Monday new releases: 30 June 2025

Just the two new cinema releases to report on this week as I decided that the oth­ers – Bank of Dave 2 and Karate Kid Legends – soun­ded too much like fake films inven­ted just to get a laugh. Also, the schedul­ing chal­lenges were insurmountable.

What’s left are symp­to­mat­ic of cinema’s cur­rent trends. I read some­where that we should be grate­ful for F1® because it’s ori­gin­al block­buster enter­tain­ment that isn’t based on pre-existing IP. Um … its entire exist­ence is due to the intel­lec­tu­al prop­erty of a giant motor­s­port organ­isa­tion. Its pur­pose is to pro­mote motor racing and its myri­ad cor­por­ate spon­sors. And it shame­lessly draws on dec­ades of oth­er sports movies, from Rocky to Bull Durham and bey­ond. Original, it is not.

But, effect­ive it def­in­itely is – at least when it’s out on the racetrack. I’m some­thing of a rar­ity as a sports fan these days as I find Formula One to be like watch­ing paint dry but I found the close-up access to all the cock­pit and pit lane tech­no­logy – and dir­ect­or Joseph Kosinski’s mus­cu­lar dir­ec­tion – to be actu­ally quite thrill­ing. It helps that the neces­sary expos­i­tion – com­ment­at­ors, closed cir­cuit chat between the pits and the drivers – does a good job of keep­ing us up with what’s going on and remind­ing us of the stakes. It’s every­where else that the film runs on soft tires.

Brad Pitt (59 at time of shoot­ing) plays Sonny Hayes, a peri­pat­et­ic multi-format racing driver, drift­ing from con­tract to con­tract. As a young man, he had been a big deal but a ter­rible crash in his first Formula One sea­son put an end to his élite career. His former team­mate, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), is now the man­ager of a strug­gling F1 team. If they don’t win a race by the end of the sea­son, the team will be sold and every­one will lose their jobs.

Having to only win one race is a neat nar­rat­ive trick when you need to include an entire industry of real world teams, cars and drivers without embar­rass­ing them. If Ruben and Sonny can win a single race, it won’t be too dam­aging for the repu­ta­tion of – for example – cham­pi­on Lewis Hamilton (an exec­ut­ive pro­du­cer on the film). All the real-life teams will still be the best.

Ruben wants Sonny to come out of Formula One retire­ment to help school the young and inex­per­i­enced lead driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). For movie fans of a cer­tain age, Sonny is Kevin Costner and Joshua is Tim Robbins and Kerry Condon plays love interest and team tech­nic­al dir­ect­or, Kate McKenna. Unlike with Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, there’s no love tri­angle here, but the romantic sub­plot is utterly redund­ant apart from allow­ing Pitt more oppor­tun­it­ies to take his shirt off.

Pitt is some­thing of a conun­drum, here. Inside the car, it really could be any­one under that hel­met and out­side the car he tries to movie star his way through scenes but he’s look­ing for a spar­ring part­ner and nev­er really finds one. He’s just not a strong enough pres­ence to carry the whole thing any more and no mat­ter how much back story Ehren Kruger’s script tries to load him up with, none of the emo­tion­al moments land.

Like the track­side com­ment­at­ors in F1, M3GAN 2.0 provides you with con­stant remind­ers of what is going on, only man­aging to inter­rupt the action rather than run par­al­lel with it. Director Gerard Johnstone has writ­ten the script for this sequel to the sur­prise 2022 hit about an AI-driven children’s toy that goes rogue, and he doesn’t have the con­fid­ence in his abil­ity to tell the story visu­ally. This is a shame because he proved with the earli­er film and the loc­al hit Housebound that he is abso­lutely cap­able of doing so.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

It’s as if the film­makers are assum­ing the audi­ence will be bored and nood­ling away on their second screens and have to repeat everything for us. I was sur­prised at how bored I was at times between the (pretty good) set-pieces.

While the M3GAN hard­ware was des­troyed in the last film, the M3GAN soft­ware appears to live on in the cas­ing of a killer mil­it­ary robot named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) who has gone rogue and appears to be look­ing for the first gen­er­a­tion AI, a sen­tient pho­to­copi­er from the 1980s. M3GAN’s cre­at­or Gemma (Allison Williams, also an actu­al p.g.a. pro­du­cer of the film) has to reluct­antly reboot M3GAN and hope that she can defeat AMELIA before all the AIs merge and cause a world-ending singularity.

This edi­tion of M3GAN is more of a comedy-thriller than a horror-comedy, sug­gest­ing a future dir­ec­tion for the fran­chise, but it would be great if New Zealand could gen­er­ate some more inter­na­tion­ally recog­nised film stars1 so we don’t have to watch Jemaine Clement do anoth­er ver­sion of the same ego­ma­ni­ac he’s been play­ing for years.