Monday new releases: 28 April 2025

Welcome new sub­scribers temp­ted here by my little bit of self-promotion on At the Movies this week­end. It’s great to have you here.

Because of all the recent pub­lic hol­i­days – and that edi­tion of ATM – there hasn’t been a new releases update for a while so this is quite crowded. We’ll start by tak­ing out the recycling.

Sinners (Coogler, 2025)

Jordan’s star power makes Smoke and Stack the most excit­ing char­ac­ters, but they aren’t the heart of the film, not really. Fantastic new­comer Miles Caton plays Sammie, a tal­en­ted young sing­er and musi­cian, ambi­tious to make his for­tune in the record­ing stu­di­os and clubs of Chicago, going against the wishes of his preach­er fath­er. It’s Sammie’s tal­ent that pro­duces the music that can tran­scend every­day life but also attract the undead.

All the while, we are cap­tiv­ated by Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s stun­ning 65mm cine­ma­to­graphy – so dif­fer­ent from the gritty and grainy lens flares of The Last Showgirl earli­er this year – Oscar-winner Ruth Carter’s cos­tume design and Ludwig Göransson’s music.

But the real star of the show is the vir­tu­os­ity of Coogler, the bal­an­cing act of the laugh-out-loud funny moments, fol­lowed by extraordin­ary fantasy sequences and then clas­sic hor­ror jump scares.

(Read more at RNZ Life or listen at RNZ At the Movies.)

Small Things Like These (Mielant, 2024)

Cillian Murphy plays Bill and I’m going to be telling myself that he won the Academy Award for this rather than Oppenheimer last year. There’s a haunted qual­ity about him and I think of Small Things Like These as a kind of hor­ror film. It’s a ghost story in the way that Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone describes itself – a tragedy doomed to repeat itself time and time again.

But it’s also a kind of mon­ster movie, with the extraordin­ary Sister Mary, the Mother Superior, played by Emily Watson rul­ing everyone’s lives from the shad­ows. The scenes with her are shot like a hor­ror film, too, with the interi­or of the con­vent like Dracula’s castle and any invit­a­tion to go inside is fraught with peril.

(Listen at RNZ At the Movies.)

Warfare (Mendoza/Garland, 2025)

How real is it? I can only guess, and I don’t want to find out, but dur­ing an open­ing sequence of the rowdy pla­toon watch­ing a racy music video, a guy in my row leaned over to his girl­friend and whispered with a laugh, “we didn’t do that.” He didn’t laugh again dur­ing the film and looked pretty ashen as he pulled his base­ball cap over his eyes and quietly left the cinema with his partner.

(Listen at RNZ At the Movies.)

The Penguin Lessons (Cattaneo, 2024)

Evidently, pen­guins are very loy­al. And so when you save their lives, they feel like they owe you. And not only that, but they are also very empath­et­ic, which is anoth­er les­son that the film wants to teach. People seem to spend a lot of their time unload­ing their secrets to this par­tic­u­lar pen­guin who looks very attent­ive and very caring of their emo­tion­al state, shall we say.

Look, it’s a feel-good movie in a week­end where there’s quite a lot of rugged mater­i­al being released. Quite tough films going into cinemas this week­end. And this is the one that you should go to if you want to be uplif­ted. It’ll make you laugh. Steve Coogan, one of the fun­ni­est people to ever do it on screen. And this is a very relaxed, restrained ver­sion of Steve Coogan, kind of minor key Steve Coogan.

(Listen at RNZ Nights.)

G20 (Riggen, 2025)

Reasonably big budget, shot in South Africa, and big cast, lots of action, and very zeit­geisty, you know. So there’s a lot of stuff about crypto­cur­rency and crash­ing the world eco­nom­ies and also deep-fake digit­al coun­ter­feit videos of human beings. All this stuff that’s very much on people’s minds at the moment. But of course, this level of hero­ism and of com­pet­ence of this par­tic­u­lar U.S. pres­id­ent puts it squarely in the realm of fantasy, does­n’t it?

(Listen at RNZ Nights.)

Now, to the new­er stuff. Artists Equity is a new pro­duc­tion com­pany put togeth­er by Good Will Hunting bud­dies Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and they have two films in today’s news­let­ter. Small Things Like These was hatched dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of Oppenheimer when Damon and Cillian Murphy were sit­ting around wait­ing for Christopher Nolan to set up a shot and Murphy was asked what his dream pro­ject would be – Small Things Like These was the excel­lent result.

But pro­duc­tion com­pan­ies do not sur­vive on mod­estly budgeted respect­able lit­er­ary adapt­a­tions alone. They either need some elev­ated hor­ror (see A24) or a fran­chise of their own. Affleck starred in the sleep­er hit The Accountant back in 2016 and so Artists Equity went about buy­ing the rights to exploit this rather daft intel­lec­tu­al property.

They’ve temp­ted screen­writer Bill Dubuque (The Judge, Ozark) and dir­ect­or (The Way Back) to rejoin the party along with return­ing per­form­ance tal­ent J.K. Simmons, Cynthia Addai-Robinson and – most per­tin­ently – Jon Bernthal.

Bernthal plays Braxton, broth­er to the aut­ist­ic vigil­ante book­keep­er of the title, Christian Wolff (Affleck). Braxton is not aut­ist­ic but would appear to be very much on the ADHD spec­trum as he is a viol­ent freel­ance secur­ity con­sult­ant of no fixed abode. Wolff needs him to help solve the murder of a ment­or who was on the trail of some bad news El Salvadoran people traffickers.

Flirting dan­ger­ously between empathy and mak­ing aut­ism the butt of the film’s humour – there is an aut­ism spec­trum con­sult­ant cred­ited but there are also three times as many cat train­ers – the film is mostly mem­or­able for the buddy banter between the broth­ers rather than the action sequences which are as noisy and bloody as they all seem to be in these R‑rated days. The nas­ti­ness of the viol­ence in these things is really only for­giv­able if the bad­dies really, really, deserve it which means there’s a bit of an arms-race going on in that depart­ment, too.

Finally, a Saturday night stream­ing action-entertainment that actu­ally deliv­ers. We actu­ally watched Bullet Train Explosion on ANZAC Day but it felt like a Saturday, so it passes the test. With fly­ing col­ours, in fact.

A tenu­ous sequel to the 1975 thrill­er, Bullet Train, which inspired the Reeves-Bullock-Hopper clas­sic Speed, the new film is about a Shinkansen trav­el­ling a reg­u­lar route from Aomori to Tokyo but on this par­tic­u­lar after­noon a bomb has been placed aboard that will explode if the train’s velo­city drops below 120kmh.

The pas­sen­gers react in dif­fer­ent ways to this news: a dis­graced politi­cian thinks this might rehab­il­it­ate her repu­ta­tion, an online influ­en­cer tries to take con­trol of the ransom pro­cess, a school class who had just been on a trip to the mag­ni­fi­cent Shinkansen engin­eer­ing facil­ity at first pan­ic but then start to take care of each other.

And then there’s the staff. Clearly sup­por­ted by Japan Railways, the film does pay the self­less and ded­ic­ated train man­ager and driver plenty of respect – not to men­tion those in the oper­a­tions centre whose expert­ise is hope­fully going to save 350 lives.

At one point, they hatch an extraordin­ary plan to extend the end of the line at Tokyo Station by 50 metres in only two and a half hours so it can join the south­bound Tokaido line and give the res­cuers more time. Viewers in Auckland and Wellington who com­mute by rail will be laugh­ing hol­lowly at this point – the New Zealand equi­val­ent of this plot would be a threat to blow up the rail replace­ment bus if the points net­work at Wellington sta­tion isn’t com­pleted in less than 18 months.