Monday new releases: 21 October 2024

Last Friday on RNZ Nights, Emile and I talked about the chal­lenge of being a crit­ic with the sheer volume of con­tent that is out there to be con­sumed – over 18,000 titles on Netflix alone. It is simply not feas­ible to be across it all.

And even respec­ted recom­mend­ers like me can be para­lysed by choice. My own TV watch­list is over 270 titles, with more added every week, and when I ask the editor-in-chief what she’d like to watch next she replies with, “some­thing you can write about” which is not as help­ful as it sounds.

And when you have weeks like the last one – where my social life ree­m­erged briefly in the shape of a din­ner out with an old friend on Thursday night and a Saturday after­noon catch-up with two more old friends – keep­ing up with new releases can fall by the wayside.

Which is a round­about way of say­ing that there’s no review of Smile 2 or My Favourite Cake (cinemas) or Brothers (Prime Video) and why one of this week’s new releases is actu­ally a few weeks old.

Let’s start with the most urgent. The soil in which we grow most of our food is so degraded – so denuded of nutri­ents – that some experts estim­ate there are only 60 har­vests left. We’ve known for cen­tur­ies how to keep soil healthy – crop rota­tion has been around for as long as organ­ised cul­tiv­a­tion – but indus­tri­al farm­ing has decided that it knows bet­ter than Mother Nature and chooses chem­ic­al fer­til­isers and pest con­trol instead.

Monocultures are bad. We see this in New Zealand where the gold rush to dairy farm­ing has led to tox­ic water­ways, erosion and the destruc­tion of wet­lands (among oth­er neg­at­ive extern­al­it­ies). The herd men­tal­ity in action.

In the British doc­u­ment­ary, Six Inches of Soil, three ideal­ist­ic but inex­per­i­enced young farm­ers demon­strate their com­mit­ment to regen­er­at­ive farm­ing – the science-based ver­sion of what our ancest­ors already knew – and attempt to marry their envir­on­ment­al cre­den­tials with that dirty word “profit”.

Full of clear examples of the bene­fits that regen­er­at­ive agri­cul­ture has on eco­sys­tems and com­munit­ies, the film is as inspir­a­tion­al as you would expect, even if the Aotearoa farm­ing scene isn’t very much like the British one. They take hedgerows (whatever they are) very ser­i­ously, for a start, and also their ver­sion of Groundswell aren’t a bunch of astro­turf­ing cli­mate deniers.

The great New Zealand journ­al­ist Rod Oram could often be found beat­ing the drum for regen­er­at­ive farm­ing and the film reminded me of how much we lost when that heart attack took him at such a crim­in­ally early age.

I also wondered wheth­er we’d have a health­i­er atti­tude towards soil if it wasn’t such a dirty word – some­thing to be washed off or washed away.

French dir­ect­or Catherine Breillat has a repu­ta­tion for push­ing bound­ar­ies but, while the sub­ject mat­ter of her latest film Last Summer appears to be quite con­front­ing, the present­a­tion is fairly restrained – clas­sic­al even.

Léa Drucker plays Anne, a suc­cess­ful Parisian law­yer, used to get­ting her own way, but also feel­ing a little con­strained by middle-class (and middle-age) expect­a­tion. Her husband’s 17-year-old son from an earli­er mar­riage, Théo (Samuel Kircher), comes to live with them after get­ting into trouble once too often.

Anne attempts to con­nect with this strange new per­son – she is curi­ous about his tat­toos – and this turns into flir­ta­tion and even­tu­ally some­thing more, a phys­ic­al relationship.

Breillat presents this in a matter-of-fact way, two attract­ive people are always at risk of becom­ing attrac­ted to each oth­er after all, but the sub­text is sim­il­ar to some of her pre­vi­ous films. Sexual attrac­tion can lead people to make utterly unwise choices and, also, that even the most benign intim­ate rela­tion­ships can be dan­ger­ously unbalanced.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Théo’s teen­age petu­lance when the rela­tion­ship is broken off becomes much more under­stand­able when he’s con­fron­ted by Anne’s des­per­ate dis­hon­esty. And Anne’s robust defence mech­an­isms become believ­able when she dis­cov­ers evid­ence of his attemp­ted manipulation.

Last Summer is a strong drama and isn’t as exploit­at­ive as you (or I) might have suspected.

One of the best dra­mas around at the moment dropped quietly on Netflix a few weeks ago, a year after premier­ing at the Toronto Film Festival.

In Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters, Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen have gathered at the apart­ment of their dying fath­er – to wit­ness and ease his final days.

Rachel (Lyonne) lives in the apart­ment and has been caring for him full-time while main­tain­ing a prodi­gious weed habit and mak­ing a liv­ing through sports bet­ting. Katie (Coon) also lives in New York and would like every­one to think that she’s the only one being prac­tic­al, but she’s really just as much in deni­al as the rest of them. And the young­est, Christina (Olsen), lives many miles away with a fam­ily that every­one thinks is much more func­tion­al than the one that she left all those years ago.

Over a few days, they bick­er and make up and then fight and make up, finally real­ising that the assump­tions they’ve made about each oth­er have little ground­ing in reality.

It’s funny, often teeth-grindingly authen­t­ic, and supremely well acted.

Also from TIFF last year and also straight to Netflix, Woman of the Hour is act­ress and sing­er Anna Kendrick’s debut fea­ture and it has the feel of some­thing that has had too much crammed into it – more than the slender struc­ture can sup­port at any rate.

Kendrick plays Sheryl, a strug­gling act­ress in 1970s Hollywood, per­suaded that an appear­ance on the hit TV show The Dating Game will provide some much needed vis­ib­il­ity (after all, it worked for Sally Field, she is told).

What nobody knows is that bach­el­or num­ber three is a psy­cho­path­ic seri­al killer (Daniel Zovatto) and that a win in the game will serve up his next vic­tim. It sounds a bit far-fetched but is, in fact, based on the truth. The notori­ous Rodney Alcala did appear on The Dating Game and it gave him the nick­name that all these mon­sters seem to need.

Because the premise is so thin that the script by Ian McDonald is pad­ded with plenty of pruri­ent back­story about Alcala and inflates Sheryl’s role in his apprehension.

Tonally a bit way­ward, Woman of the Hour is tough to recom­mend, espe­cially when you con­sider how many oth­er options y’all have.