Monday new releases: 27 January 2025

Four of this week’s new releases were fea­tured in my most recent RNZ At the Summer Movies pro­gramme and all of them have been giv­en the text treat­ment by the RNZ subed­it­ors so I dir­ect your atten­tion to them below

As always, the audio clips add quite a bit to the effect­ive­ness of the pieces so the radio ver­sions are my first pref­er­ence, but if you aren’t in an audio-friendly envir­on­ment, or just can’t wait, the writ­ten ver­sions will suffice.

A Complete Unknown (Mangold, 2024)

There may be an absence at the centre of the film but what we get instead is the mes­mer­ising effect that Dylan has on oth­er people.

The film takes plenty of time to linger on the faces of those who are watch­ing and won­der­ing: the beau­ti­ful Baez, the beau­ti­fully square Seeger, square-jawed Johnny Cash played with swag­ger by Boyd Holbrook, and all those audi­ence mem­bers, going from devo­tion to betray­al the moment those first elec­tric chords ring out.

(Listen or read here.)

We Live in Time (Crowley, 2024)

The story of Almut and Tobias is told in non-linear fash­ion, jump­ing all over the place, which means that, as an audi­ence, we soon learn that it isn’t all going to be beer and skittles for this rela­tion­ship and that struc­ture also reflects the theme of the film which is that all of our memor­ies are still alive in us, all at the same time. We can con­stantly relive and rearrange them, to make mean­ing, as we need to.

It’s very clev­er – the ori­gin­al script is by Nick Payne – but it is the rela­tion­ship between these two fine act­ors that elev­ates We Live in Time to a strong recommendation.

(Listen or read here.)

Sing Sing (Kwedar, 2023)

Like the recent Netflix doc­u­ment­ary Daughters, which showed us what hap­pens when the chil­dren of inmates are allowed to actu­ally vis­it them and cel­eb­rate a Daddy-Daughter Dance, in Sing Sing we see what hap­pens when we – as a soci­ety – decide to treat people with grace.

But when we choose the path of dehu­man­isa­tion – as we so often do – we should­n’t be sur­prised at the res­ults we get.

Both films have some aston­ish­ing stat­ist­ics at the end that should con­vince any­one watch­ing of the value of invest­ing in these programmes.

The subs cut the last line which I really liked: “Time spent watch­ing Sing Sing is a good invest­ment, too.”

(Listen or read here.)

Wolf Man (Whannell, 2025)

I once had a ter­rible flu in which I exper­i­enced hal­lu­cin­a­tions for days and the way that the sick­ness is presen­ted in the film reminded me very much of that. My hair, fin­ger­nails and teeth did not fall out, how­ever, so there’s a lim­it to how use­ful that story is.

Everyone in the film is pretty much under­writ­ten – Blake does­n’t have much to say for him­self because he spends so much of the film in vari­ous forms of phys­ic­al deteri­or­a­tion, but we’re lucky that Garner has had lots of prac­tice recently flesh­ing out thinly drawn char­ac­ters and has become quite adept at it.

(Listen or read here.)

Wolf Man was shot last sum­mer at Lane Street stu­di­os just down the road from where this news­let­ter is pro­duced, with down­town Wellington stand­ing in for San Francisco.

Back in Action (Gordon, 2025)

The cli­max to Back in Action starts in London’s Tate Modern Gallery and involves the destruc­tion of enorm­ous amounts of art and if that isn’t a meta­phor for the film as a whole, I don’t know what is.

The exist­ence of Back in Action – a Netflix-funded, star-powered, action-comedy-thriller – isn’t just a neut­ral con­tri­bu­tion to the cine­mat­ic arts, it some­how reduces the sum total simply by existing.

We’ve seen a lot of these stor­ies recently – spies-coming-out-of-retirement – and this ver­sion is as unin­spired as that makes it sound. Genuinely com­ing out of retire­ment, though, is act­or Cameron Diaz whose last live action per­form­ance was also with Jamie Foxx in Annie in 2014. She doesn’t seem to be regret­ting the choice to come back – and near the end flashes that fam­ous smile so effect­ively you are reminded why she was such a box office draw back in the day – but act­ing along­side Foxx body doubles (who had to step in after the act­or was hos­pit­al­ised with a stroke for sev­er­al months) must have been some­thing of a comedown.

Diaz and Foxx play two CIA spies who have fallen in love, got­ten preg­nant, and decided to go into hid­ing with new iden­tit­ies rather than risk their own team reveal­ing their where­abouts – or the where­abouts of a spe­cial USB drive that can con­trol all the auto­mated infra­struc­ture in Europe, includ­ing the fam­ous Thames Barrier.

Outed by social media – anoth­er dreary trope – they have to drag their unwill­ing teen­age chil­dren to Europe, reunite with Diaz’s estranged moth­er (Glenn Close), and see off the atten­tions of MI5’s Andrew Scott. Scott looks for all the world that this was the part he had to take so that Netflix would pay for Ripley.

I want to apo­lo­gise to the editor-in-chief who didn’t ask to have her Saturday night wasted by this rub­bish and who now gets a veto on my selec­tions for joint view­ing – wheth­er I have to watch them for work or not.