Thursday new releases: 30 October 2025

Once again, a busy week sees me resort­ing to link­ing to RNZ pieces rather than writ­ing any­thing fresh. But it’s all gold, so there’s that.

You can hear the whole epis­ode of this week’s At the Movies online here or on air on Sunday afternoon.

Pike River (Sarkies, 2025)

Is it a per­fect film? No, it’s not. It is excel­lent on its own terms but to be per­fect it would need to pro­voke some kind of change – struc­tur­al change, mean­ing­ful change, per­man­ent change – on behalf of those 29 men. It would need audi­ences to leave the theatre fired up about the injustice of the sys­tem and the inad­equacy of our cul­ture and determ­ined to do some­thing about it.

Helen Kelly would have known all this but – as she is ably por­trayed by Lucy Lawless – in the film she’s a fel­low can­cer suf­fer­er, an empathy engine, not the tire­less act­iv­ist for sys­tem­ic reform that she was in life.

The gains that were made to our Health & Safety legis­la­tion in 2015, partly as a res­ult of Pike River, are about to be unwound by a gov­ern­ment that argues that the risk of work­ers not com­ing home at the end of the day should be shouldered by the least power­ful not the most, all in the name of “going for growth”. While our politi­cians argue about what the eco­nom­ic “value of a life” should be, we should be telling them what we think is accept­able and that it’s not 29 men dying in a mine with bug­ger all safety protections.

But that isn’t what this film does. It wants to provide cath­arsis – a “punch­ing the air” moment – that will send audi­ences out feel­ing good, but we shouldn’t be feel­ing good, we should be furious.

(Listen to the full review.)

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (Cooper, 2025)

Springsteen is such an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. Only someone deeply insec­ure would allow him­self to be called “Boss” by every­one, would be almost pain­fully per­fec­tion­ist in the stu­dio and in rehears­al, would insist on explain­ing his songs at length in con­cert because he has a very deep drive to be under­stood, or rather to not be misunderstood.

That’s also the reas­on why this film exists, yet anoth­er way to burn­ish the legend and leg­acy of the man and also explain why he is the way he is and wrote the songs he wrote. Compare Springsteen with the song­writer that he was sup­posed be the nat­ur­al suc­cessor to, Bob Dylan, who fam­ously doesn’t give a stuff what you think or what you think his songs are about. They just are.

The Dylan biop­ic, A Complete Unknown, from last year had one con­tri­bu­tion from Dylan him­self, a scene that nev­er actu­ally happened. Compare that withDeliver Me from Nowhere, where Springsteen has been along­side it every step of the way. It’s con­stric­ted and con­strained, it has also has this need to explain everything, to not let you walk away until you’ve got it. It’s like those poetry read­ings where the intro­duc­tion to the poem is twice as long as the poem itself.

(Listen to the full review or my con­ver­sa­tion with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights.)

Frankenstein (Del Toro, 2025)

The pro­duc­tion val­ues are abso­lutely first class. Del Toro still insists on digit­al effects enhan­cing rather than repla­cing phys­ic­al ones. Kate Hawley’s cos­tumes should surely mer­it some atten­tion come awards sea­son. All of the act­ors got the memo about how heightened their per­form­ance style needs to be but only Jacob Elordi as the Creature uncov­ers any more subtle lay­ers and Mia Goth as Elizabeth, love interest to both Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein and his more inno­cent broth­er WIlliam (Felix Kammerer), is so under­writ­ten as to be not much more than an accent in a dress.

I was sur­prised to note that the final scenes of Frankenstein are very sim­il­ar to the final scenes of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, to the extent that I’ve been jok­ing that Deliver Me from Nowhere could be the sub­title for both films. They are both about failed par­ent­ing and the pos­sib­il­ity of for­give­ness and both those scenes are tender coun­ter­points to the bom­bast that has come before.

(Listen to the full review.)

A House of Dynamite (Bigelow, 2025)

This was the first of the season’s Netflix titles to get a cinema release this year — an indic­a­tion of some prestige, and a warm-up to the likes of Frankenstein, Ballad of a Small Player, Train Dreams and, the big one, Wake Up Dead Man: Knives Out Mystery which loc­al cinemas are rely­ing on greatly pri­or to the new Avatar.

I spoke about this one to Nights sub­sti­tute host Mark Leishman (these are machine-transcribed words):

It’s real grip­ping stuff that’s kind of a white knuckle ride. I will say that the end­ing of the film is going to polar­ise people. I was in a cinema last night watch­ing it and as the film fin­ished and the cred­its star­ted there was one voice com­ing out loud and clear going, “Oh come on!”

So not everyone’s going to be on side with how this film fin­ishes. But I thought it was abso­lutely tre­mend­ous, bril­liantly per­formed. And the thing about it is that it presents this situ­ation in a way that is all too plaus­ible and night­mar­ish and you real­ise how little, even the experts know about what is really going on in the world.

We were trained I think in the days of the Cold War to believe that some­thing like a nuc­le­ar war might be triggered by a kid play­ing a video game in Matthew Broderick and War Games and what have you, but it was nev­er going to hap­pen as a res­ult of enemy action because they were all too darn smart for that. But this is a film that basic­ally tells us that a cas­cade of things could go wrong quite eas­ily in and around the fog of war. It is really quite ter­ri­fy­ing and but bril­liantly excit­ing at the same time.