Friday new releases: 17 January 2025

Next Monday is a pub­lic hol­i­day in Wellington so there’ll be no news­let­ter in your inbox. So, I’ve opted to bring for­ward Monday’s sum­mary of new releases to today. All of these fea­tured in RNZ’s At the Summer Movies on Wednesday and you can listen to the full show when it is rebroad­cast on Sunday afternoon.

Emilia Pérez (Audíard, 2024)

Gascón and Saldaña are giv­ing everything but Gomez seems all at sea and none of them are helped by the fact that – and this is the biggest miss of all – there are no decent songs in this film. Written by Clément Ducol (who also wrote the score) and his part­ner, French pop artist Camille, the lyr­ics were ima­gined in French, trans­lated to Spanish on the set and then trans­lated back to English for the sub­titles we enjoy here.

But the songs of a music­al are the scaf­fold­ing – everything else is built around them. If they don’t work (or are unap­peal­ing, unre­mark­able, or unmem­or­able) the pro­spect of enter­tain­ment seems an awfully long way away. And the music­al num­bers don’t really add very much to our under­stand­ing of the story, except their pres­ence provides a kind of iron­ic dis­tance that pro­tects the film­makers from any accus­a­tions of sincerity.

(I recom­mend listen­ing to this review so you can get the full exper­i­ence of some of the songs but the read­able ver­sion is here.)

Flow (Zilbalodis, 2024)

Flow is a beau­ti­ful and deeply mov­ing fable – a cap­tiv­at­ing remind­er that sur­viv­al requires coöper­a­tion and that our dif­fer­ences are what make us stronger. There are mes­sages here – if you want them – about the envir­on­ment­al dam­age caused by human apathy but the film is a remind­er that the plan­et is just as indif­fer­ent to us and will carry on regardless.

If I see a bet­ter anim­ated film in 2025 then it will turn out to be a very good year indeed.

(Read or listen here.)

Dragonkeeper (Li/Simo, 2024)

As is so often the case with films like this, the cli­max is a noisy mess of fire­balls, arrows and fly­ing battles. There was some poten­tial there in the appren­tice­ship of Ping and Danzi, but we simply don’t spend enough time with them both before the final fight kicks off and every­one loses interest.

There are sev­en books in Wilkinson’s Dragonkeeper series of nov­els, but I fear that lack of a tail­wind for this first big screen adapt­a­tion is going to make it chal­len­ging to turn them a com­pet­it­ive franchise.

(Listen here.)

I’ll back on Tuesday. Thanks for reading.