Something to watch tonight: Friday 17 October

Beasts of No Nation (Fukunaga, 2015)

Last week I cel­eb­rated the third anniversary of my arrival as reg­u­lar screen crit­ic for RNZ Nights.

This week I recog­nise the tenth anniversary of start­ing RNZ’s pivot to video with the mul­ti­me­dia screen cri­ti­cism brand Widescreen. I was brought in to the organ­isa­tion to see wheth­er the kind of scrip­ted (RNZ calls them ‘pro­duced’) film reviews that are a fea­ture of At the Movies could be done on video. I chose to take that idea and build in writ­ten con­tent, cap­sule reviews, picks of the week, etc.

Not long after­wards, in one of those reg­u­lar cost cut­ting rounds that the media exper­i­ences, RNZ real­ised that they didn’t need two staff film review­ers1 and offered me redund­ancy, but in exchange for going quietly they let me con­tin­ue to write for the brand that we’d estab­lished. Even that option fizzled out with the intro­duc­tion of the Life sec­tion of the web­site last year.

Anyway, this is the first video review that I pro­duced for Widescreen and it’s for the first film to be pro­duced by Netflix. At the time, we could barely see where the stream­ers were going to go with their own pro­duc­tions but clearly some­thing was up.

Beasts of No Nation stars Idris Elba as a cha­ris­mat­ic com­mand­er of a group of child sol­diers in a fic­tion­al­ised African civil war. Director Cary Fukunaga went on to dir­ect the most recent Bond film, No Time to Die.

Further viewing (if you can stand it)

Here’s a link to the trail­er I made for Widescreen — my first ever attempt at on cam­era present­ing. To spare everyone’s blushes, I won’t embed it here.

Where to watch Beasts of No Nation

Worldwide: Still stream­ing on Netflix (but you’ll have to search for it)

Recent com­ment from read­er ML regard­ing Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room:

A clas­sic doc­u­ment­ary of its kind, but don’t ignore the book that inspired it, or the incred­ible journ­al­ism by author Bethany McLean that “broke” the story while every­one else was look­ing the oth­er way.