Some things to watch tonight: Wednesday 21 January

Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger, Sinners and Workmates have all made the journey to home video.

Firstly, some of your feedback.

In response to the Housekeeping post last week (the first one back after the hol­i­day and he one where I talked about shift­ing from Substack and how dif­fi­cult it is), read­er TH said:

I remem­ber that pre-internet world of fan­zines on cheap news­print, news­pa­pers all owned by National Party fun­ders, and lovely glossy magazines like Première (which I admit I sub­scribed to for sev­er­al years) that cost a small for­tune in NZ$ and arrived a month after the movie fea­tured had been and gone here. I dunno, we’ve lost a lot and gained a lot of dif­fer­ent things at the same time.

After the Isiah Whitlock Jr. trib­ute last Wednesday (where I referred read­ers to an epis­ode of the Rancho Notorious pod­cast), the very same TH wrote:

A plea to bring back Rancho Notorious, even just for a Christmas din­ner epis­ode, because we need all the cheer we can get right now. The loc­al pod­casts in my feed are all miser­able as heck or under­stand­ably angry about the world and I need an occa­sion­al break. How about a pod­cast with Simon? The two of you arguing about all the movies you dis­agree on would be a treat.

I can report that there has been some dis­cus­sion about reviv­ing Rancho Notorious, if only for one epis­ode. Just to see if we can.

More recently, read­er JS of Mt. Victoria — some­thing of an expert on this top­ic — replied to my review of Hamnet, thus:

I hear what you’re say­ing about HAMNET, Dan. I ration­al­ise the end sequence as being how Agnes remem­bers it. It’s totally filtered through her men­tal and emo­tion­al state, rather than an object­ive view of how it plays out in ‘real­ity’. She feels the sup­port of the people in the pit. She senses Will know­ing she’s there and ‘get­ting it’ in her own way.

My only object­ive quibble is why is he tak­ing his Ghost make-up off when he still has a scene com­ing up in Gertrude’s closet?

And read­er SD of Onehunga made an excel­lent point about the Jimmys in The Bone Temple:

One quibble with your Bone Temple assess­ment, how­ever, is that clev­erly the Jimmys aren’t inten­tion­ally mod­elled on the gravest betray­er of human trust on British his­tory – obvi­ously in the world of the film Saville hadn’t yet become or rather been outed as that. I think it’s one of Garland’s cleverest flour­ishes that the audi­ence feels sickened by some­thing the screen Jimmys could have no idea of.

Back to busi­ness. I wanted to point out a hand­ful of films from 2025 that are now avail­able on sub­scrip­tion stream­ing. Firstly, Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger which ori­gin­ally played in the British & Irish Film Festival late in 2024 and then returned for sea­sons at select cinemas:

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to watch A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies – the great director’s epic con­tri­bu­tion to the same ‘cen­tury of cinema’ series that brought us Sam Neill’s Cinema of Unease – you’ll already know how much pleas­ure and insight you can get from Scorsese talk­ing about film.

In Made in England, he turns his atten­tion to a dif­fer­ent kind of ‘per­son­al jour­ney’, his unex­pec­ted rela­tion­ship with the dir­ect­or Michael Powell and his appre­ci­ation for the ambi­tious and exper­i­ment­al movies Powell made with cre­at­ive part­ner Emeric Pressburger in the 40s and 50s.

Lavishly illus­trated, Scorsese’s his­tory shows us what British cinema might have become if post-war cyn­icism, pro­duc­tion aus­ter­ity and kit­chen sink drama hadn’t taken hold. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes are glor­i­ous but Scorsese also intro­duced me to two less well-known Powell/Pressburger films, A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I’m Going! Both were con­sid­er­ably less col­our­ful (visu­ally) but just as emo­tion­ally vivid, per­haps even more so.

I love that Scorsese isn’t afraid to laud tech­nic­al achieve­ment as well as artist­ic vis­ion – Technicolor and VistaVision get spe­cif­ic shout-outs – and I always feel like I’m a smarter film watch­er after spend­ing time with the great man.

If watch­ing that doc­u­ment­ary encour­ages you to seek out Powell & Pressburger’s work — and it should — you will be pleased to know that ViaVision/Imprint recently put out a hand­some box of their films includ­ing Blimp, Life and Death, Black Narcissus and A Canterbury Tale (but not The Red Shoes or I Know Where I’m Going!). It is only “Collection One” how­ever1.

I reviewed Ryan Coogler’s Sinners for the late and lamen­ted At the Movies back in April last year:

Jordan’s star power makes Smoke and Stack the most excit­ing char­ac­ters, but they aren’t the heart of the film, not really. Fantastic new­comer Miles Caton plays Sammie, a tal­en­ted young sing­er and musi­cian, ambi­tious to make his for­tune in the record­ing stu­di­os and clubs of Chicago, going against the wishes of his preach­er fath­er. It’s Sammie’s tal­ent that pro­duces the music that can tran­scend every­day life but also attract the undead.

All the while, we are cap­tiv­ated by Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s stun­ning 65mm cine­ma­to­graphy – so dif­fer­ent from the gritty and grainy lens flares of The Last Showgirl earli­er this year – Oscar-winner Ruth Carter’s cos­tume design and Ludwig Göransson’s music.

But the real star of the show is the vir­tu­os­ity of Coogler, the bal­an­cing act of the laugh-out-loud funny moments, fol­lowed by extraordin­ary fantasy sequences and then clas­sic hor­ror jump scares.

Local rom­com Workmates has made the luc­rat­ive (I hope) leap to Netflix. I had some reser­va­tions when it played at the New Zealand International Film Festival but I couldn’t be hap­pi­er to see it fol­low Tinā onto everyone’s stream­ing service:

Another film that relies on tak­ing the mickey out of the per­form­ing arts for its com­edy is Workmates, made by Fantail’s Sophie Henderson and Curtis Vowell. As a former the­at­ri­cian myself, I could see how accur­ate this por­tray­al of a tiny, under­fun­ded, theatre in cent­ral Auckland was but also the glar­ing moments when that accur­acy was sac­ri­ficed for (too) cheap laughs.

Henderson plays Lucy, former play­wright now ded­ic­ated theatre work­er Lucy and Matt Whelan is former act­or and now ded­ic­ated theatre co-worker Tom. It’s not entirely clear why there’s no real demarc­a­tion between their roles except that we need them to be thrown togeth­er in the mad­cap run­ning of this ven­ue. Except that Tom’s girl­friend is preg­nant and he needs to find a “prop­er job”.

The chem­istry between the two leads is the main pleas­ure in Workmates and that ease sug­gests that someone should give them all decent devel­op­ment time and pro­duc­tion budget so they aren’t stuck in such a self-referential situ­ation. Theatre is so rarely por­trayed well in film – The Great Lillian Hall’s Cherry Orchard is a decent example even if the pro­duc­tion details are non­sensic­al while the off-Broadway pro­duc­tions in Materialists and A Different Man are simply not ser­i­ous – that it’s slightly dis­ap­point­ing to see the loc­al ver­sion treated as a fig­ure of fun, even by its own practitioners.

Workmates was developed and pro­duced largely dur­ing (and as a res­ult of) the Covid lock­downs and its lim­it­a­tions are a reflec­tion of that restric­ted time, some­thing I should have been a bit more for­giv­ing of first time around.

Where to watch Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger

Aotearoa: Streaming on DocPlay or digit­al rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Streaming on DocPlay, FoxtelNow or SBS On Demand

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland & UK: Digital rental

India: Streaming on Mubi

USA: Streaming on Kanopy

Where to watch Sinners

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on HBO Max

Canada: Streaming on Crave

Ireland & UK: Streaming on SkyGo

India: Streaming on HotStar

USA: Streaming on Prime Video or HBO Max

Where to watch Workmates

Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on Netflix

Rest of the world: Not cur­rently available