Friday new releases: 19 January 2024

Nine of the summer new releases summarised

While I’ve been mak­ing my daily recom­mend­a­tions here I’ve also been review­ing the new cinema releases over at RNZ. It’s been a busy time but down below are extracts and links to the first nine that I’ve man­aged to get online (there are sev­er­al more in the pipeline and I’ve also got an At the Movies radio gig booked for next Wednesday).

Wish

“As I say, some­thing designed to meet all the cor­por­ate require­ments for a birth­day present to itself shouldn’t be as much fun as it is but that, too, also says some­thing about Disney’s leg­acy and how well-drilled the machine now is.”

…

Wish doesn’t tug the heart strings like recent Disney or Pixar pro­duc­tions such as Coco or Encanto, or soar like Moana, and I sus­pect that’s not going to be good enough for a com­pany with so much to celebrate.

Rebel Moon – Part One – A Child of Fire

According to Wikipedia, this first instal­ment of Rebel Moon had a budget of US$166m which, by my rough cal­cu­la­tions, would be equi­val­ent about 200 metres of Auckland light rail. When a viewer’s mind turns to fantasy loc­al urb­an trans­port solu­tions instead of your fantasy galaxy adven­ture you should really think about get­ting into a dif­fer­ent business.

Migration

Mike White (School of Rock and The White Lotus) is the cred­ited screen­writer on Migration and I hope that he is get­ting a cut of every tick­et sold because the cash might make up for all the groans he will hear from adults at every lame joke. Kids, how­ever, will lap it up.

One Life

Despite the strong work done by every­one else, the film belongs to Hopkins who can gen­er­ate so much emo­tion by doing so little. When he dabs his eye in the TV stu­dio dur­ing the pro­gramme that made him fam­ous, I feel cer­tain I wasn’t the only one in the cinema who was doing the same.

Anyone But You

Powell is a sandy haired and beady eyed beef­cake who also has some act­ing chops – he played astro­naut John Glenn in the movie Hidden Figures. Between them they work hard to gen­er­ate some chem­istry and man­age to achieve a little bit, but it’s their physiques that are doing most of the work here. It’s as if they both looked at the tick­ing clock and thought, I really need to immor­tal­ise this body before I get any older.

The film is actu­ally bet­ter the more it hews to the source mater­i­al. Chapter head­ings are quotes from the play and the feeble attempts by the couple’s friends and fam­ily (includ­ing Aussie legend Bryan Brown) to fool them into think­ing they should be togeth­er are very Shakespearean and very funny.

Poor Things

I’ve seen the ques­tion asked, is Poor Things fem­in­ist empower­ment fantasy or male wish-fulfilment fantasy and I’m afraid the answer has to be, “Yes”.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

Anyway, what of the actu­al Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom: a story about sib­ling rivalry; not really feel­ing it when your des­tiny is to be King of Atlantis; being more motiv­ated to save the world when you have a child who is going to live in it; that Atlanteans aren’t bet­ter humans for liv­ing under the sea, just dif­fer­ent; that Game of Thrones is still an influ­en­tial text all these years later; and that the vil­lain you spent the first movie build­ing up will be side­lined des­pite being more inter­est­ing in this film than the last.

Ah, it was alright, I suppose.

Ferrari

For quite a while I found watch­ing Ferrari quite frus­trat­ing. There is an open­ing sequence of Enzo racing his own car in the 1920s and it mixes genu­ine archive foot­age of the time – some clearly con­ver­ted to YouTube qual­ity video rather than the ori­gin­al film ele­ments – and clos­eups of Driver as Enzo in the cock­pit, treated to look like archive film. But that makes no sense as there’s no way that an actu­al cam­era would or could ever be moun­ted there! And don’t start me on the Italian accents and how some­times the voices on the radio would be speak­ing Italian and some­times not.

If a film is los­ing me to that extent early on, it takes a hero­ic effort to bring it back, but Ferrari does, and it’s largely due to Cruz sim­mer­ing away in her grief and her rage, still lov­ing Enzo but being driv­en mad by his dis­reg­ard for her.

Dream Scenario

On one level, Dream Scenario is an oppor­tun­ity to cre­ate some out­land­ish and amus­ing visu­als fea­tur­ing Cage’s incred­u­lous every­man in increas­ingly sur­real scen­ari­os, but as the dark­er side of Paul’s per­son­al­ity take over – the envi­ous side, the humi­li­ated side – we real­ise that sub­con­sciously he is con­trolling this situ­ation. Has he, in fact, dis­covered a super­power? Or is it some­thing even more profound?

The film is shot in a grainy, indie style – the dreams are often indis­tin­guish­able from real­ity until an alligator or some­thing turns up – and the per­form­ances are played straight des­pite the fant­ast­ic­al nature of the premise. It’s groun­ded and float­ing away from you at the same time.