weddings and a Funeral) as Mr Reed. Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place).
Simon Morris is surprised at how smart the Biggest Film of the Year™ is this year, then goes on to look at three rather smaller films. There’s a local documentary about our first Māori theatre group – Taki Rua Breaking Barriers; a rare horror outing for the usually suave Hugh Grant – Heretic; and the most successful Italian film this century – There’s Still Tomorrow.
Taki Rua: Breaking Barriers tells the story of the theatre group that started out as an activist group following the Springbok Tour protests, and ended up creating a new art form. Directed by Whetū Fala, it features Wi Kuki Kaa, Jim Moriarty, Rena Owen, Briar Grace Smith and many more.
Joy tells the story of the development of IVF – the then-notorious “test-tube babies”. Featuring Bill Nighy (Living) and James Norton (TV’s Happy Valley), it stars New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit) and is produced by New Zealand-born Finola Dwyer (An Education). Streaming on Netflix.
Memory sees the meeting of two troubled souls, one haunted by bad memories, the other by the loss of them. Starring Jessica Chastain (The Eyes Of Tammy Faye) and Peter Sarsgaard (An Education), it’s written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco (Sundown).
Simon Morris dodges the Musical of the Year - Wizard of Oz prequel Wicked - in favour of three smaller (and harder to find) titles. These include Apple Plus’s Blitz, directed by Oscar-winner Steve McQueen, a small indie film starring Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard called Memory, and the real-life story behind IVF, Netflix’s Joy, starring Bill Nighy and Thomasin McKenzie.
Blitz follows an 11-year-old boy, trying to rejoin his mother at the height of Hitler’s bombing raids on London. Written and directed by Steve McQueen (12 Years A Slave) and starring Saoirse Ronan (The Outrun), Stephen Graham (Snatch) and musician Paul Weller as Grandad. Streaming on Apple Plus.
Simon Morris finds himself getting picky at the end of the year as Christmas movies start to clog up the cinemas. Instead he checks out Ridley Scott’s second blockbuster in a year, Gladiator II; a French film that sees a couple stranded at the bottom of the world – Suddenly; and a New Zealand documentary directed by Warrior Queen Lucy Lawless.
Suddenly sees two married adventurers sail round the world, but come adrift when they’re stranded on an Antarctic island when their boat is swept away in a storm. Written and directed by the award-winning Thomas Bidegain (A prophet) it stars Mélanie Thierry (Da 5 Bloods) and Gilles Lellouche (Farewell Mr Haffman).
Gladiator II sees Paul Mescal take over Russell Crowe’s (unhistoric) leather wrist-straps as Son of Maximus. Directed by the tireless 86-year-old Sir Ridley Scott, it co-stars Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal and from the first movie, Connie Nielsen.
Never Look Away is the story of one of CNN’s first war camerawomen, Margaret Moth. Reckless, courageous and dedicated, the New Zealander’s story is almost as exciting as the events she covered. Directed by actress turned director Lucy Lawless (Xena Warrior Princess)
Jason Reitman’s comedy focuses on the chaotic 90 minutes leading up to the debut of the famous television variety show Saturday Night Live. Dan Slevin reviews.
Dan Slevin reviews a documentary about the legendary screen composer, John Williams, and his seven decade career in Hollywood.
Dan Slevin reviews Music by John Williams, a Disney+ documentary about the legendary film composer; Australian animated tragicomedy, Memoir of a Snail, and Saturday Night, a comedy about the birth of the entertainment juggernaut, Saturday Night Live.
Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot’s latest feature is a tragicomedy about twins separated after the death of their father and their eventual recovery. Reviewed by Dan Slevin.
On At the Movies, Dan Slevin reviews three films in which change can be welcome or unwelcome but inevitable all the same. In Head South, a Christchurch teenager discovers New Wave music and a way forward to the rest of his life. Here is a simultaneously experimental and sentimental film about the multiple generations of people who pass through a simple suburban Pennsylvania living room. And in A Different Man, a New York actor with a facial disfigurement is offered a miracle cure – but will it make him happy?
Sebastian Stan stars as a struggling New York actor with a face deformed by rapidly growing tumours caused by neurofibromatosis. He is offered a miracle ‘cure’ but will the transformation make him happy? The film also stars Adam Pearson, an actor who has the same condition. Dan Slevin reviews.
An experimental and sentimental drama shot from a single point-of-view in a single location but presenting people and events over many decades. The stars, screenwriter and director of Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Eric Roth and Robert Zemeckis) are reunited (and Dan Slevin reviews it).
Dan Slevin reviews Jonathan Ogilvie’s autobiographical portrait of the Christchurch New Wave music scene in 1979. Ed Oxenbould plays schoolboy Angus, discovering the underground music scene and a community of his own.
Simon Morris looks at three films that owe their audiences to attractive casts – Kate Winslet in the Oscar hopeful Lee; a star-studded comedy drama, The Critic featuring Sir Ian McKellen and Gemma Arterton; and a Netflix true-crime thriller, starring and directed by Anna Kendrick.
The Critic features Sir Ian McKellen as a much-feared theatre critic who’ll do anything to keep his job, no matter who gets hurt. Also starring Gemma Arterton (Byzantium), Mark Strong (Kingsman) and Lesley Manville (Mrs Harris Goes To Paris).
Woman Of The Hour is a true-crime thriller about an actress who goes on a TV dating show, only to discover that one of the contestants for a date with her is a serial killer. Starring and directed by Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect). Currently showing on Netflix.
Lee is the story of one of the great World War Two photographers, Lee Miller, and why she slipped into obscurity when the war was over. Starring – and produced by – Kate Winslet, with Marion Cotillard, Andy Samberg and Alexander Skarsgård.
Kneecap tells the story of the hiphop group of the same name, starring themselves, with assistance from the likes of Michael Fassbender (Hunger) and Simone Kirby (Peaky Blinders). Kneecap’s point of difference is they rap entirely in Irish. Ireland’s submission to the next Academy Awards.
Last summer is the story of forbidden love between a confident teenager and his stepmother. But writer-director Catherine Breillat (2009’s Bluebeard) offers more than one twist in the tale before it finishes. Starring Léa Drucker (Close).
My Favourite Cake is a bittersweet romance about two lonely 70-year-olds who hook up over cake and wine in modern day Iran. But how will the notorious Morality Police feel about it? It did well at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, despite being essentially cancelled by the Iranian authorities. What’s that line about success being the best revenge?
Simon Morris has a bad day at the office – three films, almost all “not in the English language”. Always a challenge for a radio show! They include festival favourites, Iranian film My Favourite Cake, a French drama called Last Summer and a breezy comedy about Northern Ireland hiphop group Kneecap, who only use the Irish language.
A Mistake is a New Zealand film about a medical misadventure and its consequences. Directed and written by Christine Jeffs (Sunshine Cleaning), based on the best-selling novel by Carl Shuker. It stars Elizabeth Banks (Pitch Perfect), with Rena Owen (Once Were Warriors) and Matthew Sunderland (Out Of The Blue).
Fergus Grady, Director of the British & Irish Film Festival, previews this year’s programme. Among the highlights are Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, We Live In Time, with Florence Pugh, a tribute to the Merchant Ivory team and a documentary on the “lost Rolling Stone”, Brian Jones.
The Apprentice is the based-on-reality story of Donald Trump’s sinister mentor - notorious lawyer Roy Cohn - while the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is the biopic of the actor who came to fame playing the Man of Steel, then suffered a tragic accident confining him to a wheelchair. But it was what happened then that proved truly heroic.
The Outrun is a hit from the recent International Film Festival that’s getting very strong reviews around the world. Starring Irish star Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird, Little Women) it’s based on the best-selling memoir of Orkney writer Amy Liptrot. Also stars Stephen Dillane (Game Of Thrones) and Saskia Reeves (Slow horses).
Wolfs went straight to streaming service Apple TV Plus, despite stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Has the audience for Hitchcock comedy-thrillers finally dried up?
The sequel to 2019’s surprise hit Joker, Folie à Deux, tries to aim at lovers of both dark drama and light musicals. What could go wrong? Stars Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, with Brendan Gleeson, Steve Coogan and Catherine Keenan.
Simon Morris discovers that audiences aren’t always the best judges of what they may want. Joker: Folie à Deux combines two popular genres, while Wolfs features two hugely popular stars, but both live to regret it. Meanwhile a little gem called The Outrun, starring Saoirse Ronan, proves that quality is the safest bet.
Radical is a Mexican film based on real-life, following in the footsteps of To Sir With Love, Dead Poet’s Society and Dangerous minds. An inexperienced teacher arrives at a poverty-stricken school and turns its fortunes round. A world-wide favourite, it was the most popular film at last year’s Sundance Festival.
The Wild Robot is a heart-warming family film from Dreamworks Animation (Puss In Boots). A robot crashes on a desert island and takes on a job it’s not programmed for – mother to a baby gosling. Voice talent includes Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Mark Hamill and Catherine O’Hara. Directed by Chris Sanders (How To Train Your Dragon).
Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppola’s multi-million dollar art film - about art, politics and the future. It stars Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman and Aubrey Plaza. It’s big, it’s serious, but is there anything in there?
Simon Morris weighs up the relative size of big empty spectacle and smaller stories with gripping characters. Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is as spectacular as its name, but what’s it about? The Wild Robot is a surprisingly engaging tale of an abandoned appliance looking for a purpose. And Radical is the real-life story of a first-time teacher in a last-chance Mexican school.
Simon Morris sees plenty of things in common among this week’s films – horror, middle-aged women, French directors - in The Substance, Iris and the Men and Never Let Go. Is it a reflection of the times we live in, or completely random? In other words, is it a trend or just a coincidence?
Never Let Go is set in a dystopian future where a mother (Halle Berry) and her two young sons are under threat from a mysterious entity in the woods. Their only protection are the ropes attached to their cabin. Directed by Alexandre Aja (Crawl).
The Substance is a Cannes Film Festival winner, starring Demi Moore as an aging film-star who takes a potion that turns her into a younger version. But youth comes at a horrifying price. Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat.
Iris and the Men sees French favourite Laure Calamy (Antoinette dans les Cévennes) return in a hit from the recent French Film Festival. When her husband seems to ignore her, Iris has an answer – a dating app for dissatisfied marrieds. Suddenly it’s raining men! Written and directed by Antoinette’s Caroline Vignal.
Simon Morris asks Annie Murray, CEO of the New Zealand Film Commission, why local audiences for New Zealand films are currently so low – around just three percent of the total box office? Is it poor promotion and publicity? Do audiences prefer streaming services to cinemas these days? Or are we simply making the wrong movies?
Simon Morris looks at three specifically targeted films - a sequel to Tim Burton's cult classic Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a popular documentary from a recent architecture film festival, Maurice and I, and a comedy-drama featuring a 93-year-old grandmother action hero - Thelma. He's interested to see if any of them can reach outside their audiences.
Director Tim Burton returns to his 1988 hit comedy about the afterlife. But does it still pack the same punch? It stars old hands Catherine O'Hara, Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, with newcomers Jenna Ortega and Monica Bellucci.
Thelma is the year's least-likely action hero on a mission to get back the money she lost to scammers. Starring 90-plus film veteran June Squibb she's out long past her bed-time, and she's not going back empty handed! Co-starring Robert Roundtree, Parker Posey and Malcolm McDowell.
Maurice and I tells the surprisingly moving story of two of the most successful architects in New Zealand - Sir Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney - their life, their times and their struggle to save their most famous building after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
Eileen is a Netflix noir, starring New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie (Last Night in Soho) and Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables) as co-workers in a juvenile prison whose relationship goes bad.
How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is a tiny independent from Thailand that’s punching considerably above its weight. It’s being sold entirely on its ability to make audiences cry!
Midas Man tells the story of Brian Epstein, the man who discovered the Beatles and changed the world. Starring Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Epstein with cameos from Eddies Marsan and Izzard, Emily Watson and talkshow host Jay Leno as Ed Sullivan.
Simon Morris looks at three smaller films that attempt to do more with less – Midas Man, a biopic of the Beatles’ manager, a Thai tear-jerker called How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies and a dark thriller called Eileen that went straight to Netflix.
Simon Morris suggests that when it comes to breaking the film-making rules, it's best to pick your battles. This week The Sitting Duck is a real life French miscarriage of justice, Blink Twice is a thriller about life among the idle rich - yes, another one! And We Were Dangerous sees three teenage girls plan to break out in 1950s New Zealand.
The Sitting Duck is the real-life story of a French trade union dispute that turns nasty. Was the whistleblower really attacked at her home, or did she make it up to publicise her cause? Starring Isabelle Huppert (Elle).
Blink Twice is the directorial debut of actor Zoë Kravitz (The Batman) that sees a tech billionaire (Channing Tatum) invite his celebrity friends to an island getaway where all is not what it seems. Co-starring Naomi Ackie (Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance With Somebody), Christian Slater (True Romance) and Geena Davis (Thelma and Louise).
New Zealand film We Were Dangerous is set during the famous "moral panic" of 1954, when a new invention - the "teenager" - seemed to terrorise the powers that be! Three rebel girls decide to get out from under. Starring Erana James (Uproar), Nathalie Morris (One Lane Bridge) and newcomer Manaia Hall. With Rima Te Wiata (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) as the Matron.
Alien: Romulus is the latest entry in the space-horror franchise that goes back to basics, and is all the better for it. Directed by Fede Álvarez (Don't Breathe) and starring Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla) and a digital version of Ian Holm (the original Alien).
Simon Morris investigates the dark art of casting - which gives you the best value for money, a star, a real actor or a trendy celebrity? He checks three contrasting films - Alien: Romulus, a little indie comedy-drama Ghostlight, and a celebrity-dotted action comedy on Prime Video, Jackpot!
Action-comedy Jackpot! stars Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians) as a woman who wins a billion dollar lottery, only to find she has to stay alive until sundown if she wants to keep it. Co-starring John Cena (The Suicide Squad)and rapper Machine Gun Kelly. Streaming on Prime Video.
Ghostlight is a critically acclaimed indie film about a construction worker and his family who heal when he is bullied into joining a community theatre. Featuring a scene-stealing performance by Dolly De Leon (Triangle of Sadness).
It Ends With Us is based on a romantic novel that went viral a couple of years back. The film version may do even better, thanks to a star performance by Blake Lively (The Shallows). It's directed by, and co-stars, Justin Baldoni (TV's Jane The Virgin).
Bookworm is about an 11-year-old girl's quest to find New Zealand's mythical Canterbury Panther with the unwilling help of her long-lost father. Directed by Ant Timpson (Come To Daddy) it stars Elijah Wood (Lord of the Rings) and star-in-the-making Nell Fisher (TV's Stranger Things).
Here's a B-movie video-game adaptation with an A-List cast - Jack Black and Kevin Hart (Jumanji), Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All At Once) and, playing her first inter-planetary bounty hunter, Cate Blanchett (Tár).
Simon Morris checks out three films that depend on a star to lift their game. Two succeed - a romance with a sting in the tail called It Ends With Us and an endearing Kiwi road-movie called Bookworm. But video game Borderlands defies even an eight times Oscar nominee…
Simon Morris goes to the first French version of The Three Musketeers in 30 years, and another film involving Parisian duels, The Edge of the Blade.
The first part of The Three Musketeers - D'Artagnan, is a fresh take on the biggest-selling book after the Bible! Stars Vincent Cassel (Black Swan), Romain Duris (Eiffel) and Eva Green (Casino Royale).
Trap finds serial killer The Butcher trapped with 10,000 teenage fans at a pop concert. Stars Josh Hartnett (Black Hawk Down) and Hayley Mills (Pollyanna). Directed by M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense).
And another French swashbuckler, The Edge of the Blade tells the true story of feminist and occasional duellist Marie-Rose Astié as she joins forces with a fencing master for justice and honour. Written, directed and featuring Vincent Perez (An Officer and a Spy).
Trap finds serial killer The Butcher trapped with 10,000 teenage fans at a pop concert. Stars Josh Hartnett (Black Hawk Down) and Hayley Mills (Pollyanna). Directed by M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense).
The first part of The Three Musketeers - D'Artagnan, is a fresh take on the biggest-selling book after the Bible! Stars Vincent Cassel (Black Swan), Romain Duris (Eiffel) and Eva Green (Casino Royale).
Another French swashbuckler, The Edge of the Blade tells the true story of feminist and occasional duellist Marie-Rose Astié as she joins forces with a fencing master for justice and honour. Written, directed and featuring Vincent Perez (An Officer and a Spy).
Simon Morris realizes there are several worlds of movies around this week - from Marvel's Multiverse in Deadpool & Wolverine to the popular French hits, typified by The President's Wife with Catherine Deneuve and Mr Blake at your service with John Malkovich.
Deadpool & Wolverine sees two Marvel Comics mavericks combine to save Disney's beleaguered MCU. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are joined by a dazzling array of cameos, including Emma Corrin (The Crown's Princess Diana), Matthew McFadyen (Succession), Channing Tatum, Blake Lively and Wesley Snipes.
French hit Mr Blake at Your Service sees John Malkovich (Dangerous Liaisons) play a British businessman (entirely in French!) who takes a job as a butler in a French stately home. Also starring evergreen French star Fanny Ardant (8 Women).
The President's Wife sees the unstoppable Catherine Deneuve (Belle de Jour) portray another force of nature - Bernadette Chirac, wife of President Jacques Chirac, who became more popular than her husband among the French public.
This week, with the eyes of the world on the Paris Olympics, what better time to learn a bit about recent French politics?
In France, The President's Wife is simply called Bernadette. The film's subject, Bernadette Chirac, wife of former President Jacques Chirac, became just as famous as her husband and a lot more popular.
And the film's star is equally a phenomenon.
Every year the extraordinary Catherine Deneuve makes another film - often two or three films - and always her name is above the title.
She's been in that unassailable position since her early films in the '60s and '70s, as the muse of Truffaut and Chabrol, Polanski and Buñuel.
She was stunning then, and she's pretty stunning now, like a high-fashion, Vogue front-cover version of Britain's famous Dames - Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren.
Like them Deneuve manages to find leading roles that do more than simply cash in on their celebrity.
Jacques Chirac was the bumptious, right-wing President of France in the late 1990 early 2000s. Like his contemporaries Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, he considered himself part of a new, political elite. Unlike his wife Bernadette, who was - well, just a wife.
But in fact, Madame Chirac was no slouch in the political arena herself, albeit mostly local politics.
And she soon became sick of playing the little woman behind the Great Man - particularly since she strongly suspected that her political instincts were rather more accurate than Chirac and his trendy think-tank.
So, with the aid of her one PR chap - an equally under-estimated public servant nicknamed Micky - Bernadette launched a charm offensive that surprised and delighted the French public.
Far from being the austere, conservative housewife she'd been presented as, she turned out to be funny, irreverent, even charismatic.
Comparisons were made with Princess Diana, at the expense of her often charmless husband. A Frenchman politician of the old school, Chirac achieved notoriety for his habitual infidelities and financial scandals.
And France clearly decided they preferred the style of The President's Wife to Bernadette's husband.
The film The President's Wife is aimed more at a local audience than an international one perhaps. …
Simon Morris wonders if genre is always a good guide to a movie's quality, just because you usually like that sort of film.
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is a typically epic Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves) western - at three hours it's not even halfway finished apparently. Written, produced and directed by Costner, it also features Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road), Sienna Miller (American Sniper) and Sam Worthington (Avatar).
Longlegs is a hugely popular, serial killer horror film. A sensation on social media, it's reignited the career of Nicolas Cage as the titular villain - with a voice inspired by his mother! Also stars Blair Underwood (TV's Elsbeth) and Maika Monroe (It Follows).
And from the French Film Festival, Divertimento, based on a real-life young woman from the Parisian projects who became one of France's great woman conductors. "Divertimento" is the name of Zahia Ziousani's own orchestra.
Longlegs is a hugely popular, serial killer horror film. A sensation on social media, it's reignited the career of Nicolas Cage as the titular villain - with a voice inspired by his mother! Also stars Blair Underwood (TV's Elsbeth) and Maika Monroe (It Follows).
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is a typically epic Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves) western - at three hours it's not even halfway finished apparently. Written, produced and directed by Costner, it also features Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road), Sienna Miller (American Sniper) and Sam Worthington (Avatar).
From the French Film Festival, Divertimento, based on a real-life young woman from the Parisian projects who became one of France's great woman conductors. "Divertimento" is the name of Zahia Ziousani's own orchestra.
28 years after the original Twister a new crew is chasing storms in Oklahoma's notorious "Tornado Alley". Starring Glen Powell (Hit Man) and Daisy Edgar-Jones (Where the Crawdads Sing). Once again produced by Steven Spielberg.
Kinds of Kindness is a typically opaque collection of loosely-connected short stories by UK-Greek film-maker Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things). Starring Emma Stone (The Favourite), Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project) and Jesse Plemens (Civil War).
Simon Morris is confronted by an embarrassment of good, entertaining movies. And about time too…
Fly me to the moon sees Scarlett Johanssen and Channing Tatum in a romantic romp that wonders what if the moon landing really was faked? Co-starring Woody Harrelson as President Nixon's hatchet man.
On At the Movies, Dan Slevin reviews Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy and Austin Butler in The Bikeriders, a drama about Chicago motorcycle gangs in the 1960s, three competing animated sequels for the school holidays, and Eddie Murphy's fourth outing as Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.
Eddie Murphy returns as the Detroit detective getting into and out of trouble in the posh part of Los Angeles, reviewed by Dan Slevin.
Dan Slevin watches three competing animated sequels - Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2 and 200% Wolf.
Dan Slevin reviews Jeff Nichols' drama about a Chicago motorcycle gang in the 1960s, based on Danny Lyon's famous book of photojournalism.
Simon Morris talks to the new director of Whānau Mārama, the New Zealand International Film Festival. Paolo Bertolin plucks some highlights from this year's programme, including Cannes sensation The Seed of the Sacred Fig, tributes to musician Paul Simon and one-time Superman, the late actor Christopher Reeves, and New Zealand classics, new and old - Alien Weaponry: Kua Tupu Te Ara and Heavenly Creatures.
There's an enticing array of international fare to watch out for at the New Zealand International Film Festival, says artistic director Paolo Bertolin.
The festival kicks off at the end of this month, with 105 local and international films on offer.
Bertolin joined the festival as artistic director earlier this year and has worked on many other festivals, including Cannes Critics' Week and the Venice International Film Festival.
This year two big ticket films open the festival, both New Zealand films representative of a "surge in vitality in local cinema", he told Simon Morris.
"On the one hand, we have We Were Dangerous. The film is directed by Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu. And it was awarded in South by Southwest and we're very proud to show the film in its domestic premiere."
It's a story of female empowerment set in the 1950s, he said.
"It's an entertaining film and it's an empowering one. I think that by the end of the film, audiences will be really happy and excited. It's a film that really entertaining and pleasing and I feel the ending is very, very inspiring."
Christchurch gets its own premiere with Jonathan Ogilvie's Head South, he said.
"It's a film I have a kind of an interest in because I was in Christchurch at that time working on a rock show. And so that early 80s post punk thing is quite close to my heart.
"Head South is another wonderful example of this renaissance of local films. This is a film set at the end of the '70s, early '80s. And it's tracking the real story of a boy who is growing up in Christchurch at that time and feeling that rock music can be something that can change his life," Bertolin said.
There's a strong collection of New Zealand films in the festival, particularly some notable documentaries, he said. They include Alien Weaponry: Kua Tupu Te Ara, The House Within documentary film on New Zealand writer Fiona Kidman, Taki Rua Theatre - Breaking Barriers, and Never Look Away a documentary on photojournalist Margaret Moth…
Ka whawhai tonu: Struggle without end tells the famous story of Rewi's Last Stand in the Land Wars of the 1860s. Directed by Michael Jonathan, it features Tem Morrison (Aquaman), Cliff Curtis (Avatar), Miriama Smith (Love and monsters) and newcomers Paku Fernandez and Hinerangi Harawira-Nicholas.
Coup de chance is Woody Allen's 50th movie - and his first entirely in the French language. A chance meeting - a stroke of luck or the worst thing that could happen?
Simon Morris looks at the conflicting demands of history and a good story. When the truth becomes legend, should you always print the legend?
The road to Patagonia is the story of a couple who travel from Alaska to the southernmost tip of Patagonia, and along the way shoot enough footage to make a great love story. Directed, photographed and edited by real-life couple Matty Hannan and Heather Hillier.
Simon Morris discovers three old-fashioned movies mostly from outside the Hollywood mainstream.
Mothers' Instinct is a Hitchcock-style suspense thriller produced by its stars Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. (Now streaming on Prime Video)
Mothers' Instinct is a Hitchcock-style suspense thriller produced by its stars Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. (Now streaming on Prime Video)
It's a reflection on the current state of the movies that a film like Mothers' Instinct should seem like a little art film rather than what it is - a reasonable-sized mainstream thriller with two big-name Hollywood stars in it.
The sort of thing that Alfred Hitchcock used to make back in the Fifties and Sixties.
But if Hollywood no longer makes psychological thrillers a priority - Mothers' Instinct is showing on Amazon Prime - in Europe they still do very well.
The Belgian original of Mothers' Instinct was big at home and did well enough outside to warrant an American remake, starring Hollywood royalty Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway, who both also produced it.
The story takes place in 1960 suburbia. Two houses, two families, two mothers.
Alice is thinking of going back to work, while Celine is happy to stay at home. Their two 10-year-old sons are best friends. All in all, an idyllic life until tragedy strikes.
Alice is out in the garden when she sees Celine's son Max out on a ledge. And before she can get to him - or warn Celine - Max falls to his death.
The effects are devastating. Celine, so happy and sensible before, now locks herself away. Alice tries to make contact with her, to no avail.
And the two husbands are also in shock, while Max's best friend Theo - Alice's son - has to try and make sense of it all.
Alice starts to have suspicions when her friend Celine and her son Theo spend more and more time together. Too much time, or perfectly innocent?
This is classic Hitchcock. How much is real, and how much our imagination?
Is Celine - a sombre, buttoned-up Anne Hathaway - simply offering the boy support, or is there more to it?
And is Alice - a permanently on-edge Jessica Chastain - just being paranoid, constantly seeing things that aren't there?
First-time director Benoit Delhomme is one of France's most respected cinematographers - he also shot Mothers' Instinct - and the film undoubtedly looks terrific, as much for what it doesn't show as what it does.
His skill is keeping us guessing all the way through the film.
Is one of these respectable wives crazy, and if so which one? A grieving mother tipped over the edge, or an over-protective one wrapping her child in cotton wool?…
The Watchers is the directorial debut of Ishana Shyamalan, produced by her rather more famous father M. Night Shyamalan. In it, a young woman (Dakota Fanning) finds herself trapped in the Irish woods by a mysterious group.
The Watchers is the directorial debut of Ishana Shyamalan, produced by her rather more famous father M. Night Shyamalan.
In it, a young woman (Dakota Fanning) finds herself trapped in the Irish woods by a mysterious group.
The Watchers - aka The Watched in some markets - was originally a novel by Irish writer A M Shine, of whom I know very little except he lives in Galway and goes in for something called Literary Horror.
Which is presumably why Ishana Shyamalan took an interest in his book.
The question that became increasingly insistent as The Watchers got underway was "Would this film have seen the light if Ishana's dad had been somebody else?"
Far be it from me to invoke the trendy insult "nepo baby", but I doubt it. M Night Shyamalan actually produced the film.
We open on our heroine Mina, played by Dakota Fanning, who works at a Galway pet shop.
Mina's given a parrot to take to Belfast. But before she goes, she puts on a wig and goes to a pub, looking for trouble.
You're possibly thinking Promising Young Woman at this stage, sticking it to the patriarchy perhaps? But it doesn't seem to be that. It doesn't seem to be anything. It's certainly never referred to again.
You're going to have to get used to this, by the way. Maybe Ishana Shyamalan had a whole pile of movie scenes in a bottom drawer and was determined to fit as many as possible into her first film.
In case there isn't a second one, perhaps?
Anyway, she's driving through a forest - not questioning why the highway from Galway to Belfast should suddenly turn into the back of beyond - when the car breaks down.
She takes the parrot - remember the parrot? - and goes exploring.
And who's this in front of her but a strange blonde Irish woman, summoning her to a door that leads to a mysterious room in the middle of a forest?
All right, a mysterious Coop. So there's Mina and blonde Madeline, and also a couple of youngies - Ciara and Daniel - and they all seem to be on standby.
Apparently they're on show in front of an invisible audience.
Mina steps up in front of the mysterious Watchers, and then.... And then what, A M Shine and Ishana Shyamalan?
We seem to be trapped in a strange, endless limbo for no apparent duration and to no apparent purpose…
The Promised Land is a historical drama set in Denmark in the early 18th century. A retired army captain (Mads Mikkelson) plans to turn a barren heath into successful farmland but makes a powerful enemy in the local magistrate.
The Promised Land is a historical drama set in Denmark in the early 18th century. A retired army captain (Mads Mikkelson) plans to turn a barren heath into successful farmland but makes a powerful enemy in the local magistrate.
Running time in a movie is an unpredictable thing. Sometimes three hours can go in the blink of an eye. Sometimes a far shorter time, on paper, seems to go on forever.
A Danish film called The Promised Land was one of the former. It was slow, but it was engrossing. Of course, it didn't hurt that it starred the always-intriguing Mads Mikkelson.
Another reliable name is veteran screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen, once a stalwart of Denmark's famous Dogme movement.
But most of all, I'm a sucker these days for a historical movie - particularly when it's a place and a period I know next to nothing about.
In the 18th century, the barren Jutland heath to the north of Denmark was virtually uninhabited, but technically owned by the King.
Demobbed soldier Ludvig has plans to make the desert bloom, so to speak, in exchange for his own estate and a title. The King gives his permission - if he can pull it off.
But Ludvig has an implacable enemy - the wealthy magistrate De Schinkel, who owns the neighbouring lands, and assumes the whole territory is his too.
To ensure this he does everything he can to run Ludvig off. And the film The Promised Land is what happens next.
It should be pointed out that Ludvig - Mads Mikkelsen - is decent and hardworking rather than particularly heroic. He certainly has no interest in a war with De Schinkel - 20 years fighting pointless wars all over Europe were enough for him.
But he's not going to give up either. What he needs is people to help him clear the land.
His first two workers prove to be mixed blessings. Johannes and his wife Ann Barbara were indentured serfs for De Schinkel - essentially slaves. If Ludvig wants them he'll have to hide them from his neighbour.
But he clearly needs more than them.
And the only people available are currently the bane of his life. These are the Tatere - Romany outlaws who keep raiding his henhouse.
In the spirit of "better in the tent than out", Ludvig offers the Tatere work and to everyone's surprise, they agree. He also gets support from another unexpected quarter…
Simon Morris continues to be unimpressed by the so-called "blockbuster season", and finds better - or at least more interesting - stuff on Netflix this week.
Hit Man, from arthouse darling Richard Linklater, tells the true-ish story of a "fake hitman" working for the New Orleans Police Department.
Hit Man, from arthouse darling Richard Linklater, tells the true-ish story of a "fake hitman" working for the New Orleans Police Department.
Hit Man was based on a real-life story - a man called Gary Johnson who was a fake assassin, working for the New Orleans police force.
The Richard Linklater touch is the arthouse director spent nearly 20 years turning it into a movie. The sort of film they don't make often these days.
In real life, Gary Johnson - played perfectly here by Glen Powell, who also co-wrote it - is a rather colourless university lecturer in psychology.
But in his spare time, he helps the police, working their hidden mics on undercover operations. In particular, he's involved in preventing murders. Clients who hire the fake hitman then find themselves in jail.
One day, the regular fake hitman gets into trouble. Gary takes his place and proves to be a natural. He applies his psychological insights to give his would-be clients the hitmen of their fantasies.
In a film like Hit Man, tone is everything. We're invited to like a man whose job is entrapping desperate people at the end of their tether.
Mind you, most of these people are awful - greedy, petty, cowardly and deserving everything that's coming to them.
Unlike Gary, who's often hilarious as a variety of fantasy hitmen - the leather-clad Russian gangster, the tattooed good old boy, the scar-faced Mafioso and the English Maggie Smith lookalike. All, it has to be said, far more interesting than Gary as himself.
Then one day he breaks the unwritten law among hitmen - even fake hitmen. He falls in love with a client.
Her name's Madison - Adria Arjona - and she wants to get rid of her controlling, arrogant husband.
Gary plays "Ron" for Madison - tough and no-nonsense, the absolute opposite of beige, indecisive Gary - and he decides to help her rather than arrest her. Take that money and just leave your husband, he advises.
His police minders are annoyed - particularly his predecessor Jasper, who wants his fake hitman job back.
So now Madison and Gary - or rather Ron - are an item. And Gary finds himself becoming more and more like Ron at work too. His students start wondering "When did boring Mr Johnson get so hot?"
Much of the appeal for Madison is her boyfriend's dangerous, secret job - the guns, the never-spoken-of murders, the cryptic passwords.
So how will she react when she inevitably finds out it's all a fantasy?…
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is the fourth in the buddy-cop franchise starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Does it have the same magic 30 years after the first episode?
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is the fourth in the buddy-cop franchise starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Does it have the same magic 30 years after the first episode?
Opinion-makers are united in the view that former biggest star in the world Will Smith needs to pull something out of the hat.
In this case it's the fourth Bad Boys with Martin Lawrence - Ride or Die.
The original Bad Boys was concocted by the bad boys of Hollywood - producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson and director Michael Bay - to cash in on the success of the then biggest stars on TV - comedians Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.
The latest, with only Bruckheimer on board this time, seems to be designed to rehabilitate the reputation of Smith after his, shall we say, patchy experience at the Oscars last year.
Getting an Oscar for King Richard and being virtually cancelled in the space of about an hour is no mean feat.
But to the credit of the bigwigs of Sony Pictures, they're now prepared to throw everything at the comeback film Ride or Die.
"Ride or die" - for people who can't be bothered looking it up - means two people who are very loyal to each other, apparently.
Like long-time cop buddies Mike and Marcus - Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Mike's task is to keep Marcus on a diet.
Marcus is distracted - first by a greasy hotdog, then by a robbery in progress.
Fortunately Mike is, er, Ride Or Die and takes care of business, thus establishing the tone.
Speaking of establishing the tone, I should point out there's rather more swearing than I expected. Will Smith was famously one of the clean hiphop rappers, before he turned into a family-friendly TV and movie star.
Still, bad boys, what you gonna do?
Anyway no sooner has Mike married the lovely Kelly when news comes out that their old Captain - who got killed in the last Bad Boys movie - has been accused of being corrupt - or as they invariably say in this sort of film "dirty".
This is a shock to Captain Howard's daughter Josie and grand-daughter Callie. Kelly... Callie... I got confused too, particularly when one of them gets kidnapped.
Mike and Marcus are also distraught. The Captain, after all, was like a father to them.
Which may have given the producers to borrow from Hamlet. The ghost of Captain Howard sends them a message from beyond the grave.
Corruption in the Miami Police Force? Surely not. Is it Kelly? Or possible Callie?…
Under Paris is part shark-thriller, part French cop movie and part Greenie parable - which is why it's getting enthusiastic thumbs-up from unexpected quarters.
Under Paris is part shark-thriller, part French cop movie and part Greenie parable - which is why it's getting enthusiastic thumbs-ups from unexpected quarters.
Full disclosure: when I saw the trailer for a film on Netflix called Under Paris I was intrigued. A blend of standard shark film and a police drama in modern-day Paris during a high-profile triathlon looked.... Well, as I say, intriguing.
It stars the lovely Bérénice Bejo, who made a big splash (sorry) in the 2011 French Oscar-winner The Artist.
It opens strikingly enough - underneath acres of plastic rubbish in the Pacific.
Sophia heads a group of scientists tagging local sharks. One of them - they call her Lilith - turns up and kills them all - all but Sophia. Lilith used to be a common or garden-variety Mako shark. She's now a terrifying three times bigger. Something in the water, maybe?
Three years later - that was quick - a still mourning Sophia has a new job in Paris, studying sharks. This is a bit of luck. She's told that Lilith has been traced, swimming up the Seine. Not just up the Seine, but just round the corner from Sophia's Paris home.
What are the odds? You may well ask. As does the Mayor, concerned about the aquatic leg of her triathlon.
Sophia is roped in to advise - after all, she's not only a shark expert, but she's got history with Lilith the Great Big Shark. She hooks up with river policeman Adil, who is sceptical.
A shark under Paris? Sophia says cryptically "You had no question when it was a beluga and an orca." Sorry, what?
I'm grateful that Netflix offers an English language version of the trailer. This is crazy enough without anything getting lost in translation.
By now the shark squad includes the River Police, who want to shoot Lilith and a slightly irritating group of young Greenies who want to save our giant carnivorous friend. There's Sophia - I'm not sure what she wants to do - and the Mayor who refuses to believe the shark is even there.
She is of course - "under Paris", otherwise there's no movie. But there's a twist. Lilith is not alone. There's at least one daughter, pointing to a potential sequel.
The film opens on a quote from Charles Darwin - essentially "adapt or die". Perhaps the usually sequel-averse French film industry is picking up tips from people like Jerry Bruckheimer…
Unsung hero is the mostly true story of Australia's Smallbone family, who emigrated to America and ended up spawning two leading Christian music acts - Rebecca St James and pop duo For King and Country. Starring Josh Smallbone as his father David and popular Australian actress Daisy Betts (Last Resort) as his mother.
The Garfield movie sees the big screen return of the sarcastic, overweight marmalade tabby. Now voiced by Chris Pratt (The Lego Movie) with Samuel L. Jackson as his long-lost father and Snoop Dogg as a cat.
Simon Morris finds it hard to get much sympathy when he complains about the regular mixed bag of movies currently on display at the cinema!
Atlas is a new scifi thriller on Netflix, starring Jennifer Lopez as a genius scientist on the hunt for her family robot, whose gone rogue and plans to destroy the Earth. Believe it or not, it went straight to Number One on the streaming service.
Simon Morris wonders why prequels are so much rarer than sequels - and reviews three films, all in their way, backstories of later events.
Copa 71 is a documentary of the first, unofficial Women's Football World Cup in Mexico City 1971. Football organisers FIFA did all they could to close it down, and later hush it up. Produced by Venus and Serena Williams.
Furiosa follows the 15 year backstory of the co-star of Mad Max Fury Road. Anya Taylor-Joy plays the girl kidnapped from her idyllic home, and out for vengeance. Once again directed by George Miller, and co-starring Chris Hemsworth as Doctor Dementus.
When Australian director George Miller revived the Mad Max series 30 years later, people were mostly interested in how Tom Hardy was going to fill the giant boots of Mel Gibson's Road Warrior. Until they saw 2015's Fury Road.
The film was entirely owned by the Charlize Theron character, Furiosa. Max was the merest bystander. So, who was she?
Miller pre-empted that question with a private prequel covering the 15 years from Furiosa's childhood in the idyllic Green Place to finding herself in the Citadel of the monstrous Immortan Joe.
It wasn't meant to be filmed - just to help Charlize get a handle on the character. But why waste a good script?
But where a three-day car chase in a post-apocalyptic Wasteland has its own built-in structure, 15 years is harder to shape.
Furiosa is a monumental three hours. And the star, Anya Taylor-Joy, takes almost an hour to show up at all.
We meet infant Furiosa at home in the Green Place just as she's kidnapped by a gang of marauding bikers. But her fearsome mother takes off in hot pursuit.
The leader of the motorbike horde - think an Australian, petrol-head Attila the Hun - is one Doctor Dementus. Miller's character names are inimitable!
And Dementus is played by an unlikely Chris Hemsworth.
Hemsworth seems to go to some trouble to disguise his strapping, surfie good looks - everything from a beer-belly fat suit, to Shakespearean vowels in Thor.
Here he sports long greasy hair, a shaggy beard and a fake, crooked nose. Not to mention an idiotic voice.
Having captured Furiosa, Dementus chucks her in a cage like a pet.
Then he gets into a turf war with his neighbour Immortan Joe, who tells him he likes the look of his latest acquisition.
Little Furiosa bides her time, until finally morphing into Anya Taylor-Joy.
At least she avoids the usual fate of Joe's female prisoners - permanently pregnant - and instead joins the manual labourers working on the giant truck, the War Rig.
And while Taylor-Joy is considerably more sylph-like than the physically imposing Charlize Theron, she manages to convince as Furiosa's younger self through total commitment to the part and a ballet-dancer's physical dexterity.
It's interesting how many female action stars come from a ballet background, rather than, say, martial arts. Charlize, Anya, Michele Yeoh, Emily Blunt, Zoe Saldana...…
Freud's Last Session is a play about a fictitious meeting between the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and the Christian writer, and later creator of the Narnia books, C S Lewis. Starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey) and Liv Lisa Fies (Berlin Babylon).
A film and a play may seem similar, but they're not really. A film is all closeups and different locations, a play is entirely a wide-shot of often just one room.
A film is about action, a play is reaction, as characters' ideas and points of view collide. Like a former off-Broadway hit drama called Freud's Last Session.
Freud's Last Session is essentially a two-hander between two great minds - the pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and academic and author C S Lewis.
At stake, a debate to the finish over the existence of God.
And despite the passion with which both Freud and Lewis hold to their positions, there's also a glee at debate that's very Oxford and Cambridge, and I'm sure, Vienna too.
Freud is played - brilliantly, I might add - by Sir Anthony Hopkins, all brash certainty disguising unexpressed doubts.
C S Lewis is played by one of my favourite not-quite stars, Matthew Goode.
This is another terrific performance - polite deference to an ailing, elderly man, stubborn refusal to back down in the face of expert bullying by Freud, and underneath, the ever-present memory of the First World War.
Freud's Last Session takes place in the hours before declaration of World War II, a mere 20 years after the nightmare of the first.
Lewis had been in the trenches back then and suffered a breakdown.
Freud and his daughter Anna had recently escaped from Vienna, and he and Lewis are united in their disgust at the Nazis.
But does the existence of Hitler disprove the presence of God, or is he simply proof of the perils of freedom of choice?
These are debates that have been going on for centuries, of course, but what lifts Freud's Last Session is that it's very much about these specific characters, not their well-trodden arguments.
And behind the scenes - occasionally revealed in. slightly stagey flashbacks and asides - are the two important women in the men's lives.
C S Lewis is in a relationship - in all but name - with the mother of a soldier he served with in the trenches. And Freud sometimes treats Anna like a child, demanding she put him before any outside relationship.
This despite the fact that Anna is a respected lecturer in child psychology in her own right, and has been in a relationship with her friend Dorothy for years. …
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is the first part of an extended remake of a 2008 Liv Tyler horror film, directed by the notorious Renny Harlin.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is the first part of an extended remake of a 2008 Liv Tyler horror film, directed by the notorious Renny Harlin.
Far from relying on the studio to fund any follow-ups to The Strangers on the strength of its performance at the box office, director Renny Harlin made all three films at the same time.
Harlin is some sort of phenomenon. Of the 40 or so movies he's made, a mere handful are what anyone would call any good - Die Hard 2, Nightmare On Elm Street 4, that sort of thing.
And yet he keeps on being employed, often on projects like this. Despite the title,The Strangers Chapter 1 isn't the first crack at this story.
The original Strangers was a pretty effective horror film, starring Liv Tyler. I don't remember if I even saw it, it was so generic.
But judging from the trailer, it featured pretty much everything Harlin offers in Chapter 1.
Young couple Maya and Ryan drive into town on their way to meet friends somewhere in Oregon.
As always with big city folk in the rural badlands, they find themselves eyed up suspiciously by the locals, who clearly don't cotton to strangers in these parts.
To the surprise of nobody who's ever seen a horror movie, their car's broken down. While they wait for it to be fixed, they'll have to stay the night in a lonely old shack way outside of town.
Miles away from anyone... A stranger? In the middle of the night?
For some reason, neither Ryan nor Maya seem particularly concerned, despite the moody lighting, the sinister background music and the fact they're stuck in the middle of nowhere without transport.
Have they never seen a scary movie? Didn't they think to ask why the only source of music is a turntable and a bunch of scratchy old LPs? What year is this?
And what's that dripping on the table? I thought you asked them to hold the ketchup...
Next thing you know there are sinister figures silently prowling around outside Casa Del Creepy, and occasionally letting themselves in so they can silently prowl around inside too.
There are three prowlers, helpfully named in the credits Scarecrow, Dollface and Pinup. Possibly their true identities will be revealed in Chapter Two or Three.
Given that the plot is basically two people being chased round a shack in the woods by three people in masks, the plot manages to stretch this skimpy material very efficiently.
Every time you think the bad guys have caught Maya and Ryan, they get away…
Simon Morris looks at a lucky dip of movies - a family fantasy, an extended home movie travelogue and an optimistic first part of a new horror franchise.
IF is about a girl who discovers a world of Imaginary Friends of children who've outgrown them. Can she find them new homes, and can they get her through some personal traumas? Starring Ryan Reynolds, Cailey Fleming and a host of celebrity voice talent as the Ifs. Directed by John Krasinski (A Quiet Place).
The Way, My Way is the film of director Bill Bennett's book about how he walked the 800 kilometre pilgrims' walk, the Camino de Santiago. Many of the people in the book play themselves in the film.
And, The Strangers: Chapter 1 is the first part of an extended remake of the 2008 Liv Tyler horror film. Once again a young couple is terrorized in a secluded house by three mysterious masked figures with no apparent motive. Directed by the notorious Renny Harlin (Cutthroat Island).
The Way, My Way is the film of director Bill Bennett's book about how he walked the 800-kilometre pilgrims' walk - the Camino de Santiago.
The Way, My Way is the film of director Bill Bennett's book about how he walked the 800 kilometre pilgrims' walk - the Camino de Santiago.
The Camino de Santiago is an extraordinary, Spanish phenomenon that seems to have outgrown its medieval, religious origins.
It's an 800-kilometre trek from the border of France to the city of Santiago, where the faithful believe are buried the remains of the Apostle St James - 'Santiago' in Spanish.
But it's far more than that now, according to Australian director Bill Bennett.
He tells us he isn't particularly religious - certainly not when he walked the Camino himself - and wasn't even sure why he became so obsessed with doing it in the first place.
But he did it, he wrote a book about his experience - The Way, My Way - and the book was a big success.
Even then, Bennett had to be bullied into making a movie of it. A movie in which most of the people in the book are played by the people themselves, including his wife, Jennifer Cluff, who also produced the film.
One person played by a real actor was Bennett himself. He brought in veteran Australian actor Chris Hayward to play him.
Though, no offense to Hayward, but there's not a lot of obvious acting going on here. In many ways the filmThe Way, My Way is like every TV travel series since Michael Palin.
Bill keeps denying he's driven by major existential questions as he takes the Walk, but without them, it's essentially one foot in front of the other for hundreds of kilometers.
If this is going to be any sort of traditional movie, we're going to need some pretty exciting travel-mates.
Well - I'm told it's a Camino thing - the Way doesn't really encourage travelling in company.
Although fictional Bill meets real-life walkers Bolosz, Laszlo and Rosa, they don't normally walk together. They do it at their own speed, usually solo, though regularly running into each other along the way.
While this is great for authenticity, it does tend to mean we're invited to connect with people we don't know anything about at the beginning, and not much more about by the end.
This is fine in a book, but, since The Way, My Way is set up as a movie, couldn't it have provided a bit more fictional drama along the way?
This reveals my lack of spirituality, obviously, and I have to concede that even without characters or much in the way of plot, the Way itself is picturesque and restful…
IF is about a girl who discovers a world of Imaginary Friends of children who've outgrown them. Can she find them new homes, and can they get her through some personal traumas? Starring Ryan Reynolds, Cailey Fleming and a host of celebrity voice talent as the Ifs. Directed by John Krasinski (A quiet place).
The new family comedy IF - it stands for "Imaginary Friend", by the way, nothing to do with Lindsay Anderson's riotous 60s public school satire - is advertised as coming "from the mind of John Krasinski", which may be a bit premature.
Krasinski is a likable actor - notably in the American version of The Office - and director - the sci-fi thriller series A Quiet Place with his wife Emily Blunt. But that doesn't make him a genius auteur quite yet.
IF attempts that deceptively tricky task - a kids story with something for the whole family. This is the land of The Wizard of Oz and Roald Dahl, of Pixar animation and early Walt Disney.
It opens on a 12-year-old girl called Bee, who's having a bad time.
Bee's mother has recently died. Her father is in hospital waiting for serious surgery. She's staying with her worried grandma in a spooky old house.... Wait, I thought this was going to be sunny escapism featuring cute, wacky cartoon characters?
Clearly the publicity department of IF had the same concerns, since most of the trailers brush all this stuff under the carpet in favour of wild and crazy Ryan Reynolds.
He plays Cal, a sort of middle-man between our heroine Bee and the wonderful world of Imaginary Friends. IFs like Blue, who's actually purple.
Bee is uniquely able to see all these displaced IFs - the imaginary friends of children who've outgrown them, and who now have nowhere to go.
There's some irony in this, since there's a strong suspicion this is the case with the story of IF too, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Initially, the plot commutes between Bee's visits to the hospital and her lovable dad - played by Krasinski himself - and her life in the fantasy world of IFs. But the IFs eventually start taking over.
This despite the fact that IF is a little unclear what to do with a bunch of out-of-work fantasy characters. Do you assign them to new kids, or do you find the child within their former owners?
Still, it can't be denied they're an overpowering mob. The voice-cast list alone is astonishing, reflecting the fact that voice-over work on a big-budget animation film is a pretty easy gig. Remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? …
Simon Morris sympathises with based-on-real-life movies where the real life doesn't quite fit the music. And he welcomes back a franchise with a lot of New Zealand digital effects.
Joika is a Polish New Zealand co-production about the only American to join the famed Bolshoi Ballet. Starring Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds) and Talia Ryder (Never Rarely Sometimes Always), and written and directed by James Napier Robertson (Dark Horse).
Jackie Stewart tells the story of one of the most popular drivers on the Formula 1 scene. Sir Jackie tells his story from his childhood in Scotland to his superstar status that continues to this day. Directed by Patrick Mark (Fabergé: A life of its own)
Watch the trailer: Jackie Stewart
Formula 1 racing is undoubtedly exciting, but not particularly dramatic.
There are people driving at incredible speeds, often inches away from each other, for endless hours. There's the constant threat of sudden death at every bend in the road.
But it's also incredibly repetitive and exhausting. It takes a special skill to turn that into a gripping movie.
Which is what the documentary Senna was, Asif Kapadia's brilliant account of Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna and his less volatile nemesis Alain Prost.
Senna won the World Championship three times. But so did another driver, Jackie Stewart, the subject of a documentary of the same name.
But unlike Senna, Jackie Stewart falls down in the story department.
I suspect director Patrick Mark was so smitten by the famous Flying Scot he didn't realise he needed one until it was too late.
Sir Jackie is one of the best-loved people in motor sports, from his early successes in the mid Sixties to now, where he's regularly mobbed by autograph-hunters at the world's top Formula 1 events.
The documentary opens on a picturesque village in Scotland where Stewart grew up. He freely admits he didn't exactly bowl over his teachers at school.
In fact, he was regularly bottom of the class - though back then the concept of learning disabilities was pretty much unknown. They just called him "stupid", which he clearly wasn't.
He worked at the family garage, then one day he was given his big break - a trial run at a local car race.
And then - it really did seem to happen this quickly - he was on the Formula 1 circuit, he was winning regularly, he shortly became one of the most famous people in the country.
It didn't hurt that this was at the height of the Swinging '60s.
Where his racing rivals Stirling Moss and Graham Hill were establishment types, hanging out with the likes of Princess Margaret, the long-haired Stewart was clearly part of the Mod generation.
Adding to his glamour - as if he needed to - was his none-more-60s wife Helen.
She looked like the girlfriend of every pop star of the time - long, straight blonde hair, a bit posh, staggeringly beautiful and fiercely loyal to Stewart.
So if this was how Stewart started out - and all this happens in the first ten minutes of the film Jackie Stewart - then where's the drama?…
The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes sees the return of the popular series, many years after the last episode. Starring Owen Teague (It) and Freya Allen (Baghead) but the real stars are the amazing effects from Weta Digital.
Watch the trailer: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
It's pointless trying to put a coherent timeline to the Planet of the Apes series that started in 1968 with Charlton Heston landing on a strangely familiar world ruled by apes.
There were subsequent sequels and reboots, with varying degrees of coherence. But the series essentially started again with 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes, featuring Andy Serkis as a sort of chimpanzee Moses called Caesar.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes takes place a hundred years or so after Caesar died just before reaching the Promised Land.
A young chimpanzee called Noa lives in a peaceful village run by his father. These particular chimpanzees are bird-fanciers, hunting with trained eagles. Then one day they're attacked by another clan.
This clan seems to be mostly chimps too, though they're led by a fearsome gorilla. In the battle, Noa's father is killed, and the rest of the clan is rounded up as slaves.
All but Noa, who vows to rescue them.
The first thing you notice is how extraordinary Wētā's animation has become over the years. You literally can't see the join between practical sets and digital effects.
Where in the past we marvelled at Serkis and some of his mates being animated in small doses, now we're seeing entire armies of apes, each one individually delineated.
Though, as far as the story goes, there's still a fair amount of suspension of disbelief required. Why do only some apes seem able to talk, while others rely entirely on a primitive sign language?
And why are the "apes" of the series so heavy on chimps and so light on all the other species?
For example, each film seems limited to just the one speaking orangutan - in this case the studious Raka.
Orangutans are generally the series' librarians, often put on exposition duty - reminding us how a virus appeared that made apes smart but had the opposite effect on humans.
We see herds of feral humans fleeing from apes on horses, as seen in the original Planet of the Apes. And Noa and Raka rescue a human female who's being chased by a gorilla platoon.
They treat her like a stray pet until she reveals she's not your average mute human. She can talk. She talks better than most apes. …
Simon Morris regrets the dearth of the sophisticated blend of romance and comedy - and looks at three films all based, more or less, on love.
The Idea of You imagines what would happen if a 40-year-old gallery owner (Anne Hathaway) fell in love with a 24-year-old singer in a boy band.
Watch the trailer: The Idea of You
The Idea of You imagines what would happen if a 40-year-old gallery owner fell in love with a 24-year-old singer in a boy band.
I'm generally prepared to see Anne Hathaway in anything but The Idea of You certainly put that to the test.
Could Annie save it from being as frightful as it looked?
Yes she could, though to be fair, she had some help. And to be even fairer, she hired much of that help herself as producer of the film.
Top of the list was a young English actor called Nicholas Galatzine who's about as close to Harry Styles as you can get. He's young, he's pretty, he can act and more to the point he can sing.
In particular, Galatzine captures both the professionalism and the essential meaninglessness of the whole modern boy-band experience.
How did you guys get together, asks Anne Hathaway's character, Solène, who runs an art gallery? 'I applied', admits actor-turned-singer Hayes Campbell.
Yes, her name is Solène, and she's a divorcee mum but a cool mum. She takes her daughter to pop festival Coachella to catch her favourite boy band August Moon.
Cue "meet cute". Solène blunders into Hayes Campbell's trailer, thinking it's the public toilet.
OMG! To nobody's surprise, Hayes is smitten by the gorgeous Solène, to the extent that he dedicates a song to her that night.
One thing leads to another and that's pretty much all there is to the movie.
But it's to the credit of Anne Hathaway, Nicholas Galatzine and it should be added, old pro director Michael Showalter, that the relationship between Hayes and Solène is far more believable than it deserves. Certainly more so than those terrible names.
With no other plans, Solène goes on the road with August Moon, even though she has her doubts. What will happen when the news gets out, she wonders?
And just as most of us are wondering who'd care, we're answered halfway through the film. There are photos, it goes viral, social media is aghast. It turns to custard, in other words.
And while the plot is ostensibly about hypocrisy - how no-one would blink an eye if the roles were reversed - it's takes a few swipes at the corrosive effect of popular culture - initially the tabloids, and these days social media.
Mind you, The Idea of You is about hypocrisy too of course. Come in, Solène's dodgy ex-husband, complete with his own new trophy wife…
The Moon Is Upside Down is a New Zealand film following three stories of love gone wrong - a mail-order bride, a long-distance Skype affair and a woman wrestling with death.
Watch the trailer: The Moon Is Upside Down
The Moon Is Upside Down is a New Zealand film following three stories of love gone wrong - a mail-order bride, a long-distance Skype affair and a woman wrestling with death.
Loren Taylor's The Moon Is Upside Down was finished, I think, a couple of years ago. It certainly picked up an award last year at a film festival in Tallin, Estonia of all places.
It's the latest in that Kiwi format that I might describe as the "gloomy romantic comedy". I think of recent examples like Nude Tuesday, Millie Lies Low, Bad Behaviour - all neither romantic nor particularly funny.
The Moon Is Upside Down isn't just one depressing story. There are three, all lightly linked by themes of loneliness, vulnerability, death and, oddly, dead birds.
The first, and most promising, opens on a Russian woman arriving at Auckland Airport.
It's a good line, even if the idea of the Russian mail-order bride is a bit of a cliche.
But at least we like Victoria Hara-labidou who plays Natalia. Certainly more than her useless intended (Jemaine Clement) and his awful sister (Robyn Malcolm).
Anyone who can make popular favourites Jemaine Clement and Robyn Malcolm both deeply unlikable deserves some sort of prize, you'd think.
And here she is - writer-director Loren Taylor, doing the same thing with the otherwise permanently adorable Robbie Magasiva. Taylor also plays Briar who's in an online relationship with her sister's ex.
Yes, we do see a certain amount of bad Skype phone-sex. No, I don't know why anyone thought we wanted to.
And last in the trilogy of torment is Faith, played by Elizabeth Hawthorne, whose husband recently bought a bunch of flats with the bare minimum of due diligence.
One of the tenants was actually dead - along with her late canary - when hubby bought the place. So Faith takes it on herself to dispose of the remains herself.
Meanwhile, what's happening with the mail-order bride and her garage-owning fiancé?
It seems Natalia was lured by the prospect of running the garage coffee-bar. A coffee-bar that turns out to be more theoretical than actual. Natalia has clearly been sold a pup - a pup that even more hilarious bad sex isn't going to help.
I'm not sure I've seen a would-be comedy that featured quite as many people who didn't like each other.
Or, for that matter, who it proved so hard for audiences to like…
This new biopic of British singer Amy Winehouse is everything you were expecting and less, says Simon Morris.
Watch the trailer: Back to Black
This new biopic of British singer Amy Winehouse is everything you were expecting and less, says Simon Morris.
It's a mystery why anyone thought there was any need to make a dramatised version of the same story so soon after Amy.
While that documentary benefited from plenty of shots of Amy Winehouse herself, particularly singing, this version features actress Marisa Abela doing a sort of karaoke version of Winehouse's music.
And in many ways the whole film is a kind of karaoke version of Amy's life covering all the beats we've heard so often in the past.
There she is growing up in London, supported by her family - particularly her dear old Nan, a performance phoned in by Lesley Manville.
Also doing what's expected of them are Eddie Marsan as enthusiastic taxi-driver Dad - I lost count of how many times he reminded us "That's my Amy!" - and Jack O'Connell as ne'er do well boyfriend Blake.
And like all bad biopics, every event has to be in some way connected to her famous songs.
In this world it's never because a talented composer sat down and slogged it out. It has to be the result of inspiration, and a particular event that gets acted out.
The story stands and falls on how much we believe in Amy's love for the unlikable Blake, which was frankly always going to be a bit of a hard sell.
Amy Winehouse's best album Back to Black may have been inspired by Blake but only after he deserted her .
Right from the start the tabloids, the fans - even Amy's family - couldn't work out what she saw in him. And the film certainly doesn't crack that puzzle - they probably didn't know themselves.
They did seem to bring out the worst in each other, and, despite what the film tries to say, their relationship was, in many ways, the least interesting thing about Amy Winehouse.
But that's music biopics for you. The fact is, the reason they get made at all is the one thing that's hardest to capture in a film, and that's the music.
We're left wondering how her first, award-winning album Frank got made or why the second one was so different and so popular in America.
Instead we're given a parade of biopic cliches, as Amy struggles to tell her truth, despite crass industry suits who don't understand her, and insensitive tabloid hacks and paparazzi who want to turn her into something she's not.
Back to Black is everything you were expecting and less…
Before Dawn is an ambitious, low-budget World War I film made in Western Australia.
Watch the trailer: Before Dawn
Before Dawn is an ambitious, low-budget World War I film made in Western Australia.
Before Dawn opens on a young chap in a trench - The Somme, 1916 - waiting for a dawn attack.
Jim is about 19. He joined up, looking for adventure, leaving his dad back on the farm.
He and his two mates Don and Legs don't want to miss anything. After all, everyone agrees the War'll probably be over by Christmas.
Incidentally, don't get too attached to Legs or Don - or indeed most of the people we run into in the course of Before Dawn. We all know what it was like on the Western Front.
Or do we? As the film trots through what we're all too familiar with in a World War One movie - mud, barbed wire, slaughter in No Man's Land, rats, nervous breakdowns and the rest - we wonder why this is being sold as somehow new material.
Have the filmmakers not seen 1917, All Quiet on the Western Front, Gallipoli or even Blackadder Goes Forth? Possibly not. The writer-director, one Jordan Prince-Wright, is in his early 20s, though he's anxious to keep Before Dawn as close to reality as he can.
Much of the material comes directly from diaries kept by the troops at the time.
But as I say, we've been here before. And after decades of more brutal and less sentimental accounts over the years - including Sir Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old - we tend to be sceptical of old-fashioned, Boys Own Paper heroics.
Which is essentially what Before Dawn is selling.
Another problem - one shared with most war films, particularly those set during World War One - is how similar most of the characters look.
They're all young, short-haired, Australian males - and dependent on audiences knowing the actors, maybe.
You may remember star Levi Miller playing Peter Pan a few years ago. But the rest were mostly new to me, and once covered in mud, it was initially hard to tell Archie from Don or Legs.
The exception was the older Myles Pollard playing, as far as I could tell, every sergeant in every war movie ever made.
The performances and direction are generally pretty good within the limits of a routine war-story format.
The best moments though are the details that don't quite fit that format, obviously plucked from real-life diggers' diaries.
Jim's dad's pipe - "take care of it". The nurse refuses to treat a wounded soldier because she's busy with people she can help. The strange anti-climax at the end of the War…
The Fall Guy is a reboot of an old TV series about stunt men which benefits from three suddenly very hot stars - Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer), Hannah Waddingham (TV's Ted Lasso) and particularly Ryan Gosling (Barbie).
Watch the trailer: The Fall Guy
Back in the bad old days of American network TV, primetime was occupied by routine, escapist fare provided by hucksters like Quinn Martin, Aaron Spelling and Glen A Larsen.
Larsen alone was responsible for Magnum PI, Knight Rider, Buck Rogers and the eminently forgettable Fall Guy.
The Fall Guy featured Lee Majors as a stuntman. With only a limited number of plots available for someone being hit and falling off things on a film set, he also doubled as a bounty hunter on the side.
Astonishingly for such a thin premise, the TV series lasted several years. Hence the remake, we assume.
In fact, the back-story behind this Fall Guy is more interesting than the film itself. It's the passion project of stuntman-turned-director David Leitch, whose career was launched by stunt-heavy hit movies such as John Wick, Atomic Blonde and Bullet Train.
And it certainly lucked out with its two stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
Gosling has received all the star-making publicity - Barbie, La La Land, Blade Runner 2049.
But Blunt's no slouch either. For many, she was the best thing in Oppenheimer, doing the same scene-stealing trick she pulled off in The Devil Wears Prada and Edge of Tomorrow.
And throw in another long-time-coming, overnight success, Ted Lasso's Hannah Waddingham as a dodgy film producer, and The Fall Guy's already off to a flying start.
So long as the script doesn't get in the way, what can possibly go wrong?
Now, people familiar with At The Movies will probably expect me to now point out that everything does in fact go wrong with The Fall Guy.
That it doesn't is entirely due to the charm, the chops and the sheer charisma of the two stars.
We meet stuntman Colt Seavers -Gosling - happily taking the blows for superstar Tom Ryder, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
Taylor-Johnson is currently tipped to be the next James Bond. Not on the strength of The Fall Guy, it has to be said. He barely registers at all.
Anyway, stuntman Colt is madly in love with director Jody, played by Blunt.
Then something terrible happens. A stunt goes wrong, Colt's laid out for months, during which time he cuts himself off from Jody.
She's understandably miffed, and more so when he comes out of retirement for her new movie.
Turns out Colt thought Jody had hired him, with a view to getting back together. …
Simon Morris wonders if the star system is over, and audiences are now only interested in the movie itself, not who's in it.
Dame Helen Mirren stars as 1970s Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in Golda.
Dame Helen Mirren stars as 1970s Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in Golda.
Golda Meir - the "Iron Lady of Israel" - led her country during what became known as the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
But if you hoped to learn too many details of that war, or of Golda herself, you may be disappointed.
Certainly, I found myself expected to know rather more about that war - not to mention the previous 6-Days War of 1967 and the events surrounding the bloody inauguration of Israel in 1948 - than I actually did.
And since my background knowledge of Golda Meir herself was limited as well, I started Golda a little on the back foot.
But the basic events of this war are familiar enough. Two of Israel's neighbours chose the public holiday of Yom Kippur as the time to attack - Syria from the north, Egypt from the south.
The Prime Minister was caught unawares, despite repeated warnings from spy agency 2.
And from the get-go, it's plain that this isn't going to get bogged down by the causes of the war. This is about one woman - in her 70s - handed the management of a war for survival. Not only in her 70s but undergoing treatment for cancer at the same time.
And it's also about one performance - Dame Helen Mirren - who looks nothing like her usual self under a brilliant makeup job.
The fact that Mirren doesn't look much like Golda Meir is underlined when the film keeps intercutting between the drama of Golda and news footage of the real-life prime minister.
The drama comes in two parts - neither, it has to be said, involving her colleagues in the Cabinet, who mostly seem pretty useless without her.
But she gets practical support from the American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who's uniquely suited for the job here.
Kissinger is played, carefully, by Liev Schreiber, and his scenes with Helen Mirren are highlights of the film.
Unlike the scenes with Golda's loyal assistant, a complete waste of the great Camille Cottin for people who remember her in Call My Agent.
I believe there have been complaints of factual inaccuracies in the film, which obviously I'm in no position to comment on.
One thing no one's denying is how it handles the global ramifications of the conflict - the subsequent oil crisis, and how America and Russia found themselves being dragged closer and closer to an all-out World War.
The parallels between this war and what's going on now are uncomfortably close, which makes it harder to assess the film than it was a year ago when it was made…
Paolo Rotondo introduces this season of the Italian Film Festival, which includes a biopic of bad-boy painter Caravaggio, the first solo film by tbe legendary Federico Fellini, and last year's box office sensation. There's still tomorrow, which trounced both Barbie and Oppenheimer in Italy.
Simon Morris introduces an all-Italian show - from Luca Guadagnino's Challengers, starring Zendaya, to an overview of this year's Italian Film Festival road show with Festival Director and film-maker, Paolo Rotondo.
Challengers sees top star Zendaya (Dune) playing a top tennis star, torn between two competing suitors, Mike Faist (West Side Story) and Josh O'Connor (The Crown). Directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name).
Watch the trailer: Challengers
Director Luca Guadagnino has had a glittering career, both in Italy and then internationally.
From the literary I Am Love and the terrifying Suspiria, to the intimate gay love story Call Me By Your Name - there seems nothing he can't handle.
So why not a romantic triangle like Challengers?
Surprisingly, Challengers isn't actually an Italian production. It's entirely homegrown American, produced by two Hollywood industry figures, old and young.
One is former Sony head honcho Amy Pascal, and the other is star Zendaya, who plays a tennis champion called Tashi.
Tashi came up the hard way from poor beginnings. But by the time we meet her, the world is her oyster.
And two young tennis-players, Art and Patrick, working their way up rather more slowly, are star-struck when they meet her.
Mike Faist (Art) and The Crown's Josh O'Connor (Patrick) - could afford to go to a private tennis school, but it doesn't mean they're not both fiercely competitive.
The competition between them goes on for years, with the film flashing backwards and forwards in time, while the fortunes of all three go up and down.
Patrick is the glamorous bad boy. Art is more the slow and steady type. And the scenes we linger on most are that first meeting and the bitter, final play-off, winner takes all, many years later.
Of the two, only Art seems to be taking it all seriously. But for Tashi, taking it seriously isn't necessarily the point of a competition - not in the early days at any rate.
She's a tennis player. And this seems to be the ultimate tennis match. Until suddenly it isn't.
Just as Tashi closes in on tennis's Number 1 slot, she has an accident on the court and breaks her leg badly. She knows that means the end of her tennis career.
Or is it? Both Art and Patrick know she understands the game better than anyone. With her in their corner, either challenger could become champion.
In most routine, 'eternal triangle' stories, audiences usually have a pretty good idea of the outcome.
No matter how much the star couple seem unsuited, and how attractive the romantic third wheel may appear, we can usually guess who gets who in the end.
But smart film makers - like everyone involved in Challengers, including writer Justin Kuritzkes - realise audiences like to be kept guessing. …
Civil War imagines a future America torn apart by another civil war, and the people who have to cover the story. Written and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina), it stars Kirsten Dunst (Power of the Dog) and Caelee Spaeny (Priscilla).
Alex Garland's film Civil War has caused ructions in the United States because it offers no explanations of how the war in question came about, or any way to rectify one.
It's just there, in the same way the incurable virus was there in zombie movie 28 Days Later, or the seemingly sentient robot in Ex Machina - both Garland scripts.
Civil War is mostly about the people covering it. The war itself was an uprising - or a series of uprisings - among people rebelling when a President refused to step down.
Unlike the last civil war, it's not simple blue uniforms versus grey ones. Some of the combatants don't even wear uniforms, which leads to confusion.
The film opens on the President, a shifty Nick Offerman, claiming total victory over the Western Force and the Florida Alliance.
And he's the President. Who's going to contradict him? Certainly not the media.
Most journalists are embedded with various armies, only reporting what they're allowed to see.
But a few independent correspondents prefer to make their own way, trying to cover all sides.
Meet Lee and Joel - highly experienced photojournalists from wars all round the world, and now shocked to find themselves plying their trade at home.
They're played by Kirsten Dunst and Brazilian star Wagner Moura. We pick them up heading to what looks like the war's endgame at the capital.
On the way they agree to give a lift to old print journalist Sammy - veteran character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson.
And against Lee's better judgement, Joel invites rookie photographer Jessie - Priscilla star Cailee Spaeny - along for the ride too.
Most of the movie is essentially four people in a truck, going through hell. Civil War asks the question pretty much every war film asks; 'How did we get here?' And it also asks, 'What's the job of a reporter anyway?' Is it to make sense of what they're seeing? Is it to do something about it? Turns out it's neither of those things.
The point is to show what's going on, that's all, according to hard-bitten Lee.
And this is mostly Lee's story. Not old hand Sammy, who's seen too much to trust anyone, or wide-eyed Jessie, who hasn't seen anything much and is in for a lot of nasty surprises.
The closest thing to an old-fashioned war hero in the group is gung-ho Joel. He's the first into action, he's the one having the most fun, because for him it's still a game. …
Simon Morris looks at Hollywood's endless fascination with the crusading reporter, and the less than noble version, hungry for ratings
Origin is a semi-fictionalised adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about racism. It's a serious film with a strong cast and some fresh and intriguing ideas, says Simon Morris.
Origin is a semi-fictionalised adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about racism. It's a serious film with a strong cast and some fresh and intriguing ideas, says Simon Morris.
https://youtu.be/dk08ognt2wU?si=T0mgID4rPd-ci-Ik
Listen to the review
Origin is the latest in a movie genre that I didn't even realise was a genre until recently.
Certainly creative non-fiction has been a literary form since Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, I suppose. But it's relatively new on screen.
Origin is about how journalist Isabel Wilkerson wrote a best-selling book about race. It was initially inspired by a real-life tragedy - the murder of a young black kid, Trayvon Martin, by a self-appointed vigilante.
The question Isabel asks is "Why did a poor Latino kill a black man to protect a rich white neighbourhood?" The kneejerk answer "Racism" didn't seem enough somehow.
While the book she wrote was an academic study - Caste: The Origins of our Discontents - Isabel included personal details within it about her marriage, her family, and a number of tragic deaths that happened while she was writing it.
And so does this film.
I think of previous blends of journalism and memoir - The Big Short, Adaptation, Nomadland and others - that all break the once number one rule. They put the writer into their own book.
Origin is as much autobiography as treatise on racism. It was co-written by director Ava DuVernay, who made the more traditional docudrama Selma a few years ago.
Origin stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Jon Bernthal as Isabel and her white husband Brett. Among other things it uses their relationship to illustrate key elements of the film.
What is the most important contributor to apparent racism, she asks - colour, class, or something less easily tangible?
What distinguishes Origin is how it attempts to follow Isabel's exploration of her theme with the various things happening in her life as she's doing it. It's an eventful journey - to Germany, to India, to the southern states of the USA.
Though Caste nearly didn't get written at all.
Wilkerson was originally approached by a newspaper editor to write a long piece about the Trayvon Martin case. She passes. She's not that sort of journalist these days, she says, she writes books.
But once she hears the police tapes of the Martin case she changes her mind…
In Late Night with The Devil, a 1970s TV host goes for the ultimate shock interview at Halloween. "Absolutely brilliant," says Stephen King. Is he right?
In Late Night with The Devil, a 1970s TV host goes for the ultimate shock interview at Halloween.
"Absolutely brilliant," says Stephen King. Is he right?
Listen to the review
Listen to David Dastmalchian talking about Late Night with The Devil on Afternoons
Very well-known novelist Stephen King and B-movie director Kevin Smith loved this film to death, apparently. Obviously, I can't argue with that, even if I'm personally not a big fan of either.
Unlike the target audience for something called Late Night with The Devil, of course.
The film's star has an unfamiliar name - David Dastmalchian - but a very familiar face. He's that creepy guy in films like The Dark Knight, The Suicide Squad and Dune.
This is Dastmalchian's first starring role, playing a non-creepy guy for a change - TV host Jack Delroy.
Late Night with The Devil takes place in 1970s America when television's top-rating shows were late-night talk shows.
Comedian Johnny Carson established the blueprint - a bit of standup, a few sketches, music, and undemanding interviews with celebrities and newsmakers.
Jack Delroy is the perpetual runner-up on the TV station UBC, and he and his producer Leo are coming to the end of the road.
Unless they can pull something out of the hat, their midnight show will be cancelled.
So they come up with something sensational for Halloween Night, 1977.
The show will be stacked with the paranormal - a fork-bending medium, a professional sceptic and the author of a best-seller called Conversation with the Devil and her subject, a young girl called Lilly.
And the climax of Late Night with Jack Elroy will be, apparently, an interview with Mr Scratch himself, via Lilly.
Before that happens we've already been softened up with the sort of thing Stephen King and Kevin Smith throw into their own genre pictures.
We learn that Jack's wife Madeleine recently died - is there anybody there, we wonder? We discover that Jack himself is a member of a secret organisation for business, church and media figures.
An organisation that regularly holds midnight meetings at an ancient Native American burial ground. But you knew I was going to say that, didn't you?
Late Night with The Devil was written and directed by a couple of brothers from Australia.
In fact they couldn't have had more Australian names - Cameron and Colin Cairnes - and they've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the film to, as I say, highly satisfactory reactions…
Simon Morris buckles up for an all-action show - a drug-fuelled bloodbath, an Indian martial arts revenge thriller and the return of an animated kung-fu favourite.
Dev Patel is best known for playing nice chaps in Slumdog Millionaire, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Lion. Who knew he wanted to write, direct and star in a ferocious revenge movie like Monkey Man?
Dev Patel is best known for playing nice chaps in Slumdog Millionaire, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Lion.
Who knew he wanted to write, direct and star in a ferocious revenge movie like Monkey Man?
Listen to the review
https://youtu.be/aqa3YTtwvaU?si=TDVDLcQ7vASAPWTR
Monkey Man has been a long time coming, apparently - ever since Patel got a black belt in tae kwan do.
His plan was to make a martial arts film that blends the visceral violence of Korean films with the spirituality of Bollywood.
This is hardly my wheelhouse, so I have no idea whether Monkey Man is what he wanted to make. I can only tell you what I saw.
It opens on our unnamed hero, the Kid, as a kid, with his mother telling him bedtime stories about Demon Kings and heroic White Monkeys.
Mum's idea of a soothing story isn't mine.
We flash forward 20 years or so where the Kid works as a stooge at a backstreet fight club, wearing a monkey mask. His job is losing fights to make his opponents look good, but he has aspirations. He wants a better job - one that will get him closer to his enemies.
He's now got a job - first washing dishes, then waiting tables. And he keeps getting into fights - and losing - with the gangsters who run this town.
This is Slumdog territory, where the rich own everything and the poor are nothing. And leading the rich are a sinister Guru - a sort of Indian TV evangelist - a corrupt Cop, dishing out the beatings, and a shadowy Politician being pushed into high places.
Do you want more backstory?
No, the audience for a blood-red-poster film like Monkey Man doesn't need much more than this. They want action, but not just scenes of the Kid being beaten up in a wrestling ring.
Clearly, before anything improves, he's going to need to sharpen up his act - and possibly dye his monkey mask a fetching shade of white.
You're right, he's gonna need a montage - though where Monkey Man's montage differs from the standard, hair-metal number in this sort of film is it uses the rapid-fire beats of Indian tablas to sharpen him up.
And when finally Dev Patel, the tae kwan do expert and first-time director, steps up to the plate, the action scenes are undeniably impressive.
Particularly a fight in a kitchen with knives, guns, broken bottles and frying pans all vying with each other for maximum impact.
Behind the fights there's rather less going on - though lack of depth hasn't hurt the John Wick movies, the obvious role model for Monkey Man…
Love Lies Bleeding sees two women falling in love in the worst possible way. There will be blood.... Starring Kristen Stewart (Twilight), Katy O'Brien (The Mandalorian) and Ed Harris (Apollo 13).
Love Lies Bleeding is a definite change of pace for Kristen Stewart after playing Princess Diana Princess in Spencer
Stewart has always had a strangely enigmatic presence ever since she burst on the scene in the Twilight series.
Is she the girl next door, an art-house darling, or the star frustrated by stardom - Princess Diana in Spencer.
In Love Lies Bleeding she plays Lou, a woman going nowhere, running a gym in a small town for her father, whom she hates.
She's got an unattractive girlfriend called Daisy - how often do you see yellow teeth in an American movie? - and is trying to get out of that relationship too. Then one day she sees someone spectacular.
Her name is Jackie - played by the statuesque Katy O'Brien - and she's training at the gym for the Body Building Champs in Las Vegas.
Lou is immediately smitten.
Is Jackie as sweet as she appears, or is she street-cunning? She's already cashed in on her considerable charms to persuade local sleazeball JJ to arrange a job interview at the local gun-club.
JJ is played by Dave Franco - an actor who usually has a label round his neck reading "loser" - while the gun-club owner is played by Ed Harris in the most bizarre hairstyle I've seen this year - bald on top, mullet on the bottom.
He's also Lou's father.
By now Jackie's moved into Lou's apartment, and in exchange she's offered to help Jackie's aim for body-building stardom with an endless supply of illegal steroids.
Adding a final element to the already toxic mixture of Love Lies Bleeding.
The film was written and directed by British film-maker Rose Glass, who made a big impression with another violent shocker, the low-budget Saint Maud.
This time, with the bigger budget that having Kristen Stewart on board gives her, she's decided to take it all further. There will be blood.
Glass has her own view of strong women characters. In a recent interview, she said "We keep seeing movies about women triumphing over oppressive forces because we're somehow ethically or morally superior. I'm so sick of that movie."
And in Love Lies Bleeding she's prepared to put the movie's money where her mouth is.
The relationship between Lou and Jackie takes an unnerving direction when doped-up Jackie gets off the leash, and Lou needs to tidy up afterwards.
It reminded me of the plot-heavy, hard-boiled B-movies of the Fifties. They were called things like Detour, Desperate and The Devil Thumbs a Ride…
Jack Black tackles Po's final Dragon Warrior adventure with his usual exuberance, says Simon Morris, but the animation is what carries Kung Fu Panda 4.
Jack Black tackles Po's final Dragon Warrior adventure with his usual exuberance, says Simon Morris, but the animation is what carries Kung Fu Panda 4.
Listen to the review
https://youtu.be/_inKs4eeHiI?si=h5gw842Qat46H9xU
Despite having minimal interest in either kung fu or the often overblown animation of Dreamworks Studio, I have fond memories of the original Kung Fu Panda movies - were they 15 years ago?
The story of overweight panda Po who surprised everyone - including himself - to become leader of kung fu heroes the Furious Five, was sweet-natured, funny and particularly well-cast.
The secret of its success, and that of its two sequels, was Jack Black - born to play Po - and a star-studded support cast including Dustin Hoffman, Seth Rogan, Jackie Chan and particularly Angelina Jolie as Tigress, Po's best friend and strongest critic.
No Angelina this time, sadly, as Po is told that his days as mere Dragon Warrior are now over, and he's about to be kicked upstairs as Grand Master.
But first Po must pick a new Dragon Warrior, and then start practising that spiritual leadership thing.
Meanwhile, Kung Fu Panda 4's villain is warming up in the wings - someone who has the shape-shifting ability to conjure up, and then impersonate, some of Po's past enemies.
Including Ian McShane as Tai Lung, the - we thought - dead leopard.
In Kung Fu Panda world everyone is some sort of animal. And the villainous shape-shifter - Viola Davis, who seems to be getting into a badass villainess rut at the moment - is none other than The Chameleon. What else?
Po needs help from someone who knows about The Chameleon, and that turns out to be a small but feisty fox called Zhen, played by small but feisty Awkwafina.
Chalk, meet cheese, in other words.
So, before devoting his life to inner peace, Po takes off on one more Dragon Warrior adventure, with an unreliable fox at his side.
Expect the pair to get into a bunch of scrapes as they tackle the dreaded The Chameleon and her army of - why not? - listless Komodo dragons.
Jack Black carries the movie with his usual exuberance, but he gets decent support from Awkwafina as a sort of Artful Dodger with possibly ulterior motives.
Certainly, her old friends don't trust her as far as they can throw her. Mind you, you can throw a small fox quite a long way.
It's a series that possibly benefits if you've got a working knowledge of matters kung fu, or indeed Chinese…
Simon Morris looks at three films, all based on journeys - to safety, to a better life, to some sort of happy ending.
The Mountain sees three plucky kids attempt to get to the top of Taranaki to save the life of one them. Debut directing feature of actress Rachel House (Cousins, Boy, Moana).
Io Capitano is an Oscar-nominated Italian film about two boys who run away from their village in Senegal in search of fame and fortune in Europe. Directed by Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah).
Netflix's Damsel sees Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger things) marry a handsome Prince - though he may not be much help when it comes to fighting dragons. With Robin Wright (The Princess Bride), Ray Winstone (Beowulf) and Angela Bassett (Black Panther).
Simon Morris reviews three films all dependent, more or less, on audiences already softened up to like them.
Road House is a reboot of an Eighties thriller starring Patrick Swayze, no stranger to ghosts himself. Stars Jake Gyllenhaal, with guest appearances by MMA star Conor McGregor and singer Post Malone. Available on Prime Video.
Immaculate sees teen favourite Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria) play an American nun in Italy, who finds that her new spiritual home isn't as safe as they thought. Produced by Sweeney herself.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire sees the return of the new cast - and most of the old cast - of the rebooted franchise. Stars Paul Rudd (Antman) and Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things) join old favourites Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray as the Ghostbusters get back to the Big Apple.
I was rather surprised at the apparent enthusiasm for the latest Ghostbusters reboot. Particularly in America or perhaps I should say, particularly in New York, which is where all but the last film were set.
When the iconic Ghostbusters car - according to my notes - was seen careering around the Big Apple, New Yorkers went nuts, apparently.
Adding to the excitement was the fact that the new, younger cast-members of the last Ghostbusters epic were going to be joined by the old ones - or as we say these days, "the legacy cast".
Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and the ghost of Harold Ramis appeared briefly in cameo roles in Ghostbusters Afterlife. But now they're back for good in Ghostbusters Frozen Empire.
Is "for good" the phrase I'm looking for? Along the way they're joined by other old cast-members hauled out of retirement, like William Atherton playing "pompous idiot" again.
And Annie Potts who apparently played the Busters' receptionist Melnitz back in the day. If you say so.
Nominally front and centre though are Egon Spangler's daughter Callie and her two young teens, Phoebe and Trevor.
The Spanglers are carrying on the family business back in New York, along with Carrie's doofus fiancé Gary Grooberson - Paul Rudd at his most Paul Rudd.
But while the Spanglers are chasing things like The Hell's Kitchen Sewer Dragon, there's something strange in the neighbourhood.
Former Ghostbuster Ray Stantz - Dan Aykroyd - is running a paranormal junk shop. And one day he's offered a mysterious orb.
What's in the orb? Ray shows it to the current Ghostbusters and their landlord, the Paranormal Research Centre.
Among the researchers is English comedian James Acaster who - like Bill Murray before him - adds some unpredictability to Ghostbusters Frozen Empire.
It transpires that there's a big scary ghost inside the orb - as opposed to the cute, green, slimy ones they've been tackling up to now.
It's a ghost that promises to supply chills on top of the usual thrills and spills. Look out New York, there's a cold front planning to freeze the entire city.
As I say, this is a promise that depends on some pre-existing audience enthusiasm for Ghostbusters. Will Sigourney Weaver return? Will that gigantic marshmallow snowman stride down Broadway again? And most important, will the now famously prickly Bill Murray get back into the suit?…
Wicked Little Letters is based on a real-life event in 1920s England, in which a small town is terrorised by abusive poison pen letters. Stars Olivia Colman (The Favourite), Jessie Buckley (Wild Rose) and Timothy Spall (Mr Turner).
Who doesn't love swearing, the more extreme and baroque the better? That's the premise of a new, otherwise cosy little English comedy called Wicked Little Letters, starring the sort of people you'd expect to see in such a film.
If not swearing as much, or as enthusiastically, as they do here.
As dear old Mrs Doyle from Father Ted would say, the language is something fierce.
Wicked Little Letters is based on a real-life case, shortly after the First World War.
Suddenly the town of Littlehampton is besieged by a torrent of abusive - and sweary - letters. Particularly besieged is a respectable spinster called Edith Swan, played here by Colman.
Her father - Timothy Spall - has no doubt who's sending the letters.
The Swans' next door neighbour has the rather inappropriate name Rose Gooding, and by any standards she's a bit of a terror.
She drinks, she's shacked up with a sailor who's clearly not the father of her daughter. Rose is played by another lovable screen figure - Irish songbird Jessie Buckley.
In real life, I gather that neither Edith nor Rose were quite as quaintly amusing as Jessie and Olivia are here, but no matter.
It was a famous case, it happened about the time that women were starting to make their mark - they'd virtually run the country during the war. And it's got swearing in it. What more do you want?
All it needs now is a convenient villain. No, not Edith, though she's clearly got "issues". Nor the unfiltered Rose.
No, the baddy is the dear old patriarchy, which demonstrates its bullying power and associated uselessness throughout. Particularly when Edith's awful Dad takes a complaint to the police.
He brushes aside the only woman constable in the village in favour of England's favorite feckless idiot Hugh Skinner, and his arrogant inspector.
But WPC Gladys Moss won't be brushed aside for long. She's firmly of the opinion that Gooding is being framed.
Unable to pay any kind of bail, Rose is remanded in custody. By this time the nation's Press has leapt onto the case, and the publicity has all rather gone to Edith's head.
It's obviously a far better story if the evil letter-writer is contrasted with a virtuous and beautiful victim.
But after a while, as news cycles so often do, the pendulum swings when it becomes clear that the evidence against Rose is flimsy at best. …
Goodbye Julia is an award-winning drama set in Sudan, North East Africa, just before it split into two separate countries. A tragedy unexpectedly brings two women together in an unlikely friendship.
Goodbye Julia is that rare thing, a film from Sudan in North East Africa. It recently made the cut as part of a recent Cannes Film Festival.
It's set round 20 years ago, before the southern, African part of the country seceded from the mostly Arab, northern part. And it's told through the eyes of two women.
Mona - wealthy, Arab, a little spoiled - spends much of her time shopping, it seems. Her husband Akram - rather more decent than usual in this sort of film - is happy to let her out, though the streets are increasingly dangerous now.
Revolution is in the air.
Sudan is a tinderbox with rich Arabs and poor Africans deeply suspicious of each other. The smallest thing can set off trouble.
When Mona accidentally hits a small southern child in her car, the kid's father takes off after her on his motorbike. Hearing the noise, Akram comes out with a gun. The father is killed, and the police cover it up.
Akram feels justified - the man was invading his home - and the guilt-ridden Mona can't bring herself to tell him what really happened.
She secretly goes back to the man's house, where she sees the child Danny now fully recovered, and his mother forced to fend for herself. Her name is Julia.
To assuage her conscience, Mona hires Julia as her well-paid maid. She also arranges a good school for Danny, and even night-classes for Julia herself.
Her husband Akram doesn't understand why she's getting so close to the hired help.
This is just the start of the journey taken by Goodbye Julia. I was reminded of those Iranian films where the plot is a chain of events following each other, each time changing the story.
Something terrible leads to something promising, which in turn leads to more bad news.
The film is certainly driven by the rising hostility between the two Sudans, coloured by our knowledge that events may seem bad now but they'll eventually turn even worse.
But the heart of the story is the growing, unlikely affection between the two women. Though as the years go by, Julia still feels she owes it to her son Danny to find out what happened to his father Santino.
Mona's life of apparent privilege comes at a price too. She had to give up a musical career because her jealous husband put his foot down.
When she secretly kept singing, Akram divorced her, only remarrying her when she promised to stop singing and stop lying to him. As Mona later jokes to Julia, she did stop singing. …
Simon Morris looks at three films based on real life, but wonders if that necessarily means a good story.
The Convert is that rare thing, a New Zealand costume drama, this time set during the notorious Musket Wars of the early 1800s. Directed by Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors), it stars Guy Pearce (L A Confidential) and Lawrence Makoare (Fellowship of the Ring).
It's to the credit of Lee Tamahori's The Convert that it sets out to tell a story we're mostly unfamiliar with - the notorious Musket Wars of the early 1800s.
We're reminded it was when the English imported two things - Christianity and guns.
The Christian minister of the title is Thomas Munro, played by Guy Pearce. A former soldier, he's swapped his uniform for the cloth in slightly mysterious circumstances and has arrived at the tiny settlement of Epworth.
Along the way, he finds himself between two war-parties, one led by the terrifying chieftain Akatarewa - Lawrence Makoare.
Akatarewa slaughters the other party - all but Rangimai, the wounded daughter of the other chief. Munro manages to save her and put her under his protection.
It seems inter-tribal warfare has always been a way of life. But with the addition of lethal firearms, the stakes are far higher. In pre-colonial terms, they really are weapons of mass destruction.
Munro takes Rangimai to a local woman, Charlotte, who's spent a lot of time in both English and Māori society. Her background is somewhat mysterious too. Was there a child, and if so where is she?
One background story in The Convert is the fact that English sailors are making a fortune selling muskets to the local iwi. All sides, they're not fussy.
But how risky is it dealing with someone as unpredictable as Akatarewa - clearly modeled on the real-life "Napoleon of the South", Te Rauparaha?
The other is the unanswered slaughter of Rangimai's war-party. She wants utu, but Akatarewa's army is bigger and better armed than anything her father can muster.
In other words, it's a bit like High Noon, except Rangimai is Gary Cooper - a woman's gotta do, and so on - and the peace-loving Reverend Munro is Grace Kelly.
But of course, Pearce is the star, and frankly, we all want a face-off between him and Makoare, the film's Darth Vader, to mix genres.
On the plus side, it looks great - particularly the scenes in the bush, and it has to be admitted, some gritty, violent battle scenes. Cinematographer Ginny Loane is The Convert's secret weapon, as she's been on so many New Zealand films.
On the minus side, for all the film's good intentions, it's let down by a less than gripping storyline…
Cabrini - the inspiring story of a Catholic nun who built an astonishing number of orphanages in New York, and later around the world. Mother Cabrini later became the first US citizen to be made a saint by the Pope. Directed by Alejandro Monteverde (The sound of freedom).
Simon Morris enjoys the best Academy Awards show in ages, then checks out three films for very different audiences - old, young and American faith-based. The great escaper is the last film by two Oscar-winning greats - Sir Michael Caine who's officially retired, and Dame Glenda Jackson who died shortly after making it. The true story of a Second World War veteran who takes off for the Normandy Beach 70th anniversary, sees both actors enjoying themselves - and each other. How to have sex is a comedy-drama of three teenager best friends, off to have "the best holiday ever" in Crete. Sun, sea, booze and multiple hook-ups - that's the plan. What could go wrong? Stars Bafta Rising Star 2024 Mia McKenna-Bruce. Finally, Cabrini - the inspiring story of a Catholic nun who built an astonishing number of orphanages in New York, and later around the world. Mother Cabrini later became the first US citizen to be made a saint by the Pope. Directed by Alejandro Monteverde (The sound of freedom).
How to Have Sex is a comedy-drama of three teenager best friends, off to have "the best holiday ever" in Crete. Sun, sea, booze and multiple hook-ups - that's the plan. What could go wrong? Stars Bafta Rising Star 2024 Mia McKenna-Bruce.
How to Have Sex is a tale that's, if not quite as old as time, certainly a familiar one to anyone who's ever been a teenager.
Three 16-year-old English girls - Tara, Skye and Em - are off on their first solo holiday, away from their families.
Which means a Mediterranean resort - in this case on Crete - loud music, more booze than is good for them, and if they're lucky, plenty of holiday hookups.
There may be pursed lips among some people outside that demographic. But I think most of us have memories of when we were young, dumb and off the leash for the first time.
On day one, the girls are already chorusing "Best holiday ever!"
Skye seems the most worldly, Em is the most book-smart, while Tara is the most engaging - fun, boisterous, up for anything, a bit naïve.
Tara's not particularly well-hidden secret is she's still a virgin, and plans to rectify matters on this holiday.
And in many ways that's almost all the story.
How to Have Sex was written and directed by a young cinematographer called Molly Manning Walker - she shot a little charmer called Scrapper last year - and the subject is one she's clearly pretty familiar with.
Walker doesn't fall into the trap of making her young leads better or smarter than they need to be.
The three girls meet a trio staying next door - two guys, Badger and Paddy, and their platonic female buddy Paige - a nice touch. But we have no more idea what to expect from them than Tara, Skye and Em do.
There's every indication that it could all go terribly wrong - particularly in a resort full of extremely drunk, British teenagers.
When Tara - adventurous but younger and smaller than her friends - gets separated at a sleazy nightclub, we can only suspect the worst.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/culture-101/audio/2018928274/how-to-have-sex-rising-british-acting-star-mia-mckenna-bruce
If ever there was a movie designed to bring out the worried parent in an older audience, it's How to Have Sex. Honestly Tara, have you no idea what can happen at places like this?
The obvious response is "Calm down, grandpa. We're teenagers, we'll be fine." Which at most of these places is true. Mostly...
But, as the title suggests, if you want to learn How to Have Sex, I'm afraid you're going to have to meet someone. …
The great escaper is the last film by two Oscar-winning greats - Sir Michael Caine who's officially retired, and Dame Glenda Jackson who died shortly after making it. The true story of a Second World War veteran who takes off for the Normandy Beach 70th anniversary, sees both actors enjoying themselves - and each other.
Simon Morris welcomes a continuing run of good American movies - including a smarter than the average sci-fi blockbuster, a multi-Oscar nominated satire about the state of the literary world, and from South America, an Argentine road movie about a tango group's last ride.
Dune Part Two continues Denis Villeneuve's epic based on the Frank Herbert classic. It features an all-star cast including Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Christopher Walken and Florence Pugh.
Argentinian romantic drama Let the Dance Begin finds the one-time "Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of Tango" get back together for a road trip full of surprises and secrets revealed.
I like Argentinian films. Particularly the landscape, which is strangely familiar somehow, once you get outside big cities like Buenos Aires.
All that blue sky, those hills and bush - it looks like Central Otago. No wonder they're so keen on rugby.
But the people are still Latin American - and the sound of Argentina is the tango, played on a jazzed-up accordion, the famous "bandoneon".
The tango conquered the world in the 1930s and 40s, and thereby hangs the tale of Argentinian romantic drama Let the Dance Begin.
It's the story of long-retired tango dancers, Carlos and Marga. Once they played to crowned heads and political leaders.
Since they split up, Carlos got married and moved to Spain, where he's now a successful TV soap star. As for Marga, she effectively disappeared.
Then one day Carlos gets a phone call.
It's his old bandoneon-player Pichu, with bad news. Marga has been found dead in her rundown Buenos Aires flat.
Carlos is horrified. How has it come to this? He drops everything and rushes to Marga's funeral, where he gets a surprise.
The first of many surprises, in fact. Marga's not dead. She and Pichu just faked it for her own purposes.
And she has news for the stunned Carlos. It seems they have a son he had no idea about. A son who lives a two-day drive away.
Carlos is skeptical. And he's got no intention of getting into Pichu's rundown old van on some wild goose chase.
But Marga and Pichu apply the guilt and invoke the old days... And anyway, if he didn't weaken there'd be no movie.
Let the dance begin, in other words - three old friends - in the case of Carlos and Marga, two old lovers - in a van. In Argentina, the appeal was seeing three popular stars at work.
Standout is Dario Grandinetti as the pompous Carlos, the would-be European sophisticate with his perfect English pronunciation. The more earthy Marga thinks it's hilarious.
There are lies and secrets behind the lies. Even Pichu, the rough-diamond musician has his fair share of surprises up his sleeve too.
He and Marga are each keeping things from Carlos, but they're obviously waiting till they think he's earned their confidences.
A running gag is Marga and Carlos's constant fear of being recognised.
Marga, after all, has just pulled off a completely fraudulent funeral, while Carlos is worried the tabloids will reveal his scandalous love-child…
American Fiction is a multi-Oscar nominated satirical comedy about racism, expectations and giving the public what it wants. Written and directed by first-time film maker, TV writer Cord Jefferson (Watchmen, The Good Place), it features an acclaimed performance by Jeffrey Wright (Asteroid City). Available on Prime Video.
American Fiction has been slightly over-shadowed among this year's Oscar nominees by more high-profile movies like Oppenheimer, Barbie, Poor Things and others.
But it's up for five awards, including Best Film, Best Actor for Jeffrey Wright, Best Script and Music. Which is why I'm a little puzzled it went straight to streaming service Prime Video here.
Thelonius "Monk" Ellison - played by Jeffrey Wright - is a respected author and academic. Respected rather than best-selling. He's too literary to be a popular Black author. But, as a Black American author, he's too often placed in the Afro-American Studies ghetto of the bookshops.
You get the idea this was also a regular occurrence for original author, Percival Everett, and to first-time film director Cord Jefferson, hitherto a TV writer. All three felt pressure to write the sort of thing best-selling author Sintara Golden turns out in American Fiction.
Monk actually goes to one of Sintara's book-readings, where he's surrounded by mainly middle-class, white readers, thrilled by her authentic voice.
Except, Sintara's background seems pretty much as bourgeois as that of her audience. "Straight from the Hamptons", as they say.
Monk is depressed - not just at the hypocrisy, but at the limited options he sees open to him. It's not as if he doesn't want a wider readership. He's sick of the academic world - his back-biting colleagues and the blinkered students he has to teach.
He also has issues with his family - his siblings and his increasingly erratic mother.
All these things conspire to push him into writing what the market seems to want.
So, for the people who lapped up Sintara Golden's We's Lives in da Ghetto here's My Pathology. No, scrub that. My Pafology.
As a bitter joke, he sends it to his agent Arthur, who, as a black man himself, is appalled.
But as an agent, he fires it off to a bunch of publishers. The publishers who were so lukewarm about Monk's recent literary work. And wouldn't you know it...
They love it, needless to say. It ticks every available box - diversity, apparent authenticity, gangster chic, white guilt and the added frisson that the newly-named Stagg R Leigh may in fact be a runaway criminal.
And once he's on the gravy train, Monk finds himself having to go with it…
The Zone of Interest is a harrowing film about the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp and his family - the pictures are almost home movies, the sound is pure horror. Stars Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) and directed by Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin, Sexy Beast).
Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest managed a rare double at the recent Bafta Awards - both Outstanding British Film and Best Film Not in the English Language.
Set in Poland and performed entirely in German, it was based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis.
Writer/director Glazer has stripped it of most of its plot, so all that's left is its nightmare wartime setting.
It entirely takes place at the home of the Höss family - husband Rudolf, wife Hedwig and their four or five well-behaved children.
The family has done very well for themselves. Army officer Rudolf has secured a plum job, and it shows.
Wife Hedwig has turned their house and garden into a showcase for any visitors - it's even got a swimming pool.
A wall separates the garden from Rudolf Höss's work - the Auschwitz concentration camp where he's the commandant.
There are two narratives in place. What we see is the happy, domestic life of the Höss family. And in the background - unseen, only heard - is the sound of terror.
There are sudden, distant gunshots, there are muted cries from the inmates. There's the constant noise of machinery - the efficient infrastructure of the Nazi regime that enabled in the Holocaust.
This is hardly a new story, of course, but it's usually from the point of view of the victims. The perpetrators are shadowy monsters at the side of the picture.
Not this time. There they are, basking in the sunlight, seemingly oblivious. But of course, they're not. Where did the fur coat come from? Who are the unpaid gardeners?
What makes The Zone of Interest impossible to shake off is how it makes undeniable evil seem somehow normal.
Just as inner-city dwellers no longer hear the constant noise of traffic, the Höss family have long since stopped looking or listening.
The film was shot in a way that accentuates the impersonal. Cameras were hidden all over the house and grounds, no lights, no visible microphones, not even a film crew. It was shot remotely from behind the wall.
Visitors call - salesmen from an appliance firm showing the latest, more efficient incinerator. The kids have their friends over - presumably the offspring of other Auschwitz officers.
One outsider - Hedwig's mother - comes in to admire the family home and how far her daughter's come up in the world. …
Baghead is a straight-ahead horror film about a woman who inherits a deserted hotel with something unexpected hiding in the basement. Stars Freya Allen (The witcher) and Peter Mullan (After the party).
Simon Morris checks a highly-favoured Oscar nominee, a successful horror short turned into a less successful feature film, and a lesbian romp from one of the masters of sweet and sour movies. Nobody blends comedy and drama like the Coen brothers.
Drive-Away Dolls is a road movie where two lesbians take a drive-away car down to Florida, only to discover it's the wrong car and some crooks want it back. Stars Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, with guest appearances from Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal and Miley Cyrus. Directed by Ethan Coen (The Big Lebowski) and his editor wife Tricia Cooke.
It's one of the great romantic comedy cliches - two on the run, one serious and uptight, the other a lovable loose unit. Not just romances of course. Odd couples have worked in films as diverse as Midnight Run, Thelma and Louise, The Green Book and even Star Wars in a certain light.
But it works best in a romance, particularly a screwball comedy romance like Drive-Away Dolls.
Mind you, this isn't your standard 1930s Hollywood screwball comedy. The first thing you notice - literally - is apparently graphic lesbian sex.
Though it doesn't show quite as much as you think, thanks to expert directing and editing by expert husband and wife directors and editors Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke.
Meet Jamie - played by delightfully screwball Margaret Qualley - who we pick up at a lesbian bar, getting a bit sick of the screwball life.
She'd arranged to meet her uptight best friend Marian there - Geraldine Viswanath, who I didn't know, but can't wait to see again in something else.
We need to get them on the road, which happens when Jamie tells Marian the cheap way to get down to Florida.
Pick up a Drive-Away car from a place like Curlie's.
But there's a twist - of course there is. They accidentally pick up the wrong car - a car that had been booked by a trio of incompetent Coen Brothers goons to carry a Mysterious Package to a Mysterious Client.
Jamie and Marian, happily unaware in their Drive-Away car, head off to Florida, while the three goons look for information about the girls from their friends.
Including Suki the angry cop - played by Booksmart's Beanie Feldstein.
One mark of a Coen movie - albeit technically half a Coen movie since brother Joel isn't involved in Drive-Away Dolls - is expert writing. There's not an unnecessary word in the film.
Another mark is terrific casting - a dynamite blend of great new faces and bit parts from the likes of Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal and Miley Cyrus as a hippie plaster caster.
But this is also a Tricia Cooke movie. She edited many of the Coen brothers' best movies but more to the point, she's set out to make a full-on lesbian movie that is neither too serious nor earnestly mopey.
It's absolutely hilarious, with nods to the flat-out comedies of Ethan Coen's past, but also their screwball forerunners. …
Simon Morris checks out three films with something in common. They all take place in the mid Seventies. They include an Amazon explorer, a Jamaican superstar and an eccentric New Zealand theatre troupe whose influence long outlasted them.
Bob Marley: One Love is a year in the life of the reggae legend, from the attempted murder of Marley and his family to the recording of the Exodus album and the famous One Love peace concert. Stars Kingsley Ben-Adir (One night in Miami), directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard).
Fictional biographies of well-known entertainers have their work cut out for them. Not only are these people famous because they're pretty much impossible to imitate convincingly, the expectations for a film about, say, reggae star Bob Marley is almost impossibly high.
The reaction, inevitably, is "That's not Bob".
This despite the fact that the three leads are the reputable Kingsley Ben-Adir as Marley, Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley and James Norton as Island Records boss Chris Blackwell...
Authenticity goes further in Bob Marley: One Love. Musicians like Junior Marvin, Bunny Livingston and Family Man Barrett are actually played by their sons.
In addition, a lot of effort went into the distinctive Jamaican patois spoken by just about everyone in the film.
It's to the credit of the performers - and perhaps of us too - that we manage to keep up despite the lack of subtitles.
One Love avoids another common mistake in this sort of biopic - trying to cram a whole life into one short movie.
This film covers a relatively short period, opening when Marley is well-established at home and just breaking out in Europe and America.
Jamaica is in the throes of fierce political unrest, following independence. There are two main political parties, each supported by a violent gang.
Murders in the streets of Jamaica are common, and the only thing the two sides agree on is their love of Bob Marley and the Wailers.
Marley is being pressured to put on a concert that will somehow bring about peace overnight.
He reluctantly agrees to do it but then, shortly before the concert, armed gunmen break into the Marley compound.
Miraculously, no-one is killed but it's clear Marley, his family and his band have to get out. They take off to London, where they record a new album Exodus.
This is a key point in Marley's life. Exodus became not only his most famous album, but according to Time magazine, the greatest album of the 20th Century.
It's easier to tell this story in a documentary. Once you start handing out the exposition in dramatic form it inevitably clunks at times.
No reflection on the writers or director Reinaldo Marcus Green who made the Oscar-nominated King Richard.
But Richard Williams was a tennis coach. He wasn't in our living room year after year singing some of the greatest songs in reggae. …
Madame Web is the comic book heroine who's inspired a thousand memes. Can it really be as bad as everyone says? Stars Dakota Johnson (50 shades of Grey)
Madame Web is actually Marvel-lite - Sony Marvel rather than Disney's official MC Universe.
Sony is definitely the B Team, responsible for dumb stuff like Morbius and Venom. Generally comic book geeks don't think much of them.
Partly it's because they're not very good - a tradition Madame Web certainly upholds. Partly it's because they don't stick rigidly to the source material, which often stretches back decades.
Dakota Johnson as Cassie Webb, a "baby-sitter with ill-defined powers".
But it's also because we may be getting a bit sick of comic-book movies, and most of the good stories have been taken.
There's no way Madame Web - starring 50 Shades of Grey's Dakota Johnson - remotely counts as a good story, or even at times a story at all.
It opens on Cassie Webb's Mum hunting for spiders in the Amazon in 1973. Her fellow explorer is a chap with the sinister name of Ezekiel Sims. I can also tell you she's about to have a baby.
Let's meet Cassie, 30-odd years later in New York City. Cassie drives an ambulance, she attends an accident and ends up in the Hudson River.
She's rescued by her old buddy Ben. Wait - Ben? Ben Parker? Wasn't he Spiderman's uncle?
Before we can tackle that feeling of deja vu, Cassie keeps having visions. Is she reliving the present, or is she slipping a minute or so into the future, you may or may not be wondering?
If Cassie Webb is confused, imagine how the rest of us are feeling. Particularly when we keep cutting to an older Ezekiel Sims - yes he's back. He's having weird dreams of three teenage girls in Spidergirl costumes all ganging up to kill him.
Wait, what?
Cut back to Cassie - come on, catch up everyone! - on a New York train and having her old premonitions.
Premonitions involving fellow travellers - three teenage girls all being attacked by someone looking suspiciously like an old Amazon explorer.
OMG. Stopping only to register that one of three girls is played by flavour of the month Sydney Sweeney of White Lotus and Handmaid's Tale fame, Cassie goes back in time, rounds up the teen trio and herds them to safety.
Now my problem - you may be surprised I'm only picking one - is that comic-book origin films depend on a simple, easy to grasp situation.
I can't even work out what Madame Web's superpowers are. They bear very little connection to those of her obvious predecessor, Spiderman.
The premise of Madame Web seems to be "Baby-sitter with ill-defined powers". …
Red Mole: A romance is a documentary about the underground New Zealand theatre group that set out to conquer New York - and very nearly did! Directed by Annie Goldson (Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web.
American film director Todd Haynes talks with Dan Slevin about his new movie May December, starring Natalie Portman as an actress planning a biopic about a real-life teacher (Julianne Moore) who caused a scandal when she slept with an underage pupil.
American film director Todd Haynes talks with Dan Slevin about his new movie May December, starring Natalie Portman as an actress planning a biopic about a real-life teacher (Julianne Moore) who caused a scandal when she slept with an underage pupil.
Listen to the interview
Simon Morris welcomes the revival - films that don't depend on tired old formulae - and hopes it's a lasting trend. He looks at two new one-offs, while Dan Slevin talks to American indie auteur Todd Haynes (Carol, Far from Heaven) about his new film, Golden Globe-nominated May December.
Force of Nature: The Dry 2 is another Aussie cop story starring Eric Bana as Aaron Falk. Not dry this time, it's set in the decidedly wet bush, where one of a group of women campers goes missing.
Calling Force of Nature a sequel to the popular cop movie The Dry is perhaps pushing it a bit.
Yes, it stars Eric Bana as federal detective Aaron Falk, but otherwise there's not much connection with the first film, which involved a man returning home many years later and solving two vaguely connected crimes.
This time Aaron is solving the mysterious disappearance of Alice, who works for a shady financier called Daniel Bailey.
Alice had been part of a five-woman team-building exercise - to survive in the bush for a weekend. But only four came out.
The other women include Jill, the boss's equally dodgy wife, two sisters - good girl Bri, ne'er-do-well Beth. And there's the meek and mild Lauren, who had issues with Alice before they even went into the bush.
If director Robert Connolly has a weakness, it's his fear of a simple, straightforward narrative.
So, Aaron's investigation is constantly interrupted by, not one but two flashback sequences - what happened with the five women, and a totally unrelated trip in the bush by a young Aaron and his Mum and Dad several years before
Still, like The Dry, Force of Nature is that rare thing, a big hit on both sides of the Tasman.
It pops along at a commendable pace, glossing over a few holes in the plot, and Bana, as always, is a likable presence.
I wonder why New Zealand producers don't have a crack at a few more film thrillers like this? They're clearly popular, judging by the success of TV series like The Brokenwood Mysteries and After the Party.
Perhaps we can give the "cinema of unease" a rest for a bit and turn to simpler fare. After all, who doesn't want to know who dunit?
https://youtu.be/xhP05eOYbTE?si=HbfRQJwC7ZInUErc
Charcoal sees an impoverished Brazil family and a wealthy Argentine fugitive see if they can solve each other's problems. From the recent New Zealand International Film Festival.
Simon Morris reminds us that opinions are very rarely unanimous and this week is no exception. Three movies that are likely to divide opinion include a celebrity biopic, a spy thriller with more than its fair share of twists, and a Korean coming of age story.
Priscilla is the story of the woman behind the legend - Elvis's child bride Priscilla Presley. Written and directed by Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette) and produced by Priscilla herself.
The story of Priscilla - the former child bride of Elvis Presley turned celebrity and for a while, popular film and TV star - is essentially one of expectations met.
Once you know it's directed and co-written by Sofia Coppola you pretty much know what to expect. Coppola seems to have been making the same movie most of her career.
The story is usually that of a young girl who marries someone successful, only to be ignored - trapped in a gilded cage.
That was certainly the case in Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, and unsurprisingly in Priscilla. It's one of the best-known bits of the Elvis story.
Like Baz Luhrmann's gaudy Elvis a year or so back, Priscilla has minimal interest in Elvis's music, which for me was the one saving grace of the whole Presley industry.
His actual life story was often quite peculiar - the mother fixation, his abandoning of decent music for terrible movies, the sinister influence of his manager, the Colonel. His marriage was just a part of that.
If you're new to the Elvis story, his career took off spectacularly in the late '50s with some terrific records and a dynamite stage show. Then he got called up and served in the army for a year or so in Germany.
Where he met the daughter of another serviceman. Her name was Priscilla Beaulieu, and she was 14 years old.
So of course, the question on everyone's mind is a variation of "what's going on here?" She's 14, he's 24 and the King of Rock and Roll at the very start of the rock and roll business.
In fact, Priscilla's dad does ask that question.
And the answer - in real life as in this movie - is the rather unsatisfactory "don't worry about it".
Having corralled Priscilla to himself during his time in Germany, Elvis returns home, telling the teenager to wait for his call.
And two years later, that call comes. Priscilla is invited to come and stay at Graceland, Elvis's mansion.
To assuage any lingering concerns from Mr and Mrs Beaulieu, once again Elvis - "E" to his Memphis buddies - tells them not to worry about it.
And if you believe Priscilla, no creepy, underage hanky-panky actually takes place. Graceland is full of respectable chaperones - from the wives of the Memphis buddies to Elvis's dear old daddy Vernon.
But if you think it's weirder that there was no hanky-panky going on - Elvis and Priscilla share a room for three years before he finally married her - then this film doesn't offer much in the way of clarity…
Riceboy Sleeps is an oddly-titled award-winning Canadian-Korean production about a solo mother and her child setting up a new life across the Pacific. Directed by Anthony Shem.
On the surface Riceboy Sleeps seems to be another story we've heard many times before - the coming-of-age movie, a young boy with a solo parent. But like all potentially routine scripts, it's the detail that lifts it.
This is the story of a young Korean mother - So-Young - who after a series of misfortunes, takes off with her baby son to seek her fortune in Vancouver, Canada.
Considering how small the Korean community is in Canada, it's interesting that Riceboy Sleeps should come out at around the same time as another Canadian-Korean gem, Past lives.
We meet So-Young and 5-year-old Dong-Hyun on the boy's first day at a Canadian primary school.
The usual first-day nightmare is amplified by his being the only Asian at the school, and therefore an easy target.
Tiger mother So-Young's advice proves disastrously counter-productive. Hit back, she suggests. Which means both she and the boy are dragged off to the principal's office.
It's soon clear that the best thing to learn for both mother and son is how to fit into monocultural Vancouver.
In Canada, most young immigrants are encouraged to take a bland, Canadian name - like Kevin, or Stanley, or David.
Dong-Hyun is fine with that. He picks "Michael Jordan" and refuses to back down.
In Act Two of Riceboy Sleeps, an older Dong-Hyun, now "David" at his new school, is fitting in a lot better nine years on. There are certainly a lot more Asians than when he was picked on for eating rice at lunchtime.
And he's becoming more interested in his Korean past. Why does his mother resist talking about his late father, he wonders?
Riceboy Sleeps has been cunningly structured by writer-director Anthony Shim. We already know rather more than David about why So-Young felt she couldn't stay in Korea.
David is frustrated by her silence. He's trying to do a school project about his family history - a history his mother isn't ready to share.
So-Young is making a new life for herself in Canada - including romance with another Canadian Korean, her nice boss Simon, played by Anthony Shem himself.
The couple are drawn together not just by their Korean background, but by the fact that they were both adopted as children.
There are fascinating parallels and differences between the would-be couple. Both were orphaned, though Simon's adoption experience was rather more positive than So-Young's…
From the man who gave us Kick Ass and Kingsman - producer-director Matthew Vaughn - comes Argylle, a thriller about a spy novelist who comes face to face with her creation. Stars Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World), Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) and Sam Rockwell (Moon).
Simon Morris returns and discovers that mere size doesn't constitute "a great big movie". He compares films about wrestling superstars, based on smash hit Broadway musicals and a little art film that triumphed at the Cannes Film Festival. Perfect Days is a sweet Japanese character study, directed by German auteur Wim Wenders (Paris Texas), about a middle aged man content to clean Tokyo's famous public toilets. Starring Koji Yakusho (Shall we dance, Babel). The Iron Claw is based on the real-life story of a family of superstar wrestlers, the Von Erichs, and the astonishing run of tragedy that stalked them. Stars Zac Efron (The greatest showman), Lily James (Pam and Tommy) and Jeremy Allen White (TV's The Bear). And the Tony-winning musical of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The colour purple returns to the big screen. Produced (but not directed) by Steven Spielberg, it features Oscar nominee Danielle Brooks.
The Iron Claw is based on the real-life story of a family of superstar wrestlers, the Von Erichs, and the astonishing run of tragedy that stalked them. Stars Zac Efron (The Greatest Showman), Lily James (Pam and Tommy) and Jeremy Allen White (TV's The Bear).
What comic-books are to literature, what soap opera is to TV drama, so pro wrestling is to sport, I suppose. It's bigger, it's flashier, it's more colourful and of course the end result is more satisfying.
Wrestlers don't like people calling these bouts "fake". They prefer "predetermined". I imagine North Koreans feel the same way about their elections.
But fake or not, pro wrestling is still hugely popular around the world, with its larger-than-life characters and its mapped-out storylines that culminate in villains defeated and heroes triumphant.
Good guys like the famous Von Erich family.
Now, I say "famous"... It has been quite a while since I last watched the WWF's Wrestlemania in slightly dazed confusion.
So, I'd rather forgotten about the doomed Von Erich brothers and their domineering father Fritz.
Fritz used to be a wrestler himself. His persona in the Sixties was a villainous Nazi, and the Von Erich signature move was grabbing his opponent's forehead in the dreaded Iron Claw.
Now Dad relies on his wrestler sons Kevin and David, and later Kerry and Michael to win the coveted World Championship.
Kevin, the eldest, is played by Zac Efron, who's an eyeful for people who just know him as a teenage heartthrob in High School Musical and The Greatest Showman.
There's certainly a lot more of him - he looks like a miniature version of The Rock in this film. Zac's the one brother who's allowed a love-life - that's if you don't count Mum and Dad.
English actress Lily James must have set some sort of record for number of starring roles without quite graduating to A List.
Downton Abbey, Mamma Mia, Yesterday, TV's War and Peace, Pam and Tommy.... What's a girl got to do to get noticed? Possibly not The Iron Claw.
Zac's brothers include Harris Dickinson as David - the one with the gift of the gab - and Jeremy Allen White as Kerry, the one with emotional problems.
The other brother, the rather weedy Michael, would rather be playing guitar. Good luck with that, Mike.
If you're not already on board for the idea of a story about the Von Erich brothers and their famous Family Curse, chances are you're not a big wrestling fan.
You'll be asking inconvenient questions about "predetermined sports" and how you compete to win a championship when the result has already been fixed?…
Tony-winning musical of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple returns to the big screen. Produced (but not directed) by Steven Spielberg, it features Oscar nominee Danielle Brooks.
Somehow, I got through the Eighties without ever seeing The Color Purple. It was Steven Spielberg's first "serious" movie after a career devoted to blockbusters, and it launched the careers of stars Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.
Now the three have joined forces to produce the remake, nearly 40 years on.
But that's not quite the whole story. Between those two films, Alice Walker's novel was turned into a hit Broadway musical - not once but twice - and this film is basically a rendition of that show.
Can this Color Purple break the current curse of Broadway hit musicals to Hollywood flops?
The notorious failure of Cats alone has meant that often films like La La Land, The Greatest Showman, Mean Girls and Wonka all have to pretend they're not musicals at all. Including much of the publicity for The Color Purple.
But in fact, the most off-putting thing about this film isn't the songs or the dancing. It's how dark it is - particularly if you were fooled by the sunny opening in 1900s Georgia.
We meet two teenage sisters, Celie and Nettie, happily getting ready to go to church.
There's uplifting gospel music, there's all sorts of sisterly love, and arriving on an old horse, there's the charming Mister, plucking away on his old banjo.
I don't know what it is about banjos that signify villainy in rural American movies these days. But that's not the worst.
Teenage Celie has a baby - two babies in fact - both packed off for adoption. She's sold into marriage by her wicked stepfather. Then her sister Nettie's run off both the farm and indeed most of The Color Purple. What sort of musical is this?
So now the story is entirely that of poor Celie, played by Fantasia Barrino, who in the tradition of this sort of story is punished over and over again by the ghastly men in her life.
Led of course by the banjo-plunking Mister - yes, she married him.
When you turn a famous book, then movie, into a musical you have to make room for an awful lot of uplifting songs.
And to make room for 'Hell no', 'I'm here', ("Push da Button") and the aptly-named 'Mysterious Ways' you have to lose a certain amount of explanation and motivation.
Characters mysteriously appear and then vanish like Mister's infant son Harpo, now suddenly in his twenties with a stroppy girlfriend called Sofia. …
Perfect Days is a sweet Japanese character study, directed by German auteur Wim Wenders (Paris Texas), about a middle aged man content to clean Tokyo's famous public toilets. Starring Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance, Babel).
German director Wim Wenders is yet another cinematic Old Master making some of his best work at the moment.
Following in the footsteps of Martin Scorcese, Ken Loach, Ridley Scott and Hiyao Miyazaki, Wenders' latest - Perfect days - is an extraordinary example of both good luck and good management.
Originally the German auteur of classic dramas such as Paris Texas and Wings of Desire, and documentaries The Buena Vista Social Club and 3D ballet extravaganza Pina was invited to make four short documentaries about Tokyo's famous public toilets.
Wim offered to make one full drama on the subject instead. The slightly bemused Japanese producers agreed.
Wenders then scribbled a one-page outline and sent it to his favourite actor - Japanese star Koji Yakusho, best known for that 1996 charmer Shall We Dance?
Yakusho said yes, and then delivered one of the best performances of the year.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story of Perfect Days is as simple as a one-page outline - on paper at any rate.
Middle-aged Hirayama lives alone, he cleans upmarket toilets for a living, and his days follow a set pattern from dawn to bedtime. Wake up, clean teeth, water your plants, get in the van to go to work, put on a cassette.
Yes, cassette. Like all films about aging characters these days, old technology has to be explained to young folks.
And for people of a certain age, once you hear the first couple of tracks on Hirayama's mix-tape - Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day', Otis Redding's 'Dock of the Bay' - you have a pretty good idea who else is going to show up.
Patti Smith's 'Redondo Beach', the Kinks' 'Sunny Afternoon', Van Morrison 'Brown Eyed Girl' all combine to give a tone of nostalgia, but not bitterness or even regret.
For all his solitary ways and minimal social life, Hirayama seems happy enough with his life. Wenders' challenge is to reflect this without boring the pants off us.
The thing is, Hirayama's not bored. He likes the slightly irritating kid he works with. He likes the kid's girlfriend, particularly when she proves sound on Patti Smith.
He likes taking photos of his favourite trees in the park where he has lunch. But that uneventful life is about to be disrupted.
His teenage niece suddenly shows up, having run away from home. They haven't seen each other for years - it seems Hirayama and his sister have been estranged all that time. …
Dan Slevin summarises the fifteen mainstream films that featured in cinemas between Boxing Day and Wellington Anniversary, and reviews All of Us Strangers in which a lonely screenwriter who returns to his family home for inspiration and The Holdovers starring Paul Giamatti as a a curmudgeonly boarding school history teacher who has to babysit the kids who can't go home for the holidays.
Dan Slevin reviews the new film from director Alexander Payne about a curmudgeonly boarding school history teacher who has to babysit the kids who can't go home for the holidays.
Andrew Haigh's film about a lonely screenwriter who returns to his family home for inspiration is reviewed by Dan Slevin.
If you spent the last month on a beach and not in a cinema, what did you miss? Dan Slevin briefly summarises the fifteen mainstream films that featured in cinemas between Boxing Day and Wellington Anniversary.
Dan Slevin reviews the origin story of the magical musical confectionery maker, starring Timothée Chalamet.
Dan Slevin reviews the long-awaited sequel to the 2000 fowl animated classic from Aardman Studios, streaming on Netflix.
Dan Slevin reviews the new film from director Kelly Reichardt and actor Michelle Williams about a struggling sculptor who finds that life keeps getting in the way of her work.
Dan Slevin reviews Wonka, the origin story of the magical musical confectionery maker, starring Timothée Chalamet; Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, the long-awaited sequel to the 2000 fowl animated classic from Aardman Studios, streaming on Netflix; and Showing Up, the new film from director Kelly Reichardt and actor Michelle Williams about a struggling sculptor who finds that life keeps getting in the way of her work.
Simon Morris looks back on 2023, and notices two big changes. A lot of long-running series and franchises are coming to a close, and the biggest movies of the year are individual and rule-breaking.
At the end of Groundhog Day you may remember, Bill Murray wakes up in bed with Andie McDowell. This is a bit of a surprise for him, since for the entire movie he's been waking up alone on the same day, over and over again, to the same irritating breakfast DJs.
"Something is different," says Bill. "Good or bad?" asks Andie. "Anything different is good," replies Bill. And this year I had the same feeling.
2023 started out the same as the last ten years or so - a few blockbusters, a couple of Oscar hopefuls, a dumb movie starring Jason Statham.
But after that, things started changing. For a start, many of the blockbuster franchises started closing down.
Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.
No, not Avatar, thank goodness. New Kiwi James Cameron plans to keep them coming for the foreseeable future, I gather. This is a relief to Cameron fans around the world, and to the New Zealand film industry, mostly in Miramar, Wellington.
But many other apparent hit series are suddenly calling it a day.
John Wick is over now, as is Indiana Jones. Mission Impossible and Fast and Furious are both grinding to a halt. I'm not complaining, you understand. Frankly most of these titles were running out of puff three or four instalments back.
But it's very unusual for a cash cow to shut up shop while there's still box office life in the old dog, if I can mix about four separate metaphors.
It seems in each case, some brave soul simply said "Enough already" and suggested the franchise-holders switch the lights off as they go.
As well as these Great Big Titles, there are several that don't warrant capital letters in the description but have also started looking a bit rocky. Including Rocky itself - or rather this year, Creed 3.
Creed barely mentioned Rocky at all in the third outing, though perhaps former star Sylvester Stallone was a bit busy.
As well as his new reality TV show, he had to put out the fourth of the less than exciting Expendables series.
The best description of Expendables 4 was "it came and it went". And you could say the same about other B-List blockbusters like Transformers, Hercule Poirot, Equaliser 3 and Magic Mike's Last Dance.
It became cool in 2023 to admit you were moving on. This is very big news in an industry that for years had depended on one immutable rule: "keep doing it again". Sequels, prequels, remakes and knockoffs, in other words…
On At the Movies, Dan Slevin reviews The Old Oak, 87-year-old director Ken Loach's latest film about a clash of cultures in an English village; Godzilla Minus One, the famous Japanese radioactive lizard reimagined for post-war Japan; and Trolls Band Together and Renaisance: A Film By Beyonce - two very different films about the music business.
Dan Slevin reviewsThe Old Oak, 87-year-old director Ken Loach's latest film about a clash of cultures in an English village.
It has been a good year to be an 80+-year-old film director.
Martin Scorsese (81) picked up a New York Film Critics' Circle Best Picture award for Killers of the Flower Moon last week, an important precursor for this summer's awards season.
86-year-old Ridley Scott has an epic historical drama in cinemas and the critical consensus is that his director's cut of Napoleon will be a marked improvement on the version that's available right now.
Images were even released last month of a smiling 93-year-old Clint Eastwood back behind a camera, his next film stars Toni Collette and Nicholas Hoult and is a legal drama called Juror No. 2 which is due out next year.
And then there's 87-year-old Ken Loach. I've lost count of the number of films of his that have crossed my path with the warning that "this is going be his last one" but here we are once again with a film that easily ranks with the very best of his work.
The Old Oak is a shabby and rundown pub in a former mining village in the North-East of England. It's the only community facility left but as the town is slowly drained of opportunities, it too seems destined for the history books.
The publican, T.J. Ballantyne (Dave Turner) is a decent enough bloke but also fundamentally broken, like his pub.
Many of the empty houses in the community are being sold for a song to absentee landlords, reducing the property values for the locals, and others are being made available to resettled refugees.
When a coach load of Syrian survivors of civil war arrive T.J. is one of the few to make them feel welcome. But, as Margaret Thatcher knew all too well, sewing seeds of discontent among the dispossessed is the best way to ensure they don't come after the powerful and others in the community think that the state should be doing something for them before offering a helping hand to strangers.
But the state is nowhere to be seen. Just the impact of their decisions on people who are powerless. The Syrian refugees didn't choose civil war for themselves and their communities, it was forced upon them by the powerful.
The miners didn't decide to close their own pits in 1984, to destroy their local economy and extinguish opportunities for their young people. Westminster did that, without ever even visiting.
Another interesting insight in The Old Oak is that everyone in the village knows who it was who scabbed during the 1984 strike…
Godzilla Minus One, the famous Japanese radioactive lizard reimagined for post-war Japan, reviewed by Dan Slevin.
Trolls Band Together and Renaisance: A Film By Beyoncé - two very different films about the music business. Reviewed by Dan Slevin.
Simon Morris reviews a trio of films "based on real life". They may be historically suspect, but their subjects were all equally unreliable when they told their own stories - the most famous leader of the 19th century, the reputed wealthiest pirate in history, and an athlete whose Guinness World Record was taken from her.
Nyad tells the (mostly) true of long-distance swimmer Diane Nyad who failed to swim from Cuba to Florida, then decided to try again 30 years later at the age of 60. Starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster.
The film I enjoyed most this week was something of a surprise. Nyad, which has been out on Netflix for a week or so, sounds like a description - a "nyad" is a sea nymph from Greek mythology. But it turns out to be the name of long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad.
Nyad stars Annette Bening, who I admire but occasionally find a little overpowering. As, it turns out, so is Nyad herself.
And it also stars Jodie Foster, who I like rather more, despite a career often playing solitary women going out of their way to fend off anyone's sympathy.
An unlikely candidate for a buddy movie, is what I'm saying. And yet, that's what this is. But first let's go back.
Diana Nyad was a high achieving athlete in her 20s. She'd swum round the island of Manhattan and also from the Bahamas to Florida.
But it was the horrendous swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys that almost killed her. And she retired for 30 years.
But it was an itch that she couldn't stop scratching, and at 60 she decided to have another crack at it.
For this she needed help from her long-time friend Bonnie Stoll as her coach.
Nyad is being sold as a sort of LGBTQ sports story, but while both Diana and Bonnie are lesbian, it's not what's driving the story of Nyad.
It's about one woman's almost insane drive to do a pretty much impossible feat. And it's about another woman who's prepared to do whatever it takes to help out of simple friendship.
We watch Bonnie patiently pushing Diana into training longer and harder, while putting together a support team to help make it happen.
The main thing they need is a good navigator, which was where her last attempt failed. Bonnie's candidate is hard-bitten seafarer John Bartlett played by Rhys Ifans.
Ifans playing it dead straight for once. He's good in Nyad opposite Bening - they fight all the time.
But he's even better playing with Foster as the Ron and Hermione to Diana Nyad's Harry Potter - the self-appointed Chosen One.
The swim takes place. It's exhausting. You don't know how she does it. There are sharks and worse - all sorts of ultra-poisonous jellyfish, including the infamous man-o'-war.
And she doesn't make it, but she refuses to quit.
So, she does it again. And again. And again. She wears everyone down, mostly because she refuses to think of anyone or anything but this one thing she means to do. …
Sir Ridley Scott's Napoleon is a spectacular attempt to portray the enigmatic Corsican soldier who ended up ruling most of Europe. Starring Joaquin Phoenix (Joker) as Bonaparte and Vanessa Kirby (The Crown) as Josephine.
The astonishing force of nature that is Sir Ridley Scott takes the historians head-on with his latest epic Napoleon.
Well into his 80s now, Ridley Scott is showing no signs of slowing down, let alone retiring.
His track record is astonishing - and not just his glittering CV, including Alien, Thelma and Louise, Blade Runner and the rest.
There are his recent films - The Martian, All the Money in the World, House of Gucci and The Last Duel.
Say what you like about them, you can't deny their size and their scope. And now Scott takes on an even bigger one - Napoleon.
Napoleon Bonaparte has defeated some of filmdom's best, it should be said. Stanley Kubrick famously tried and failed to bring to life the unlikely tale of the uneducated Corsican corporal who rose to pretty much conquer the world.
It's a story that defies organising into a story. How do you tell it?
Scott isn't the sort of producer/director to faff about looking for hidden meanings in a narrative.
"Damn the torpedoes" seems to be his attitude, as he starts with Bonaparte's first victory - against his own people as it happens, the rabble fresh from executing Queen Marie Antoinette.
Napoleon is played by Joaquin Phoenix - no stranger to saturnine, slightly unlikable people like The Joker and the villainous Caesar in Scott's own Gladiator.
Like all previous Bonapartes, Phoenix plays him swarthy, humourless and self-centred. Having conquered the streets of Paris, he now takes on the English, who France is at war with as usual.
Returning from the Battle of Toulon, he goes to a victory party in Paris, where he catches the eye of a famous courtesan.
Vanessa Kirby rather flatters the actual Josephine who in real life was older than Napoleon and far from classically beautiful. No matter, Kirby is still the best thing in this Napoleon.
The trouble with any account of this period is it's almost impossible to make sense of it all, particularly the height of the French Revolution.
Every week, someone new seemed to be in charge, with the previous incumbent, as often as not, sent to the guillotine.
Anyone who could survive in such circumstances was not only brilliant but lucky - a perfect illustration of the famous adage 'chaos is a ladder'.
And for years Napoleon was both. He was a gifted soldier and his record speaks for itself - 61 battles, most of them won. …
Jack Mimoun and the secrets of Val Verde is a romp about a fake survival-expert who's hired to find the lost treasure of the pirate known as The Buzzard. Written, directed and starring French movie star Malik Bentalha, it's another comedy from the recent French Film Festival.
Saltburn finds a penniless student invited to the country house of the aristocratic Catton family. Starring Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin), Rosamund Pike (Gone girl) and Archie Madekwe (Gran Turismo), it's written and directed by Emerald Fennell (Promising young woman).
Writer-director Emerald Fennell started out as an actress playing upper-class types like Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown.
But it all changed with the revenge fantasy Promising Young Woman - multiple awards, including an Oscar for Fennell's script, and some heated arguments around a lot of water coolers.
Her new film Saltburn takes on the English upper class, but the tone is strangely similar.
Fennell seems to tap into a set she knows very well - Oxford, country houses, Cool Britannia during the Blair/Britpop years - and also into a particular genre of English novel.
The English have always had a fascination with the indiscreet charm of the aristocracy. It's reflected in a long line of stories about outsiders trying - and generally failing - to be admitted.
Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Brideshead Revisited of course - and latterly the added villainy of The Talented Mr Ripley. Saltburn borrows from them all.
We meet the decidedly non-U Oliver Quick as he arrives at Oxford. His classmates qualified for the ruling-class finishing-school by dint of money and connections, but Oliver had to rely on hard work and scholarships.
He's the outsider gazing at the likes of Felix Catton with envy, until one day he bumps into Felix, who has a flat tyre and Oliver lends him his bike.
Able to do the impossibly glamorous Felix a good turn, Felix invites him for drinks with his A-List friends.
And suddenly, to his surprise, Oliver finds himself accepted - vouched for by his new best friend.
It's light-years away from Oliver's tragically disadvantaged background - he's essentially homeless these days.
Shocked, Felix insists he come to stay for the summer. Stay at the family's ancient pile, Saltburn.
Felix is played, surprisingly, by an Australian actor, Jacob Elordi. Oliver is another bit of stunt accent work - Irish actor Barry Keoghan playing Liverpudlian.
Ollie arrives at Saltburn to face the family.
And they certainly catch your attention. None of the Cattons seem to work, as such, they simply recline in the luxury of their astonishing home, and in their spare time they collect people.
Like Oliver - this year's good cause, according to sister Venetia.
Sir James - Richard E Grant - is all teeth and glib catchphrases, while Lady Elspeth is a dream part for the always brilliant Rosamund Pike. …
Simon Morris looks at three films that all revisit familiar ideas - a prequel to a popular franchise, a horror film inspired by a joke trailer and a modern day take on the English upper classes of Downton Abbey and Brideshead Revisited. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the prequel to the popular series, sees the young Coriolanus Snow fall in love with a Tribute - one of the contestants in the lethal Games. Stars Rachel Zegler (West Side Story), Tom Blyth (TV's The Gilded Age) and Viola Davis (The Woman King). Saltburn finds a penniless student invited to the country house of the aristocratic Catton family. Starring Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin), Rosamund Pike (Gone girl) and Archie Madekwe (Gran Turismo), it's written and directed by Emerald Fennell (Promising young woman). And Thanksgiving is a horror film that started out as a parody Grindhouse trailer before turning in to the real thing. Starring Patrick Dempsey (Grey's Anatomy), it's directed by Eli Roth (Hostel).
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the prequel to the popular series, sees the young Coriolanus Snow fall in love with a Tribute - one of the contestants in the lethal Games. Stars Rachel Zegler (West Side Story), Tom Blyth (TV's The Gilded Age) and Viola Davis (The Woman King).
The Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set 60 years before the events of the first four movies.
Which means, of course, that the familiar characters of the mostly teenage franchise weren't born yet. All but one - Donald Sutherland's evil President, Coriolanus Snow.
Right now Snow's a callow youth, and the Hunger Games themselves are also a mere shadow of what they'll become.
It's all a bit low-rent in the Arena. Unlike the casting of the Games creators - Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage chewing the scenery as the lethal event's showrunners.
It's a bit depressing watching two hitherto favourite actors stooping to over-salted ham, which both Davis and Dinklage do mercilessly here.
Mind you, what else can you do when your character names are, respectively, Doctor Volumnia Gaul and Dean Casca Highbottom?
Young Snow comes from poor and hungry stock. He's clearly a scholarship boy - like Napoleon - and has wangled a role mentoring a couple of Tributes - kids who drew the short straw and were drafted into the Hunger Games.
Since the Games - a fight to the death between 24 kids from 12 districts - are a Roman-style bloody spectacle, you'd think that Mentors would be a bit redundant.
But you clearly haven't seen enough Survivor-type TV contests. And Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is as much about the birth of a hit TV show as it is about Snow turning bad.
This year, it's decided to give the jaded audiences someone to root for.
From now on just as much time will be spent building a fan base for the contestants - in particular star performer Lucy Grey Baird, played by West Side Story's Rachel Zegler.
Zegler's superior musical chops mean she can lean into the music that always underpinned The Hunger Games.
Unlike Jennifer Lawrence who famously was terrified of singing - though it did give her rendition of "The Hanging Tree" rather a touching quality - Zegler sings like a songbird.
Snow is played by English actor Tom Blyth, who wrestles with two conflicting roles - young lover and villain in waiting.
The first Hunger Games had the benefit of one simple plot. 24 kids are chucked into a giant arena. Only one can survive…
Thanksgiving is a horror film that started out as a parody Grindhouse trailer before turning in to the real thing. Starring Patrick Dempsey (Grey's Anatomy), it's directed by Eli Roth (Hostel).
Simon Morris once again faces the challenge of making a radio show about a visual medium, including this week a comic book spectacular, a documentary about great - and indescribable - paintings, and a dialogue-free story of a runaway donkey.
The Marvels sees the MCU attempt to win over the teenage girl market, with mixed success. Starring Brie Larsen (Room) as Captain Marvel and Samuel L Jackson (Snakes on a plane) as Nick Fury.
It's clear that the Masters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are starting to worry that people might think that comic-book blockbusters are all a bit blokey.
So recently there's been a push-back with films and streaming TV series aimed at women - Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Ms Marvel, Valkyrie and the rest.
But the complaint isn't so much that Marvel product targets males, it's that it targets 12-year-old males - 12-year-old boys of all ages maybe.
People who pride themselves on encyclopedic knowledge of all the comics and how they fit together, and an endless tolerance for interminable battle scenes. Hardcore comic book fans, in other words.
The appeal of the early MCU films was that they aimed at the widest possible audience, not just the geek-isphere.
However, something like The Marvels, aimed firmly at 12-year-old female fans, is unlikely to reach beyond existing followers of Ms Marvel, Kamala Khan, and Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers.
Let's assume that you're not part of that core audience. So, here's what's going on in The Marvels.
After doing a bunch of stuff in previous Marvel movies, the almost too powerful Captain Marvel - Carol to her boss Nick Fury - is resting in outer space when something happens. Something involving arch-villain Dar-Benn.
You can't make an omelette without offending arch-villains, and somehow - blame a couple of magic amulets - Captain Marvel finds her powers "entangled" with a couple of other Marvels.
One of them is the daughter of Carol's best friend - it's complicated - Monica Rambeau.
The third one is Ms Marvel - the franchise's first Muslim teenager super-hero.
So, if you do your signature move, you find yourself swapping places between the three of you.
I know, you don't have to tell me, it's a bit ridiculous, and also rather more PG 13 Disney than hardcore Marvel.
Kamala Khan - Ms Marvel in Civvy Street - is bit of a cartoon teenager - all OMG and LOL! She's also like, totally star struck by grown-up superheroes like Carol, Monica and Nick Fury.
"You mean, like a female Spiderman?" I'm hearing from those of you still keeping up. I'm sure that's the aim, but I'm more reminded of other teen super-heroes like Sailor Moon and the dreaded Josie and the Pussycats.
At least the cast of The Marvels is a cut above. Led from the front by no less than Brie Larsen…
Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War is the story of Eric Ravilious, a half-forgotten English war artist who 70 years later was rediscovered and hailed as one of English art's greats. Featuring Ravilious fans Alan Bennett, Ai Weiwei and Grayson Perry.
The documentary Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War tells the story of an artist whose life might easily have been one of those depressing stereotypes.
Like Mozart, Keats and Van Gogh before him, his major success was not to happen until many years after his death.
Though, unlike the usual tortured artist, Ravilious's life seemed remarkably happy.
He became belatedly famous - in England at any rate - after many of his paintings were discovered at the home of his close friend Edward Bawden.
But when he worked - before and during the Second World War - he'd already gained respect for his paintings, which were like nobody else's.
What set him apart, maybe, was his love of drawing and water colours, and his skill as a designer.
Mind you, "design" is one of those expressions of faint praise, like "craftsman", another lukewarm description of Ravilious at the time.
Much of his early work was in tandem with his wife Tirzah Garwood, who was just as talented - some say more so - in the field of pure design.
This is where I run into problems - first, describing the film Eric Ravilious Drawn to War, and then convincing you why I found it such an extraordinary experience.
Because - like Ravilious's own life - much of the film is devoted to his visual works.
The paintings, drawings and etchings are quite wonderful, and director Margy Kinmouth finds ways to lightly animate some of them - particularly the uncanny, ancient chalk giants carved into the South Downs of Sussex and Kent.
But it's a challenge to put their extraordinary impact into words.
What does carry are the many letters Eric sent to Tirzah and others from wherever he found himself.
When war broke out in 1939, he was head-hunted by the War Department as one of Britain's war artists. A job, it turned out, he was very well suited to.
The subtitle of the film - Drawn to War - really does capture Ravilious's character.
Yes, he hated war - he was anti-Fascist long before much of the country, in fact - but he also relished the exciting places he found himself in - Norway and Iceland, observation posts during the Battle of Britain, underwater in Royal Navy submarines.
And all the time he was capturing these experiences in unique drawings and paintings. …
The multi-award winning EO finally arrives in New Zealand, the story of a lone donkey travelling through modern day Europe in search of a home. Written and directed by 86-year-old Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski (The shout, Moonlighting).
Loop track is the directorial debut of popular comedian Tom Sainsbury (Guns akimbo). He plays a would-be tramper who gets more than he bargained for when he takes the long way round.
Simon Morris launches the Spring Cleaning season with the question "Is there an audience for this film?" Among this week's treasures are two New Zealand features, a French film about a famous (in France) politician, and a revenge film told by a psychotic assassin. Simone: Woman of the century is a biopic about former President of the European Union, and Holocaust survivor, Simone Veil. Directed by Olivier Dahan (La vie en rose). Bad behaviour, the debut feature by New Zealand writer-director Alice Englert, explores the mother-daughter relationship of a movie stunt woman and a former actress in search of enlightenment. Stars Jennifer Connolly (A beautiful mind) and Ben Wishaw (Skyfall). Another New Zealand film, Loop track, is the directorial debut of popular comedian Tom Sainsbury (Guns akimbo). He plays a would-be tramper who gets more than he bargained for when he takes the long way round. And The killer is a typically chilling David Fincher tale of a professional assassin who seeks revenge after a hit goes wrong. Stars Michael Fassbender (Assassin's Creed) and Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton).
The Killer is a typically chilling David Fincher tale of a professional assassin who seeks revenge after a hit goes wrong. Stars Michael Fassbender (Assassin's Creed) and Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton).
David Fincher's latest, The Killer, is based on a French graphic novel, and seems right in Fincher's normal wheelhouse.
This is the man who directed films like Fight Club, Zodiac, Seven and the remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - all cold, slightly callous, with a hard-to-know lead character.
The Killer is not only exactly what it says on the packet, it's pretty much what it says in the two-word title. Michael Fassbender's unnamed lead character is an assassin for hire.
You book him, you point at the target, he takes it from there.
This job seems straightforward enough.
Our anti-hero sets up opposite a rich man's mansion. The target comes home late with a dominatrix sex worker - it's David Fincher, what do you expect? - and the Killer waits for a clear shot.
But this time something goes wrong. The Killer misses and has to make a quick getaway, with bodyguards and police on his trail - Fincher's very good at these scenes. He flees to his home in Central America.
By the way, note the little in-jokes in his fake passports. His various names are all characters from old TV sitcoms - Sam Malone, Lou Grant, Felix Unger and Oscar Madison.
Chapter One's climax is getting home to find his house trashed and his girlfriend badly beaten up.
Someone is going to have to pay, and the rest of the film is devoted to just that.
It's one of the great movie plots - it's certainly the most basic. Like John Wick before him, and countless lone avengers before that, the Killer works his way up the ladder of blame.
He takes out the humble taxi-driver who drove the getaway car, various contractors and conspirators, all the time aiming at the final mastermind.
And as the Killer goes further up the food chain, the risks get bigger, the opposition gets more cunning, and the skills required get more complicated.
There's a great little cameo from Tilda Swinton, essentially reprising her amoral executive character in Michael Clayton.
So, what's the appeal of a no-good-guys film like this? Well first, there's always a market for a Lethal Weapon character using increasingly ingenious techniques to get what he needs.
And the Killer is a psychopath. The film is entirely taken from the point of view of someone with no interest in anyone but himself…
Bad Behaviour, the debut feature by New Zealand writer-director Alice Englert, explores the mother-daughter relationship of a movie stunt woman and a former actress in search of enlightenment. Stars Jennifer Connolly (A Beautiful Mind) and Ben Wishaw (Skyfall).
Bad Behaviour is star-studded but arty, reflecting its auteur's pedigree. Alice Eglert is Dame Jane Campion's daughter.
Eglert plays Dylan, a stunt performer on a cheesy sci-fi film being shot in the middle of Central Otago.
She has a prickly relationship with mother Lucy, played with all the stops out by Jennifer Connolly.
I had to be told later that Lucy's a "former child actor", it certainly doesn't come up in the movie. Right now she's off to something called a "semi-silent retreat" in deepest Oregon.
I now have several questions. Why Oregon? I mean, it looks very similar to Central Otago to me anyway, so why not set it there?
And what's a "semi-silent retreat"? Is it the same as The Piano's "elective mute"?
Getting back to "why Oregon?" there do seem to be an awful lot of Kiwis there, including a Samoan chap, Ana Scotney from Cousins and the omnipresent Tom Sainsbury - not to mention a Russian model called Dasha Nekrasova and the retreat's English guru Elon, played by Ben Wishaw.
Wishaw certainly classes up Bad Behaviour a bit, but it does beg another question. Are hippie retreats where you try and find yourself still a thing?
You know, publicly beating yourselves up about your traumas, role-playing yourselves as babies, missing out on breakfast if you happen to sleep in?
Since we have no clue what Lucy actually does these days, and what she wants out of this retreat - at least this time everyone keeps their clothes on - all we can do is follow her behaviour, which is pretty awful.
She seems to have issues with her late mother, culminating in a violent tantrum when she blames everyone else for... well, everything.
We don't see much of this in the cunningly expert trailer for Bad Behaviour, but stunt-woman Dylan has her own rather vague issues, often linked to her own mother.
Presumably this is to indicate a consistent plot or theme. You know, mothers and daughters, what are you going to do?
At the end mother and daughter leave Oregon and Central Otago, and end up bonding in - why not? - San Francisco. Although it looks quite a lot like Central Otago to me.
I only have one more question. When the considerable amount of New Zealand public money was spent on Bad Behaviour - stars like Ben Wishaw and Jennifer Connolly don't come cheap, after all - did anyone ask who might want to see this? And if not, why not?…
Dan Slevin takes us to At the Movies this week, in Ms. Information, Microbiologist and science communicator Dr Siouxsie Wiles suffers a pandemic backlash. Spy novelist John Le Carré comes clean with Errol Morris in The Pigeon Tunnel. And, two concert movies - Taylor Swift The Eras Tour and Talking Heads Stop Making Sense show us how music can move us from a big screen.
Two concert movies - Taylor Swift The Eras Tour and Talking Heads Stop Making Sense show us how music can move us from a big screen, according to Dan Slevin.
Spy novelist John Le Carré comes clean with Errol Morris in The Pigeon Tunnel, reviewed by Dan Slevin.
In The Pigeon Tunnel one of the great documentary interviewers takes on one of the great obfuscators, a professional yarn-spinner who has survived interviews for sixty years by relying on some well-rehearsed anecdotes and carefully contrived contradictions.
The filmmaker is Errol Morris, famous for his cross-examinations of characters like Stephen Hawking, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert McNamara and Steve Bannon. Also, topics as diverse as pet cemeteries (Gates of Heaven) and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
At one point in the early 80s his film career stalled and he made a living as a private investigator and he still brings that tactical ingenuity to bear on his subjects.
A good foil then for the spy novelist John le Carré, real name David Cornwell. In 2020, Morris arranged a series of interviews with Cornell who was then 89 years old. The interviews were his last. He died in December 2020.
Cornwell had been a spy for MI6 in Berlin in the early 60s, and left the service disillusioned by the number of Nazis he saw walking around on both sides of the Berlin Wall, their freedom undisturbed because the world had moved on to another, colder, war.
He took up the pen and, with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, began a series of novels that for many people are the perfect spy stories, a long way from the glamour of James Bond.
Le Carré's spies are often morally dubious, damaged people, and in The Pigeon Tunnel, Cornwell talks about the attraction of betrayal, the addiction of duplicity, that feeling of being at the centre of something when you are really just a pawn being moved randomly around a chessboard.
It takes a certain kind of broken person to become a spy, he argued. Someone whose character didn't line up with regular society but who still had a desperate need to belong to something.
Turns out he was describing himself.
Cornwell's father Ronnie was an inveterate confidence trickster and minor criminal meaning that the family was always broke, often on the run, but - as young David found out - giddy with the excitement of it all.
Unlike his father, Cornwell eventually made good use of his imagination and his ability to read people. He estimates that Ronnie spent about seven years in jail during his lifetime.
Cornwell in the film is a charming rogue in his own right. He professes to be there to tell the whole truth - I've nothing to hide at my age - but then makes sure that certain personal topics are off-limits…
In Ms. Information, Microbiologist and science communicator Dr Siouxsie Wiles suffers a pandemic backlash. Reviewed by Dan Slevin.
Back during the ancient history pandemic days of anxiety, lockdowns and vaccine campaigns, there was one voice - apart from the Prime Minister and the Director-General of Health - who felt like a ubiquitous presence on our screens and on our radios.
Dr. Siouxsie Wiles, a microbiologist from the University of Auckland - acclaimed researcher into infectious diseases and an award-winning science communicator - was never an official part of the Covid communications campaign.
But her tireless willingness to say yes to every media offer of airtime - over 2000 interviews over two years - helping hammer home important lessons about the risks to public health, meant that she was critical to the success of the first wave of Aotearoa's response.
It also meant that, when the public opinion tide turned, she had a target on her back.
The new documentary, Ms. Information is an extension of a short documentary that was put online in 2020 as part of the excellent Loading Docs scheme. That was a much more celebratory story than the one we have now.
Director Gwen Isaac continued to follow Wiles through 2021, culminating in the bizarre parallels of a New Zealander of the Year Award at the same time as the hate mail and online harassment was becoming almost unbearable.
Wiles is a paradoxical figure. On one hand she stubbornly insists on getting up at sparrow fart to try and school breakfast television hosts about the nature of infectious diseases and at the same time she protests that she hates to be the centre of attention and wishes she'd never said yes to being in the documentary.
Before Covid the reasons why she was such a public figure were clear. Her Bioluminescent Superbugs lab at the University of Auckland is chronically underfunded and anything she can do to draw attention to it helps meet the growing shortfalls.
In the film she tells some Victoria University students how every fee for public speaking she ever received is donated back to her lab.
But there's also the fact that she's really good at it - science communication that is. Not many people are. So, why shouldn't she continue to do something that she's excellent at?
Well, it appears that the science community are conflicted. A loud, opinionated, pink-haired media star can't possibly be a good scientist at the same time. I'll leave you to discuss why those conclusions are held by so many on so little evidence.
I was quite shaken by Ms. Information - largely the reminders of that anxious time in early 2020 when we knew so little and feared so much…
Simon Morris welcomes the opportunity to visit unusual settings - a Dutch animated film, the interface between Wall Street and a young YouTube influencer, and a western from one of the world's leading film-makers.
Killers of the Flower Moon is an unusual project for Martin Scorsese a true crime western set in Oklahoma. Stars Scorsese favourites Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, with a career-making role from Lily Gladstone (Reservation Dogs).
The biggest - certainly the longest - movie of the year comes from the man still considered to be America's greatest living director, Martin Scorsese. It's called Killers of the Flower Moon.
Scorsese comes from the great tradition of classic movies and classic movie-makers.
He was never a Hollywood director as such - he described himself as an "in spite of Hollywood director" - but he was steeped in the films of David Lean, Federico Fellini, Kubrick and Kurosawa. And the great westerns.
Which is why it's only right that this most urban of American film-makers should finally turn to making his own Western.
When Scorsese was asked why make something as risky as Killers of the Flower Moon, he said "At my age why wouldn't I take a risk?"
And the risk entailed reshaping what could have been a straightforward whodunit. As Marty says, it's more a "who didn't do it."
Killers of the Flower Moon opens on Ernest Burkhart - Leonardo DiCaprio - returning home from World War I. Home being Oklahoma where his uncle William Hale - Robert de Niro - has a job offer for him.
Hale is already a successful rancher - the self-styled "King of Oklahoma" - when the territory suddenly strikes it rich.
And the luckiest people in the state are the owners of the land - the Osage tribe. Suddenly oil wells are springing up all over the territory, all owned by the Osage.
Oil, like gold, is a signal for chancers and opportunists from all over the country to try their luck - including Ernest, of course.
With no particular skills he takes a job as a driver for hire, and one of the people he drives is a wealthy Osage woman called Mollie.
As his uncle says, that's a short cut to wealth - marry an Osage heiress. All over the territory, white men are marrying Osage women, because that way they get their hands on all that money in the fullness of time.
But for some - in fact for more than some - "the fullness of time" is a long time to wait for an impatient man.
Osage people start dying for various reasons - accidents, suicides, illnesses - and no-one seems to be investigating these killings.
They're tragedies, shrugs Hale, but that's what happens when people find themselves with more money than they can handle…
Oink is a stop-motion animation from the Netherlands about an incontinent pig and his attempts to avoid the clutches of a sausage-making butcher.
The true story of a YouTube financial influencer who took on the Wall Street elite and won - for a while. Directed by Craig Gillespie (I Tonya), and starring Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood), Shailene Woodley (Big Little Lies), Seth Rogen (This is the End) and Vincent D'Onofrio (Jurassic World).
The cartoonist and satirist Tom Scott once coined the phrase "fiscal moron" to describe someone who, no matter how often it's explained to them, is never going to understand the inner workings of the market.
Speaking as a paid-up member of this unfortunate group, it would never occur to me to plunge wildly on Wall Street. Unlike the participants of Dumb Money.
Two or three years ago, a whole lot of fiscal morons decided they could make a fortune by following someone who seemed to know want he was doing.
His name was Keith Gill and he posted regularly on YouTube calling himself Roaring Kitty.
Now before we go much further, a warning. Or rather two warnings. First, there's an awful lot of casual swearing in the film Dumb Money, often courtesy of the always annoying Pete Davidson as Keith's deadbeat brother Kevin.
And second, owing to my fiscal limitations, I understood about half of what was going on. And even less once they started diving into the legal ramifications of market trading.
But one thing I did understand was the Golden Rule of Finance - the ones with the gold make the rules.
For some reason the followers of Roaring Kitty have no idea of this yet. But eventually they're going to get a crash course from the stock-market big boys.
Keith Gill is a low-level finance guy who in his spare time goes on YouTube, predicting market trends.
He becomes keen on a small hardware company called Game Stop. He calls it "interesting". And his growing number of fans are interested because he's interested.
Roaring Kitty's appeal, as far as I can gather, rests on a cool name, an eye-catching red bandana and a "Hang in there" dangling cat poster behind Keith.
And turns out that's pretty much all you need to go viral on the Internet. Remember Gangnam Style?
Keith himself has very little actual money. His followers have even less - many of them are in debt. But one thing they do have is simple faith in Keith. They'll have what he's having.
And up goes the Game Stop stock.
And the old guard of Wall Street are shocked to discover they're being outflanked by these dumb money, fiscal morons.
Dodgy hedge-funds often gamble that companies like Game Stop will go broke, not go through the roof…
Simon Morris talks about the importance of identifying with characters - in an unusual Western and two thrillers about people trying to make a fortune.
Strange way of life is a short - a very short Western, about two cowboys who re-ignite an old flame. Starring Pedro Pascal (The last of us) and Ethan Hawke (Before midnight), it's directed by Pedro Almodóvar (All about my mother).
Ice-cold thriller Fair play shows a workplace relationship torn apart when one of them gets a big promotion. Starring Phoebe Dynevor (Bridgerton) and Alden Ehrenreich (Solo).
The origin of evil sees French comedy star Laure Calamy (Call my agent!) in a decided change of pace - as the cuckoo in the nest of a wealthy family fighting for control of the business. Directed by Sébastien Marnier.
Simon Morris welcomes a new film festival - from the people who brought the popular French Festival, here comes the British and Irish Film Festival. It features a distinguished cast list, from Sir Michael Caine to Gemma Arterton, Olivia Colman to Dame Helen Mirren, Take That to Noel Coward.
The Tasting sees two lonely people meet at a wine tasting. So will alcohol bring them together or drive them apart? Directed by Ivan Calbérac, from his hit play.
The Tasting sees two lonely people meet at a wine tasting. So will alcohol bring them together or drive them apart?
The one big surprise in The Tasting is it doesn't star Laure Calamy, the klutzy, breakout star of hit TV series Call My Agent. She seems to be in every other film produced in France over the past couple of years.
Instead, writer-director Ivan Calbérac has picked the next best thing - Isabelle Carré as the middle-aged, middle-class midwife Hortense.
Meanwhile the other half of the potential couple, Jacques, has received bad news from his doctor. He's got to cut out alcohol for his heart's sake.
Jacques protests - he runs a bottle-store after all. And he doesn't even drink alcohol. Just wine. Top end wine. In fact, he runs regular tasting sessions on the subject.
Which is how Jacques meets Hortense, who expresses an interest in wine. Though you get the idea she's just as interested in Jacques himself.
And who wouldn't be, after all? Like most French male film stars, Bernard Campan is middle-aged, bald, with bags under the eyes and a bad disposition.
Jacques also has a cheeky new intern Steve - another familiar French movie character. He's a young, second-generation Algerian wastrel, who by the end of the film, we predict, will come right.
He may even develop an interest in wine. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
The first tasting session is small but select - Jacques himself, the lovely Hortense, rude boy Steve and - offering contrast to the diffident Jacques - a smooth operator called Guillaume.
Wine is all about looks, smell, taste, says Jacques. Like women, leers Guillaume, indicating that the Me Too movement has its work cut out, gaining traction in France.
They sip, they learn, but before one thing can lead to another, our mismatched couple needs to overcome various hurdles. Jacques is clearly nursing a mysterious secret as well as a dicey ticker. While Hortense tends to get drunk on the smell of a damp cork.
The Tasting behaves like we expect in this kind of film, with Jacques and Hortense regularly drifting apart while the audience urges them to get back together.
Curiously one thing that happens in the film - though possibly not in Ivan Calbérac's hit play, which it's drawn from - is a movement away from the wine-tasting sessions which, you'd think, would be a regular occurrence…
November is a gripping police procedural set during a real-life event - two simultaneous terrorist attacks in Paris, one at a rock concert at the Bataclan. Stars Jean Dujardin (The Artist) and Sandrine Kiberlain (The women on the 6th Floor).
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.