Tuesday new releases: 11 November 2025

Because I have watched far too many science-fiction movies, for the last few days I’ve been idly ima­gin­ing thou­sands of nano­bots inside the hole in my gum, breez­ily going back and forth rebuild­ing bits of jawbone, flesh and skin accord­ing to an ancient map of human ana­tomy and cen­tur­ies of sub­sequent mutations.

Yes, now that you men­tion it, these paink­illers are quite strong.

Today’s news­let­ter is a quick catch-up on some new releases, mostly using mater­i­al recycled from last week’s RNZ At the Movies show.

Bugonia (Lanthimos, 2025)

But, des­pite his usu­al visu­al flair (sup­por­ted this time by Robbie Ryan’s mar­vel­lous VistaVision cine­ma­to­graphy), Bugonia is prob­ably more of a Will Tracy film than a Lanthimos one.

Tracy has been writ­ing and pro­du­cing edgy 21^st cen­tury satires for a few years – he was a writer on Succession and wrote the screen­play for the wild com­edy hor­ror film The Menu, which starred Ralph Fiennes as a demen­ted Michelin-starred chef tak­ing his revenge on every­one who ever crossed him.

Tracy was also a pro­du­cer on Ari Aster’s recent Covid-comedy Eddingtonand Jesse Armstrong’s satire about a billionaire’s retreat turn­ing mur­der­ous, Mountainhead.

So, Tracy’s script for Bugonia fits right into that jet-black world­view – that we should pretty much acknow­ledge that the mod­ern world is on a wild ride to inev­it­able anni­hil­a­tion and that our only pos­it­ive is that the ultra-rich olig­archs that are driv­ing it will not only go down with the rest of us – they’ll prob­ably go first.

(Read and listen to the full review.)

Good Fortune (Ansari, 2025)

That scene is one of sev­er­al that we shall char­it­ably call homages to pre­vi­ous films about the angels who walk among us. In Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, Peter Falk’s ex-angel chose the life of a human because he too fell in love with fast food. Ansari’s open­ing shot is of an angel stand­ing on the domed roof of Griffith Observatory, look­ing down on Los Angeles as Nicolas Cage did in the American remake of Wings of Desire, City of Angels, even wear­ing a sim­il­ar long raincoat.

It also con­sciously reminds us of It’s a Wonderful Life, a film we are all going to watch again on Christmas Day, aren’t we? Or Powell & Pressburger’s clas­sic A Matter of Life and Death. It’s nowhere near as good as any of those films, of course, and it being 2025, there’s a shit-ton more curs­ing, but Good Fortune is not without its charms and, thanks to the eth­er­e­al Keanu Reeves, it has a few things to say about how we treat people down here on Earth.

(Listen to the full review.)

Predator: Badlands (Trachtenberg, 2025)

Reader DD (tem­por­ar­ily of Silverstream) sug­ges­ted that if was an eleven-year-old again, the new Predator movie could eas­ily be his favour­ite film. The prob­lem in for eleven-year-olds in Aotearoa, unfor­tu­nately, is that they aren’t allowed in to watch it as it has been rated R13 here (instead of PG-13 in the States).

Yes, it’s viol­ent with lots of armed com­bat, destruc­tion and severed limbs and what­not, but there’s not a human being with­in light years of it, and all of the blood is green or that white flu­id that keeps androids from seiz­ing up. But there’s also a bunch of cool ali­en creatures, lots of Wētā Workshop designed hard­ware and a coming-of-age story that man­ages to open up the lore of the Predator-creatures them­selves while also con­tinu­ing to tie in to the ongo­ing saga of the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation.

Turns out that the Predator spe­cies is actu­ally called the Yautja1 and they are like the Klingons in Star Trek — obsessed with hon­our, dom­in­a­tion, viol­ence and succession-planning, to the extent that when we meet our hero, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), he is fight­ing his broth­er for the right to not be euth­an­ised as the weak­est link in the tribe. Tragedy ensues.

In order to prove him­self worthy of the Yautcha, Dek flies off to the plan­et Genna to claim the ulti­mate trophy, the head of the “unk­il­lable” beast, the Kalisk. On arrival, he dis­cov­ers that a Weyland-Yutani exped­i­tion has the same idea — to har­vest valu­able genet­ic mater­i­al — but their party of Synthetics has been decim­ated in the attempt.

Talking torso Thia (Elle Fanning) per­suades Dek to take her on the exped­i­tion and she helps him nav­ig­ate some of the very fun dangers of a plan­et that seems to take great delight in find­ing innov­at­ive ways to dis­pose of intruders. On the way, Dek dis­cov­ers that team­work makes the dream work and that friends are the fam­ily you choose — none of which are core cul­tur­al prin­ciples for the Yautcha.

Superbly mar­shalled by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane, Prey), Badlands is a hoot. You’re nev­er very far away from an enter­tain­ing moment — the wee nod to Spielberg’s E.T. was a favour­ite of mine — and Schuster-Koloamatangi’s mask work is fant­ast­ic. He’s so expressive.

Made mostly in New Zealand (loc­al cast­ing experts Tina Cleary and Miranda Rivers deservedly get their names in the main cred­its along with cos­tume design­er Ngila Dickson and pro­duc­tion design­er Ra Vincent), at a time when we are once again debat­ing the value of screen pro­duc­tion sub­sidies, it’s worth men­tion­ing that on an estim­ated budget of US$105m, two-thirds of that can be expec­ted to stay in pock­ets here.

I saw someone online ask why we don’t sub­sid­ise all industry in Aotearoa New Zealand the same way. Well, maybe we should, but an easi­er answer is that Hollywood is an atten­tion mul­ti­pli­er. The rebates to have 20^th Century Studios build and shoot here gen­er­ate a much high­er pro­file than almost any oth­er dol­lar we can spend.

Hedda (DaCosta, 2025)

Hedda is quite arch, though, not very nat­ur­al­ist­ic, and I sus­pect my res­ist­ance to it is either a res­ist­ance to Ibsen or that DaCosta’s script doesn’t depart enough from him. It fea­tures a heightened sen­su­al­ity, or sexu­al ten­sion, as if Ibsen was being filtered through Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. (If you know how I feel about Saltburn, you’ll know that I don’t con­sider that to be much of a good thing.)

But Thompson car­ries the film with her com­bin­a­tion of brazen self-confidence and utter des­per­a­tion. Hedda, the clas­sic­al char­ac­ter, is a com­plex jumble of desires, frus­tra­tions and neur­oses – it’s no won­der act­ors are still queueing up to play her – and Thompson isn’t afraid to make her choices seem, if not unfor­give­able, at least unsympathetic.

(Listen to the full review.)

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost (Stiller, 2025)

Finally, a quick acknow­ledge­ment of anoth­er celebrity biop­ic (but a very good one) and anoth­er film about a celebrity told by one of their chil­dren.

If you cre­ated Apple TV’s biggest ever show2, gar­ner­ing 42 Emmy nom­in­a­tions (win­ning ten) and they asked you what else you wanted to do, like Ben Stiller, you might tell them that you want to make a film about your rela­tion­ship with your par­ents and that is what he has done.

Stiller grew up with show­biz par­ents. When he was born, Jerry Stiller & Anne Meara were a fam­ous nightclub com­edy double-act with reg­u­lar slots on the Ed Sullivan Show and were becom­ing a fix­ture of the day­time talk­show cir­cuit. Jerry was Jewish and Anne was Irish. Neither came from a per­form­ing fam­ily but the post-war years seemed to offer oppor­tun­it­ies that had pre­vi­ously been with­held to people like them and they had a work­mate that was hard for any­one to beat.

Jerry was anxious and lacked con­fid­ence. Comedy did not come easy to him and he needed to work at it. For Anne, it was the oppos­ite. She was a gif­ted com­ic and audi­ences warmed to her eas­ily. She would bridle at the end­less impro­visa­tion required at home to pro­duce new routines, and the con­stant rehears­al required to per­fect them.

How do we know this? Because Jerry taped almost every single ses­sion and then metic­u­lously cata­logued and filed them. He was a hoarder of almost everything related to their careers — and little Benjy’s and sis­ter Amy — and when he finally passed in 2020 at the age of 92, their huge apart­ment on Riverside Drive was full of mem­or­ab­il­ia as well as memories.

The centrepiece of the film is Ben and Amy (and Stiller & Meara’s assist­ant Dawn) going through all this stuff, pre­par­ing the apart­ment to be sold. To dis­pose of their own child­hood home. It’s that pro­cess that gives the film its uni­ver­sal­ity, and provides insight into a com­plic­ated fam­ily and a com­plic­ated fam­ily business.

Nothing Is Lost is a very kind film. There are no big dra­mat­ic reveals, like Mariska Hargitay’s My Mom Jayne. Jerry and Anne were very dif­fer­ent people but they kept it togeth­er and raised a good fam­ily, all the while try­ing to hold on to their own indi­vidu­al cre­at­ive mis­sions. You can see Ben Stiller him­self, wrest­ling with the real­isa­tion that no mat­ter how hard he tried to be a dif­fer­ent kind of fath­er or a dif­fer­ent kind of artist, how much he finally resembled Jerry and his struggles and you can see how much effort is required for him to for­give them both.