Ka Whawhai Tonu: Struggle Without End, The Taste of Things, Inside Out 2 and A Quiet Place: Day One are in cinemas, The Royal Hotel is a digital rental or Blu, Remembering Gene Wilder is on Netflix
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Ka Whawhai Tonu: Struggle Without End is not the first time that the pivotal 1864 siege of Ōrākau during the New Zealand Wars has been portrayed on film. Pioneering New Zealand filmmaker Rudall Hayward told it as Rewi’s Last Stand twice – once as a silent film in 1925 and again with sound in 1940.
The te reo Māori word whakapapa is strictly defined as genealogy or lineage but I have heard it used in different modern contexts – rather than a personal line of descent it can be used to outline the descent of an idea, a purpose, a philosophy. In that sense, then, Ka Whaiwahi Tonu whakapapas back (I’ve also heard the word used as a verb like this) through Aotearoa cinema history (including Geoff Murphy’s Utu) and Māori screen representation, a perfect example of how Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) travels forward in time while simultaneously looking back towards the past.
The Rewi of Rewi’s Last Stand is Rewi Maniapoto, chief of Ngāti Maniapoto. In the new film he is played by local legend Temuera Morrison. His forces have been driven back by the colonial army and they are stuck in an unpromising position. Reinforcements have arrived from other tribes and they are desperate to engage – not to waste all that energy and all their weapons – but Maniapoto argues for a retreat over certain defeat, the only way he believes they might keep their land.
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He loses that argument and hurried arrangements are made to defend the Ōrākau Pa before the colonial army arrives.
We see most of this through the eyes of two fictional characters – young folk. Haki or Jack (Paku Fernandez) has been taken prisoner. A child soldier with an English father (Jason Flemyng), he’s looking for a way out and to find his dead mother’s family. Also trapped in a role they do not want is Kopu (Hinerangi Harawira-Nicholas). She’s a medium, a channel to the gods, but it is her mother’s ambition that drives that choice of career.
These two bond as the battle begins and it is largely they who we follow as the tragedy of Ōrākau unfolds.
Tim Worrall’s script is unafraid to consider the many contradictions of Māori society of the time, the differences of political opinion as well as the different rates of adoption of pākehā ways and technologies. But it also makes clear that – 24 years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the position of Māori in colonial New Zealand is desperate.
Michael Jonathan, the director, is a screen veteran but this is his first feature film and it is a robust and effective action film. The pacing is excellent, with plenty of lulls in the battle for us to focus on the characters, but when the fighting starts it is thrillingly shot.

A much more sedate experience is The Taste of Things, a quick return from the successful French Film Festival.
Based on a hundred-year-old novel, in turn set thirty-odd years before the being published, the film is about the relationship between gourmand Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and his cook/assistant (and lover) Eugénie (Juliette Binoche).
Yes, it’s about food – lovingly, respectfully, gorgeously presented food – but it is also about love across the class divide. Eugénie repeatedly refuses Bouffant’s proposals of marriage but not his entry to her bedroom. They are a perfect partnership in the kitchen but she does not believe that she can be his equal in life. She chooses not to share his table when they cook extraordinary, extended, meals for his friends.
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I presume Bouffant’s ability to indulge his gastronomy comes from being independently wealthy – money is never mentioned but there is no shortage of fine ingredients and wines – but he is serious about his art and the film is serious about respecting it. Anh Hung Tran (Norwegian Wood, The Scent of Green Papaya) won the Best Director award at Cannes last year, and he knows just when to linger – on the food or on the faces.

Young fans of the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out have now had nearly ten years to generate expectations for the sequel, Inside Out 2, helping to make it this year’s box office juggernaut.
I’m not a young fan but I did love the first film and can report that the new one pushed all the same buttons for me.
Riley has reached puberty and all heck is breaking loose in the emotions department with Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui and the new boss Anxiety now demanding control over our old friends Joy, Sadness, Fear, etc.
I’m not one of those people who thinks that Pixar is somehow floundering. While box office and attention has been badly affected by the pandemic and an unhelpful streaming theatres release strategy, the films themselves are as strong as they’ve ever been. Turning Red was fantastic! I loved Soul.
Inside Out 2 shows the same ridiculous levels of care and attention that we have come to expect. There’s not a wasted, dare I say it, emotion or beat. Of all the Hollywood machines we are confronted by, Pixar is the one that hides the mechanicals the best. This film is observant, kind, wholesome and – if you are the parent of a young teenager – probably helpful.

Another franchise instalment that has no right to be as good as it is, A Quiet Place: Day One benefits greatly from having Michael Sarnoski, the writer-director of Pig, at the helm.
Before this week, the Quiet Place films had passed me by but I gave myself a crash course in these high concept, well executed but actually quite silly, monster movies.
The planet has been invaded by monsters from outer space. They can’t see (or swim) but have hyper-sensitive hearing which allows them to identify human targets from a long way away, unless they are completely silent. They are also very fast runners.
The latest picture takes us back to the first day of the invasion and focuses on different characters from John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s family from the first two films.
The prodigiously talented Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave, Us) is Samira, a New York poet living in a New Jersey hospice, counting down the days until her disease takes her life. Persuaded to visit the city one last time – promised pizza – she and her service cat, Frodo, are caught up in the alien invasion giving us a very Pig-like single-minded quest to reach an unlikely goal against terrible odds before it is too late.
After each off these films, I have so many questions – if they arrived from space, why can’t the aliens use their flying machines to cross the water that they are so afraid of – but it is to Sarnoski’s credit that I didn’t think of these things during the film.

Last October, we recommended the 2016 Australian documentary, Hotel Coolgardie, and we evidently aren’t the only ones who rated that deeply troubling film. Kitty Green (The Assistant) has adapted that story of young female backpackers trapped in outback hospo and turned it into the horror-thriller that the documentary threatened to become.
Green recognises that the sense of dread comes from the realisation that any of the men in that lonely bar could turn from amiable boofheads to something more sinister at any moment. Dolly (played by Daniel Henshall who was terrifying in Justin Kurzel’s debut The Snowtown Murders in 2011) is the exception here – he is a bad seed from the get-go.
The sisterhood isn’t spared. There’s plenty of risky behaviour on display and only Julia Garner’s Hanna seems to appreciate the risks.

Briefly, because it will probably show up in your Netflix recommendations, Remembering Gene Wilder is a warm documentary about an actor who no one has a bad word for. There are no great surprises for anyone with a passing familiarity with his work but the tragic disintegration of such an agile mind due to Alzheimer’s is very sad.
There’s, clearly, lots of love in this film and also something melancholic in Wilder’s own recollections (from the audiobook of his 2005 autobiography, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art).
Many of Wilder’s colleagues and contemporaries are now gone – Cleavon Little, Richard Pryor, Sidney Poitier, Gilda Radner of course – so the movie is padded out a bit with people who perhaps weren’t quite as close.