Tuesday new releases: 2 December 2025

When you com­bine the increased social com­mit­ments of this time of year with the lack of avail­able screens in Wellington for many releases, you find that a fair few new films have missed out on my atten­tion this week.

The one that I really feel bad about miss­ing out on is Die My Love1, a ser­i­ous piece of work with two big name per­formers (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson) and a top dir­ect­or (Lynne Ramsay). Unfortunately, on Sunday there were only two ses­sions for the film in the Wellington region and both were a 40-minute drive away.

As I often say, and equally often fail to make good on, I’ll catch up with it when it hits the streamers.

I had high hopes for Zootopia 2 as I have been a fan of the ori­gin­al since I made this video review for RNZ back in 2016, but it ended up being the kind of dis­ap­point­ment that we often assume sequels to be — a repeat of the same for­mula with dimin­ish­ing returns.

Odd-couple crime fight­ers Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), a rab­bit with imposter syn­drome, and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a smart-talking former con artist who also hap­pens to be a fox, have been made part­ners at the Zootopia Police Department after their efforts in the last film brought down the cor­rupt may­or. Utterly unable to fol­low orders from both the chief of police (Idris Elba as an African buf­falo) or the new may­or (Patrick Warburton as a hand­some but vain stal­lion), Judy and Nick are determ­ined to crack anoth­er case. A piece of snake­skin indic­ates that some­thing might be up at the posh gala to cel­eb­rate the city’s centennial.

Zootopia is able to com­fort­ably house all of these dif­fer­ent spe­cies because one hun­dred years ago a lynx inven­ted air con­di­tion­ing — a weath­er wall — but a snake (a rare out­lawed spe­cies) played by Ke Huy Quan is determ­ined to prove that it was his grand­moth­er who actu­ally inven­ted the tech­no­logy but it was stolen by the Lynxley fam­ily who took all the glory and the riches that came with it.

As in the first film, there’s a great deal of sil­li­ness and inven­tion2 in the details of the city and its inhab­it­ants — I count more than 65 named voice act­ors most of whom are pure stunt cast­ing for name recog­ni­tion reas­ons — and I wish that the same amount of cre­ativ­ity had gone into the core story, a <em>Chinatown</em>-like tale of poor unfor­tu­nates being pushed out of their prop­erty due to power, cor­rup­tion and lies.

The inten­ded audi­ence for Zootopia 2 will prob­ably have a good time wheth­er they see it in cinemas or at home, I just feel like it could have been so much better.

Emma Thompson is one of the smartest people ever to work in the movie busi­ness so when she turns up in a mid-budget viol­ent thrill­er about a kid­nap­ping gone wrong, you’d have to assume that there’s more to the story than meets the eye (cor­rect) and that there’s some sur­pris­ing depth to the char­ac­ters (also cor­rect). That, and at the age of 66 she’d like to do some­thing she’s nev­er done before.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

In Dead of Winter, Thompson plays Barb, a wid­owed tackle and bait retail­er in snowy remote Minnesota. On the way to scat­ter her husband’s ashes — and do a bit of ice fish­ing — at the lake where they had their first date, she hears evid­ence of foul play and on fur­ther invest­ig­a­tion dis­cov­ers a young girl chained up in the base­ment of a cabin.

Despite being ill-equipped to mount any kind of res­cue, she real­ises that she is likely to be this girl’s only hope and finds her­self get­ting deep­er and deep­er into a dan­ger­ous situ­ation as the two des­per­ate kid­nap­pers fight to stay on top of a situ­ation rap­idly get­ting out of control.

We real­ise that every­one involved has their reas­ons for being there and the two kid­nap­pers (Judy Greer and Marc Menchaca) are equally out of their depth.

Minnesota3 — and its accents — bring to mind the clas­sic Fargo and Thompson’s Barb has some­thing of Frances McDormand’s decent prac­tic­al­ity as well as that coun­try sense of right and wrong. 

At this time of year, it would be easy to let this one slip by but it’s worth a look for two women (Thompson and Greer) rel­ish­ing an oppor­tun­ity to play against type.

Further listening

Here’s a link to my chat about Dead of Winter with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights from last Friday.