Monday new releases: 17 March 2025

There’s a big new release movie miss­ing from this week’s roundup – the new film from The Russo Brothers, The Electric State. Evidently it’s the most expens­ively pro­duced fea­ture film ever from Netflix and sounds like it should be per­fect Saturday night enter­tain­ment – a light­hearted piece of sci-fi fea­tur­ing wise-cracking robots and big name movie stars.

But I’ve had too many of my Saturday nights wasted by these big budget, high concept, star-studded extra­vag­an­zas recently (The Gorge, Back in Action, Fly Me to the Moon, You’re Cordially Invited) and this week­end we decided in favour of some fam­ily nos­tal­gia instead. Wolfgang Petersen’s beloved 1984 fantasy The Neverending Story has just been released on 4K UHD in a hand­some col­lect­ors’ edi­tion, so we watched that instead.

I will come back to The Electric State later this week as I’m curi­ous to see what US$350m of Netflix money buys you – a decent script? – but the mur­mur­ings around the review­er com­munity are not positive.

The organ­isers of New Zealand’s French and British & Irish film fest­ivals can be rightly proud that their alumni are dom­in­at­ing qual­ity cinema releases at the moment. It’s a sign that the New Zealand International Film Festival no longer has a lock on all the best films and that those oth­er fest­ivals are a great way to see highly regarded films earli­er than almost any­where else. Three-quarters of the four new pic­tures this week premiered in those fest­ivals last year.

But first, the second Steven Soderbergh/David Koepp col­lab­or­a­tion in the last six weeks, espi­on­age thrill­er Black Bag.

Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are mar­ried British agents. Fassbender’s George is handed a list of five intern­al agency sus­pects in the theft of a cru­cial piece of tech­no­logy and is only mod­er­ately dis­con­cer­ted to find his wife Kathryn is on it.

In order to flush out the mole, he organ­ises a din­ner party at his home and plays some psy­cho­lo­gic­al games with the guests who all appear to have either a motive or a weakness.

This is about as effi­cient as an enter­tain­ment deliv­ery sys­tem can be in our cur­rent era. It’s easy to ima­gine an idea like this being turned into a six-part series with mul­tiple extra twists, turns and shootouts, but this is a tight 94-minutes that rewards intel­li­gence and attention.

If I have a beef with Black Bag, it’s that the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters – well played by classy act­ors – are more like Lego bricks for the plot rather than fully-fledged humans in their own right, but it’s the twisty rela­tion­ship between Blanchett and Fassbender that we are here for – and the shame­less indul­gence of the pro­duc­tion in which every­one looks a mil­lion bucks and lives in an utterly desir­able design­er res­id­ence. Great grown-up escapism.

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths might be the first con­tem­por­ary drama that I’ve seen that actu­ally ref­er­ences the Covid pan­dem­ic and lock­downs – not as a cent­ral theme but the kind of con­ver­sa­tion that we all still have. If you were to watch most so-called con­tem­por­ary stor­ies you would be for­giv­en for think­ing that Covid nev­er happened and yet it casts a shad­ow over us all still.

Hard Truths is about a dif­fer­ent kind of trauma – the com­plic­ated grief and guilt around the death of a par­ent who wasn’t par­tic­u­larly well loved. Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) inflicts her pain on every­one around her – long-suffering hus­band Curtley (David Webber), with­drawn adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and well-adjusted sis­ter Chantelle (Michele Austin) espe­cially – but she clearly doesn’t spare her­self. A clean-freak with a hyper-articulate anger at the world, she reminded me of anoth­er of Leigh’s fam­ous ragers, David Thewlis’s Johnny in Naked (1993). A mouth that can only get her into trouble and the only escape is to with­draw and stay in bed all day.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

A per­form­ance as good as Jean-Baptiste’s can only work with scene part­ners to wit­ness her and – in typ­ic­al Leigh fash­ion – that’s what she gets. Even the rel­at­ively small roles, in the super­mar­ket check­out queue or the assist­ant man­ager at the fur­niture shop (Alice Bailey Johnson), have to bring their best game.

I loved the truths that Hard Truths tells us about Black fam­il­ies, Black British cul­ture and even Black bod­ies. If you find raw, messy, emo­tion to be dif­fi­cult to watch this may not be for you, but it’s about love and all the ways that it can hurt you.

Firebrand is a piece of spec­u­lat­ive fem­in­ist fic­tion regard­ing the final mar­riage of King Henry VIII (Jude Law) to Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander). Henry is an ail­ing, mer­cur­i­al, selfish, pri­ap­ic, bully and Katherine is some­thing of a reli­gious philo­soph­er. Between them a battle for the soul of England is being waged, with Henry’s chil­dren (includ­ing the future Elizabeth I (Junia Rees) stuck in the middle.

When the film is about those two togeth­er it sparks away migh­tily, but there’s some­thing off about the rest of it. The editor-in-chief is a cos­tume pro­fes­sion­al and was unim­pressed at some of the choices and exe­cu­tion on offer, and I am a beard pro­fes­sion­al and found some of those to be uncon­vin­cing (to say the least).

Neither of us could be sure if the ana­chron­isms were just over­sights in a rushed pro­duc­tion pro­cess or delib­er­ately placed to emphas­ise that most of what we were see­ing was an inven­tion through a mod­ern lens.

It’s nearly a year since I saw the antho­logy com­edy Lucky Winners at the media launch for the 2024 French Film Festival so my memory of the detail might be hazy. What I do recall, how­ever, is that I really didn’t like it and chose not to single it out in my pre­view.

Each story is about what hap­pens when a win­ning lot­tery tick­et enters the lives of some ordin­ary people and it sug­gests that noth­ing good is the res­ult. It’s an ugly and cyn­ic­al take on human nature and I didn’t care for it.