Monday new releases: 24 March 2025

At some point I’m going to have to stop watch­ing everything through a polit­ic­al lens but this is not that week.

Two of our films in this news­let­ter have the same cent­ral ques­tion at their heart – wheth­er to res­ist a tyr­an­nic­al ruler at great per­son­al risk or choose the safety of a quiet life under the thumb of dictatorship.

In Disney’s Snow White, they even sing a song about it. Snow White (Rachel Zegler), exiled from the castle, meets hand­some Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) and his band of out­laws in the woods. She is determ­ined to enlist them to help with her incip­i­ent rebel­lion against the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) who has stolen the throne and enslaved the people, but Jonathan argues – melod­ic­ally if not per­suas­ively – that stay­ing alive is prefer­able to tak­ing on a ruth­less oppon­ent who out­matches you.

In The Rule of Jenny Pen’s small town rest home, res­id­ents are tor­men­ted by a puppet-wielding bully (John Lithgow) until a stroke-ridden former judge (Geoffrey Rush) and a lame ex-All Black (George Henare) decide they have no altern­at­ive but to take the law into their own feeble hands. As Omar’s fam­ous quote from The Wire goes, “If you come for the King, you’d bet­ter not miss.”

When the cast­ing for this film was announced I’ll admit that I was dis­ap­poin­ted, think­ing that – once again – it seemed as if a New Zealand story could only be told if we impor­ted a couple of stars to secure the fin­an­cing. Jenny Pen is based on a New Zealand short story by Owen Marshall and I had my doubts about fly­ing in inter­na­tion­als to take roles that our loc­al act­ing luminar­ies could have done.

Here’s me eat­ing my words. The pres­ence of Lithgow and Rush is totally jus­ti­fied for the reas­on that they are clearly the best in the world at what they do and dir­ect­or James Ashcroft steers them superbly.

I had expec­ted that this film would have more of a super­nat­ur­al aspect – the endorse­ment from Stephen King and the trail­er emphas­ising the utterly creepy Jenny Pen doll-turned-emotional sup­port pup­pet led me astray – but it’s actu­ally a much more relat­able and upset­ting hor­ror. The myri­ad indig­nit­ies of age: men­tal and phys­ic­al infirm­ity, soci­et­al invis­ib­il­ity, the risk of abuse and the ter­rible food.

Lithgow’s Dave Crealey turns out to be an inter­est­ing vil­lain. He has psy­cho­path­ic tend­en­cies, true, but mostly he does what he does because he’s bored and no one can stop him. The fact that his body hasn’t giv­en out the way it has for oth­er res­id­ents gives him a power over them, allows him to rise above the mediocrity of his pre­vi­ous life, and you can see how intox­ic­at­ing power can be in the hands of those who nev­er had it before.

The so-called scan­dals around Disney’s Snow White – the latest updat­ing of their IP taonga for a mod­ern age – are the least inter­est­ing top­ics I can ima­gine so I won’t indulge them here. What goes in our eyes and in our ears? That’s really all that matters.

Of all Disney’s golden age of anim­a­tion – and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first back in 1937 – Snow White is the most simplist­ic story and the one that’s more suc­cess­ful the young­er the audi­ence. There’s not much here for the grown-ups which means my attempt at find­ing mod­ern polit­ic­al par­al­lels is even more of a stretch than usual.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

The Evil Queen is vain and selfish and lies her way into the heart of the wid­owed King, becom­ing cruel step­moth­er to Snow White. She spins a bunch of lies as a pre­text to start­ing a war with a neigh­bour­ing king­dom which her hus­band goes off to fight, nev­er to be seen again. When Snow White blos­soms into a beau­ti­ful young woman, the Queen’s truth-telling mir­ror drops the bomb­shell that she is no longer the fairest of them all which should mean cur­tains for Snow White until the sev­en jew­el min­ing dwarfs (and the afore­men­tioned Jonathan) finally decide to take a side.

Once you notice that Grumpy, the dwarf, looks like cur­rent New Zealand deputy prime min­is­ter Winston Peters, you won’t be able to unsee it and that might also affect enjoy­ment for older view­ers. Kids shouldn’t care. There’s noth­ing about this Snow White that’s worth hat­ing or cam­paign­ing against. Its flaws are many – but entirely cor­por­ate – and Rachel Zegler does what she can to keep things watchable.

Gia Coppola’s Vegas slice-of-life, The Last Showgirl is a conun­drum. If you take out the long and mean­der­ing sequences of star Pamela Anderson wan­der­ing around vari­ous gritty Las Vegas loc­a­tions with the sun pro­du­cing epic lens flares upon the genu­ine cel­lu­loid that it’s pho­to­graphed on to – and the excru­ci­at­ing Jamie Lee Curtis Pat Benatar dance sequence – what do you have? Not very much is the answer.

Unfocused in almost every way ima­gin­able, the main reas­on the film seems to give us for watch­ing is to see that Ms. Anderson is an actu­al real human female, not the tabloid car­toon char­ac­ter she was por­trayed as for dec­ades. But that doesn’t make the char­ac­ter she’s play­ing in the film, Shelly, any less of a car­toon. Just a dif­fer­ent kind.

Shelly is an age­ing dan­cer who has nev­er left the Razzle Dazzle tra­di­tion­al prom­en­ade show that she was the face of nearly 40 years ago. Times have changed, though, and audi­ences for that kind of pro­duc­tion are dimin­ish­ing rap­idly. Shelly, though, remains in com­plete deni­al about the fact that she and the world around her are chan­ging and that there’s no going back.

I find films where we are meant to feel sym­pathy for char­ac­ters whose prob­lems are largely self-inflicted to be unsat­is­fy­ing and this is one of them.

Finally, I can con­firm I still have no desire to make time to watch the Russo Brothers’ The Electric State on Netflix. Life is, lit­er­ally, too short. If you think I should, feel free to leave a comment.