Monday new releases: 3 February 2025

The Brutalist (Corbet, 2024)

It takes more than just length for a film to become an epic but at 215 minutes, plus a fifteen-minute inter­val, The Brutalist meets that first require­ment. It also needs to be about some­thing great­er than just the domest­ic trav­ails of its char­ac­ters and it ticks that box, too.

This is a film about America and the prom­ises made and broken by cap­it­al­ism. But it’s also about some­thing else, some­thing I won’t reveal here because it comes in an epi­logue at the end. It hits you like a gut punch and forces you to think again about everything you have just seen – even to the extent of want­ing to rewatch the film imme­di­ately, from the beginning.

It’s not being clev­er for clev­er­’s sake, it’s a genu­inely bril­liant and power­ful film about trauma and the inad­equacy of recov­ery, the impossib­il­ity of heal­ing and the neces­sity of survival.

(Listen or read here.)

Flight Risk (Gibson, 2025)

I think the jury repor­ted back a while ago on wheth­er Mel Gibson was a decent human being or not but, if I set aside his lack of mor­al fibre, I have to acknow­ledge that he has always been a cap­able film­maker. Braveheart won five Oscars. Hacksaw Ridge was a ter­rif­ic film about a con­scien­tious object­or show­ing uncom­mon bravery in World War II.

But he does have a tend­ency to let the ugli­er side of his per­son­al­ity over­whelm the rest. Apocalypto was a thrill­ing chase movie set among the Mayan civil­isa­tion but his mes­sage became clear at the end when we see the arrival of the colo­ni­al ships who have come to bring Catholicism to the hea­thens. The less said about the glee­ful sad­ism of The Last Temptation of Christ The Passion of the Christ the better.

Flight Risk leans in that dir­ec­tion, too, des­pite a clev­er set up provided by screen­writer Jared Rosenberg. A run­away mob account­ant (Topher Grace) is appre­hen­ded in a remote Alaskan motel by U.S. Marshall Michelle Dockery and agrees to become a pro­sec­u­tion wit­ness. A light plane is chartered to get them to Anchorage where – with backup – they can fly to New York in time for the tri­al. But there’s some­thing off about this pilot (Mark Wahlberg).

A tight three-hander on board a rick­ety air­craft (with some con­veni­ent satel­lite phone calls to keep the plot mov­ing for­ward), this should have been an easy film to make enter­tain­ing but, unfor­tu­nately, Gibson’s decision to make Wahlberg’s char­ac­ter a charm­less sad­ist (with a pen­chant for mak­ing rape threats) means that his action dir­ect­ing is under­mined by the audience’s desire to be any­where else but stuck in a plane with him.

The Haka Party Incident (Wolfe, 2024)

The Haka Party Incident has arrived at an extremely per­tin­ent point in the devel­op­ment of our race rela­tions in New Zealand as well as the so-called debate over our con­sti­tu­tion­al arrange­ments. It should be required view­ing for any­one who has some­how for­got­ten how far we have come since those days. There are atti­tudes dis­played by pāke­hā New Zealanders in this film that should have been shock­ing even then.

(For some reas­on the RNZ web edit­ors haven’t turned this review into a read­able page. Too polit­ic­al? You be the judge and listen here.)

Maria (Larraín, 2024)

Of all three Larraín bio­graph­ies, I found this one to be the easi­est and most sat­is­fy­ing to watch and I think it comes down to the music. Not just that the oper­at­ic selec­tions are so beau­ti­ful but that they also encour­age a slower pace, a more leis­urely struc­ture. The dia­logue scenes may be – to some audi­ences at least – frus­trat­ingly slow but I found that they matched an emo­tion­al or ele­gi­ac­al tone that starts with the music.

In the first two films, the scores were much more strident, more dis­son­ant, illus­trat­ing their char­ac­ters heightened states of mind, but they kept the audi­ence on edge, too. Anyway, no dis­respect to Mica Levi or Johnny Greenwood, who are very fine mod­ern com­posers, but neither of them are Puccini, are they?

(Listen here.)

Companion (Hancock, 2025)

Saturday was a stabby sort of day at the movies (see Flight Risk, above) but the exe­cu­tion of Companion man­aged to exceed the clev­er con­ceit rather than let it down.

It’s the near future and all sorts of auto­mated giz­mos are mak­ing our lives bet­ter, includ­ing domest­ic “emo­tion­al sup­port” robots. Jack Quaid (The Boys) brings his elec­tron­ic girl­friend (Sophie Thatcher from Yellowjackets) to a week­end away at a pal’s lux­uri­ous (but remote) lake house. There he ‘jail­breaks’ her CPU in order to com­mit the per­fect crime.

But things imme­di­ately start to go wrong and the newly eman­cip­ated Iris – with her heightened senses and enhanced powers of self-defence – becomes someone to be reckoned with in her own right.

Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” are clev­erly made use of here in ser­vice of a (slightly) on-the-nose satire about con­trolling boy­friends and des­per­ate incels. It helps that it’s played with gusto, espe­cially by sup­port­ing per­formers Lukas Gage and Harvey Gullén whose rela­tion­ship is par­tic­u­larly sweet.

Companion was fun and had a decent num­ber of sur­prises in its hundred-or-so minute run­ning time. 

You’re Cordially Invited (Stoller, 2025)

Cordial is the word to describe this minor rom-com from Forgetting Sarah Marshall writer and dir­ect­or Nicholas Stoller. Like Netflix last week, Prime Video seems con­tent to throw buck­ets of money at some star power rather than a well-developed script and hope like heck that some chem­istry will mira­cu­lously occur.

Will Ferrell is a wid­owed dot­ing dad whose daugh­ter (Geraldine Viswanathan) has decided to marry her boy­friend (Stony Blyden). At the same time, real­ity TV pro­du­cer Reece Witherspoon’s sis­ter (Meredith Hagner) has become engaged to a male exot­ic dan­cer (Jimmy Tatro) and both of these brides want to get mar­ried on the beau­ti­ful Palmetto Island in Georgia.

The tiny resort can only accom­mod­ate one wed­ding at a time but a tra­gic mis­un­der­stand­ing sees both events hap­pen­ing on the same week­end. A battle of wits ensues as Ferrell and Witherspoon attempt to make their family’s wed­ding dreams come true. The source of much of the humour here is that the two fam­il­ies are very dif­fer­ent – the buttoned-down, old school, south­ern con­ser­vat­ism of Witherspoon’s fam­ily and the looser, more express­ive, style of Ferrell’s party.

Sporadically amus­ing (but work­ing exceed­ingly hard for it), there’s a con­sist­ent pat­tern in how it treats all of its char­ac­ters. They are all awful right up until they each get a big reveal that provides some kind of for­giv­able human­ising detail and allows for a sen­ti­ment­al moment of con­nec­tion. It’s like it has all been planned out with a spread­sheet, much the way wed­ding plan­ner might do things.