Monday new releases: 4 November 2024

While I seem to have been watch­ing screens for a lot of the last sev­en days, it turns out that not much has fit­ted the defin­i­tion of new release for this column.

One of the chal­lenges in Wellington at the moment is the amount of screen space being taken up by fest­ivals – the British and Irish going great guns at the Lighthouses and Terror-Fi selling out many ses­sions at the Roxy. As a res­ult, the New Zealand coming-of-age drama Head South had no Saturday or Sunday screen­ings here and the latest Robert Zemeckis/Tom Hanks col­lab­or­a­tion, Here, wasn’t at any con­veni­ent time or place.

And some­how, I again failed to make time for the Irish hip-hop movie Kneecap. Apologies for those of you who were hanging out for that!

For a long time Christchurch was the only New Zealand city oth­er than Auckland where you could fly to a coun­try that wasn’t Australia. It was also the gate­way to Antarctica, which meant reg­u­lar pas­sage through the city of inter­na­tion­al vis­it­ors en route to the great white con­tin­ent – and a brief cameo in Oliver Stone’s JFK in 1991.

So you can ima­gine how bereft the rest of New Zealand must have been in 1979 after you watch Jonathan Olgilvie’s affec­tion­ate por­trait of a city on the verge in Head South. Punk is just start­ing to take hold, two years after “God Save the Queen” landed in the United Kingdom. That’s how long trends from ‘over­seas’ could take to arrive and enter­pris­ing young people could use that time to claim inter­na­tion­al music­al obscur­it­ies as their own.

Antarctica is a pres­ence through­out Ogilvie’s film. An Air New Zealand DC-10 has just crashed into a vol­cano while on a sight­see­ing flight, with cata­stroph­ic loss of life and chal­len­ging New Zealand’s sense of remote immunity from dis­aster. Robert Falcon Scott’s fam­ous fail­ure to sur­vive his trip to the South Pole in 1912 also looms. When inex­per­i­enced school­boy non-musician Angus (Ed Oxenbould) has the temer­ity to audi­tion Kirsten (Stella Bennett) for his band that doesn’t exist, she plays him a song inspired by that fate­ful exped­i­tion, lend­ing the film its title at the same time.

It takes a little je né sais quoi (also a song title in the film) to bring some­thing new to the coming-of-age story and Ogilvie’s largely auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al movie has a bit of that. His alter-ego, Angus, inex­plic­ably man­ages to win sup­port from unlikely sources, It’s a lovely per­form­ance by Oxenbould, appeal­ing des­pite being a dorky try-hard most of the time.

The film has the good sense to cast as much exper­i­ence as pos­sible. Oxenbould has worked for over a dec­ade in Australia but still con­vinces as a kiwi school­boy, and it’s always a pleas­ure when Marton Csokas returns to New Zealand – I have a the­ory that he’s our highest gross­ing act­or, nev­er out of work over­seas. He plays Angus’s dad, Gordon, one of those rare things in loc­al cinema – a ‘good dad’.

Those two provide bal­ance to first-timer Stella Bennett (aka the pop star Benée) who more than holds her own, espe­cially with the music as you might imagine.

Speaking of the music, I refuse to be nos­tal­gic about punk and appre­ci­ate its demo­crat­ising qual­it­ies ahead of the actu­al noises being made, but nos­tal­gia is the reas­on why Head South works. There’s a rosy glow around everything, boun­cing high­lights off the production’s remark­able atten­tion to detail, and the dark side of the city (and the peri­od) is there but it has taken a back seat for this par­tic­u­lar ride.

In Anand Tucker’s The Critic (scrip­ted by Patrick barber from a 2015 nov­el by Anthony Quinn), Ian McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, an age­ing and over-confident, lazy, drunk­en review­er who has over-estimated his import­ance and out­stayed his influ­ence, des­per­ate to cling to the paltry baubles on offer – a char­ac­ter con­jured wholly from ima­gin­a­tion ladies and gen­tle­men, bear­ing no resemb­lance to any­one in reality.

He’s a won­der­ful grot­esque, fleshed out by McKellen as only he can do. There are a couple of scenes where Erskine’s extra dimen­sions are revealed but they are soon put to one side in favour of a scarcely believ­able crim­in­al con­spir­acy and there’s not one ounce of the tragedy in the final third of the film that is earned.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

It’s 1934, Erskine is Chief Drama Critic of the Daily Chronicle (who I would have ima­gined is based on the Daily Mail if the Daily Mail wasn’t men­tioned as the paper’s chief com­pet­it­or). Sleeping until noon, booze for break­fast, din­ner at the club, then into the tux for anoth­er open­ing night after which his long-suffering sec­ret­ary and lov­er, Tom Turner (Alfred Enoch) will type up his notes and attempt to make sense of the purple prose Erskine is fam­ous for.

He is par­tic­u­larly hard on act­ress Nina Land, Gemma Arterton, an opin­ion that appears to be a genu­ine response to her per­form­ances rather than the unthink­ing cruelty that it might appear to be. A bit like me and Gerard Butler, then.

Except Mr. Butler is big enough to sur­vive my barbs and Ms. Land’s career is going nowhere.

Erskine’s reck­less pub­lic approach to his sexu­al­ity lands him in hot water and the new pro­pri­et­or of the Chronicle (Mark Strong) takes the oppor­tun­ity to get rid but when he dis­cov­ers that his nemes­is has a crush on Ms. Land, Erskine offers her an awful bargain.

The pre-war London of The Critic is shrouded in a kind of digit­al haze and the film sim­il­arly lacks focus. if you are going to rely this much on plot, you need to take bet­ter care with it, I think.