Thursday new releases: 24 July 2025

I pushed the boat out yes­ter­day on At the Movies by review­ing four films instead of the usu­al three. Truly value for money for the New Zealand tax­pay­er. The show is avail­able online now and will be broad­cast on Sunday after­noon at 1.30.

Friendship

There’s a lot of talk these days about a crisis of mas­culin­ity. Men are lonely, they don’t know how to talk about feel­ings. They can’t make friends with oth­er men without it get­ting weird. The inter­net and our devices are just mak­ing things worse – splin­ter­ing us into tiny interest groups, rad­ic­al­ising our polit­ic­al opin­ions and mono­pol­ising our atten­tion. Robinson’s Craig is a vic­tim of all of this – he’s on his phone the entire time he’s at home but to no real vis­ible pur­pose – but he’s also a per­pet­rat­or. He makes apps that are designed to max­im­ise ‘engage­ment’ which is anoth­er way of say­ing, pay atten­tion to it not to the people around you.

It’s an example of Andrew DeYoung’s clev­er script, like the hints that Craig’s child­hood exper­i­ences may have been less than per­fect. It’s a clue about where that hair-trigger sense of unfair­ness might come from.

Listen to the whole seg­ment here.

The Divine Sarah Bernhardt

What the film is res­ol­utely not inter­ested in is what made Bernhardt such a star in the first place. It feels like a con­scious choice to not show Bernhardt on stage – per­haps Sandrine Kiberlain as Bernhardt felt that no per­form­ance she could give would com­pare with one that is con­jured in the mind’s eye from her repu­ta­tion – but the film is utterly incuri­ous about Bernhardt as an artist.

Why was she a star? What kind of con­nec­tion did she make with audi­ences that meant they would queue around the block for tick­ets? The film makes a big deal of her inter­na­tion­al tours – she actu­ally came to New Zealand in 1892! – but doesn’t attend itself to what might have been hap­pen­ing in the world of soci­ety, media or tech­no­logy that caused such glob­al suc­cess to hap­pen. Where’s the magic?

In the end, she’s just anoth­er rich per­son with excess­ive tastes, hid­den insec­ur­it­ies, a col­lec­tion of exot­ic pets, lots of fam­ous friends and a taste for polyamory. If The Divine Sarah Bernhardt is not inter­ested in her art, then it’s not a por­trait of an artist, it’s just gossip.

Listen to the whole seg­ment here.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

It’s not quite a remake or a reboot and it doesn’t do the basics well enough. It’s not shock­ing, it’s not funny, it’s not sexy and the pres­ence of Gellar, Hewitt and anoth­er return­ing star Freddie Prinze Jr. just makes it feel like the kids are hav­ing to party with their par­ents rather than cut loose and really have some fun.

The 4^th of July set­ting and hol­i­day resort loc­a­tion reminds you of Jaws which does nobody any favours, but I was think­ing that, why would you set a film dur­ing that hol­i­day week­end and not have any­thing to say about America? Or maybe it did but what it had to say was so banal, I didn’t notice.

Listen to the whole seg­ment here.

Four Letters of Love

This is a romantic film, first and fore­most – the mys­ter­ies of love and mar­riage, how we meet and how we stay togeth­er. But it’s also about faith – the arrival of God in some people’s lives means the depar­ture of God from oth­ers – and the film also asks the audi­ence to take a huge leap of faith themselves.

Listen to the whole seg­ment here.