Monday new releases: 17 February 2025

Captain America: Brave New World was – until very recently – sup­posed to be named New World Order until someone at Marvel/Disney saw the dir­ec­tion the real world was headed and thought bet­ter of it. Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson has offi­cially gradu­ated from Falcon (in the Avengers films) to Captain America after a Disney+ min­iser­ies (Falcon and Winter Soldier) in which the powers-that be did everything they could to give the job to loy­al blond-and-blue-eyed but tem­pera­ment­ally ill-equipped career sol­dier (Wyatt Russell) instead of the already proven African-American man anoin­ted by Steve Rogers himself.

But this Captain America has come a long way from the fascist-fighting ori­gins of the char­ac­ter and is now a tool of a United States régime led by former enemy of the Avengers, Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford), whose change of heart may not be reliable.

Whether an African-American man is accept­able as Captain America – either to the American pub­lic in the films, American audi­ences for the films or to African Americans them­selves who are used to hav­ing their pat­ri­ot­ism taken for gran­ted and abused in equal meas­ure – is the key sub­text that has been set up for this film but it goes vir­tu­ally unad­dressed, leav­ing Mackie with almost no per­son­al stakes in the story.

A mys­ter­i­ous island has been formed in the Indian Ocean (the res­ult of the much-maligned MCU film Eternals in 2021) and it con­tains vast quant­it­ies of an extra-terrestrial super-element called Adamantium. Ross is attempt­ing to nego­ti­ate a glob­al pact that would share this new wealth rather than have it fought over, but someone is derail­ing his dip­lo­mat­ic efforts.

There are two things about this film that dis­tin­guish it from the pack and I’m not sure that either are enough for me to actu­ally recom­mend it. One is that it actu­ally looks like a film – there’s abund­ant grain and Kramer Morganthau’s cine­ma­to­graphy brings this aspect of the MCU back to the slightly grit­ti­er polit­ic­al thrill­er roots of Civil War and Winter Soldier. Secondly, Ford (step­ping into a role inhab­ited for five films by the late William Hurt) is giv­ing it everything, treat­ing this green-screened com­ic book movie with all the grav­itas at his com­mand. He looks like he’s hav­ing fun but at the same time he’s not wink­ing at the cam­era. He’s present.

Nigerian-American dir­ect­or Julius Onah’s action sequences – espe­cially the ones on the ground make sense but for a long time I’ve treated these as punc­tu­ation between the human bits that I’m more inter­ested in, rather than the rais­on d’être of the films that Disney think they are.

Heroes are defined by cour­age and – since the arrival of a mul­ti­verse that has decim­ated the stor­ies by elim­in­at­ing risk for the char­ac­ters – the Marvel movies have shown very little. Brave New World doesn’t change things much.

I had to con­fess to my com­mis­sion­er at RNZ that I hadn’t actu­ally seen any of the pre­vi­ous Bridget Jones films, thus tak­ing me out not the run­ning to pro­duce a paid review for them. Of course, I’m aware of the cul­tur­al impact of all three, it’s just that my response to Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is as a film, not a Bridget Jones film.

And it’s a very pleas­ant couple of hours centred around a char­ac­ter who is roughly my age and deal­ing – comed­ic­ally – with not-unrelateable con­cerns. Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is now a wid­ow with two young chil­dren. She’s dis­or­gan­ised but dot­ing but all three are still strug­gling with their grief. Contradictory advice from her friends is not help­ing but even­tu­ally a decision is made that Bridget should get back out in the dat­ing pool and into the tired old cliché of “the apps”.

Romantic suc­cess (with a hand­some young “gar­bolo­gist” played by man-of-the-moment Leo Woodall) trans­fers itself to work­place con­fid­ence and things start look­ing up, except Woodall’s char­ac­ter may not be the best long-term replace­ment for her par­agon of a former hus­band, Darcy (played in a ghostly cameo by Colin Firth).

The sen­ti­ment­al­ity works, as does most of the humour, except that they don’t feel like they come from the same film. The jokes don’t emerge from the char­ac­ters and situ­ations as much as are imposed on them by a team of writers who con­stantly need to remind us what the ‘com’ in rom­com stands for.

As he is in most things days, MVP is Hugh Grant as the cad Cleaver. Not only is Grant crush­ing it in per­form­ance, the scriptwriters clearly know who this char­ac­ter is and write him accord­ingly. Not some­thing that can be said for many of the others. 

The parade of hor­ror films into cinemas is the least edi­fy­ing aspect of this job as I find myself unenthused to say the least at all of that glee­ful mur­der­ous viol­ence. Suffusing it with irony or satire doesn’t really help as I’m still left with the con­clu­sion that these films aren’t made with the love of people at heart.

Talking of heart, the latest is a Valentine’s‑themed slash­er called Heart Eyes in which a masked seri­al killer finds ever more grue­some ways to dis­pose of happy couples cel­eb­rat­ing romance.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

The main point of interest for me is that the har­bour city of Seattle is por­trayed by Auckland and that loc­al cre­at­ives, per­formers and tech­nic­al tal­ent get more than the usu­al oppor­tun­it­ies to shine. Watching one of your mates get his head blown off in a taxi does tend to spark one’s interest when it would oth­er­wise be flagging.

Streaming is where the high-concept action can be found and – if you don’t pick too closely at the loose threads – you’ll find some enter­tain­ment. In Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, two solo snipers are on a 12-month tour of duty on either side of a mys­ter­i­ous foggy canyon, on guard against any­thing that might try to climb out. One is from the East (Anya Taylor-Joy plays a Lithuanian work­ing for Russia) and the oth­er rep­res­ents the West – Miles Teller is the American.

Are they guard­ing the gates of Hell? What are they going to do dur­ing the long peri­ods of inactiv­ity except flirt by tele­scope. Did their respect­ive bosses (Sigourney Weaver on the American side) not see the pos­sib­il­ity of romance devel­op­ing between these two good-looking young people?

And that’s my first and biggest prob­lem with the logic of the film. Like Duncan Jones’ Moon, which starred Sam Rockwell as a solo mine super­visor, mon­it­or­ing the oper­a­tions of a min­er­al extrac­tion facil­ity that’s vital to the future of Earth, if this thing is so import­ant – why is there only one per­son on each side look­ing after it!? Because the story doesn’t work oth­er­wise, is the answer.

Anyway, The Gorge gets sil­li­er and sil­li­er as the stakes get big­ger and big­ger but the film­mak­ing is good and at the end we decided that, actu­ally, we were meant to think it was all quite ridiculous.

Another set of entirely arbit­rary rules are the centrepiece of anoth­er Anthony Mackie vehicle, Elevation. Indestructible giant cockroach-like mon­sters have emerged from the depths of the earth and anni­hil­ated 95 per­cent of the human pop­u­la­tion but they a) aren’t eat­ing us and b) can’t go any high­er than 8,000 feet. The remains of soci­ety are liv­ing in tiny set­tle­ments in the moun­tains, unable to ven­ture below the fence line or vis­it any of the oth­er settlements.

As it hap­pens, all does get revealed – and makes more sense than it sounds – but to dis­cov­er the truth, wid­owed fath­er Mackie has to ven­ture into Boulder from the Colorado moun­tains to find fil­ters for the oxy­gen machine that is keep­ing his son alive. On the exped­i­tion are cyn­ic­al sci­ent­ist Morena Baccarin, who has a the­ory about how these writers might be killed, and Maddie Hasson, who has nev­er seen one of them up close.

Director George Nolfi made The Adjustment Bureau in 2011, which also fea­tured Mackie, and he’s made a tight 90-minute action film that isn’t quite as deriv­at­ive as it sounds. For once, Colorado plays itself and looks spectacular.