Thursday new releases: 31 July 2025

First up, I want to show you this lovely little visu­al com­bin­a­tion that appeared on the home page yesterday:

Anyway, this week is the last of my three-show run on RNZ At the Movies so I’ll be link­ing to the audio seg­ments there and hop­ing that you’ll listen. Got to get those met­rics mov­ing in the right direction.

It was a lean week for new cinema releases with two “altern­at­ive con­tent” art doc­u­ment­ar­ies1 going up against the Marvel jug­ger­naut of The Fantastic Four. Luckily, The Life of Chuck had some pre­view screen­ings last week­end in advance of today’s nation­wide release.

To fill the third seg­ment, I inter­viewed former-Wellington film crit­ic Richard Scheib about his book, A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic. I had to cut the half-hour con­ver­sa­tion down to less than eight minutes for broad­cast but you can listen to the whole (inter­est­ing) thing here.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

You might be able to tell, I really liked The Fantastic Four. The char­ac­ters are strong, and their rela­tion­ships are relat­able to the rest of us. As usu­al, Marvel cast­ing dir­ect­or Sarah Halley Finn has filled the roles with ped­i­gree act­ors, act­ors who know how to provide what the script some­times only hints at.

It’s also superbly designed and real­ised by a team led by Kasra Farhani, who gave the TV series Loki one of the most strik­ingly ori­gin­al and detailed worlds I’ve ever seen. Like Loki, The Fantastic Four is shot in England – at Pinewood – and I have a the­ory that the Marvel pro­duc­tions that are made in the UK just tend to be bet­ter. The craft is abso­lutely first rate and there’s more prac­tic­al con­struc­tion and less reli­ance on digit­al green screen tech­no­lo­gies. Their worlds feel sol­id. The cos­tumes are knit­wear, not moul­ded plastic armour over fake foam muscles.

It’s like the dif­fer­ence between Mexican Coke – the real sug­ar cane stuff – and the High Fructose Corn Syrup we get in the rest of the world.

The Life of Chuck

A couple of times recently I’ve been moved by a film that’s actu­ally about death for a change. Not grief and loss and its impact on every­one left behind – although that’s not to dimin­ish those feel­ings – but about the pro­cess of dying and its effect on the one who’s actu­ally doing it.

A few weeks ago, the Danny Boyle zom­bie flick 28 Years Later sur­prised me with the sens­it­iv­ity of how it approached the inev­it­able death of a cent­ral character.

Now we have The Life of Chuck, a film that’s destined to join the list of favour­ite Stephen King adapt­a­tions along­side The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. It’s adap­ted from a King short story by Mike Flanagan, who in 2019 adap­ted the sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep.

The Life of Chuck is con­struc­ted as some­thing of a puzzle, though it’s a sat­is­fy­ing one. Its three-act struc­ture goes in reverse so that the mys­tery of the first third – the end of the actu­al world – is solved by the final third. It’s Stephen King, so there’s always a risk of it being too clev­er by half but for me it landed beautifully.