Friday new releases*: 24 October 2025

This week cer­tainly got away from me. Not in the way it did for the people who are still without power, or are flood dam­aged or whose roofs were torn off by the high winds, but enough to be mildly incon­veni­enced by the vicis­situdes of paid employment.

On Wednesday I recor­ded this week’s epis­ode of RNZ At the Movies so my new release reviews are recycled from there.

Roofman (Cianfrance, 2025)

Channing Tatum plays Manchester, pro­du­cing a much more effect­ive ver­sion of the larger-than-life movie star pre­tend­ing to be an ordin­ary, turn of the cen­tury, work­ing class joe, than Dwayne Johnson’s much-hyped paink­iller addicted cage fight­er in The Smashing Machine. But the film does rely on Tatum’s relaxed cha­risma – much as I ima­gine the real Manchester suc­cess­fully stayed out of jail by win­ning over the con­greg­a­tion of the loc­al church and single moth­er Leigh (Kirsten Dunst, also dial­ling the back the movie star­dom effect­ively) and her kids.

Cianfrance also makes excel­lent use of Tatum’s phys­ic­al grace, without turn­ing him into a kind of super­hero. He also has a documentarian’s eye for real-life loc­a­tions and lived in faces and the film itself is much more down­beat than the advert­ising would suggest.

(Listen to the com­plete seg­ment here.)

Black Phone 2 (Derrickson, 2025)

Black Phone 2 draws on a few more hor­ror tropes than the tightly focused ori­gin­al – includ­ing the Nightmare on Elm Street idea of the vil­lain being able to kill you in your dreams – but that open­ing up is good as it offers some big­ger out­door set-pieces and some very spooky effects of poor Gwen being hurled around the camp kit­chen by invis­ible forces.

The small cast are all well-drawn and clearly meant to be more than just fod­der for kills, there’s a strong mor­al core to the ‘good vs. evil’ con­test, which is as it should be, and there’s enough gore to keep most hor­ror fans sat­is­fied. The sound design – there’s no design­er giv­en that cred­it but the score is by Derrickson’s son Atticus – also makes a strong con­tri­bu­tion to over­all creep­i­ness of things as well as the well-oiled jump scares.

(Listen to the com­plete seg­ment here. You can also listen to my con­ver­sa­tion with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights here.)

Mr. Scorsese (Miller, 2025)

The final epis­ode con­tains some mov­ing per­son­al rev­el­a­tions and Miller’s care­ful build up to them is com­mend­able. You won’t see him and his later career in quite the same way again. Mr. Scorsese human­ises the man as well as telling the story of an artist. At the end, it draws an eleg­ant line from the Catholic altar boy in 1950s New York and the self-destructive and rebel­li­ous young man to the eld­er states­man of today, using one of my very favour­ite films of his, the 2016 film Silence, as the guide.

(Listen to the com­plete seg­ment here.)

The show is online now and will air on RNZ National on Sunday at 1.30pm.

Tonight at 8.40, I’ll be chat­ting with Emile Donovan once again on Nights. Topics will be Springsteen: Deliver Us from Nowhere in cinemas, The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix) and Bollywood clas­sic Sholay (Tubi).

Next Monday is a pub­lic hol­i­day in Aotearoa New Zealand and on Wednesday I’ll be record­ing and post­ing the next At the Movies so expect fur­ther inter­rup­tions to the post­ing schedule.