Friday new releases: 2 February 2024

Priscilla, Argylle and Riceboy Sleeps are in cinemas, Society of the Snow and The Greatest Night in Pop are on Netflix

The most not­able thing I took away from Sofia Coppola’s adapt­a­tion of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 auto­bi­o­graphy, “Elvis & Me”, is how much feel­ing is involved. Not emo­tion­al feel­ing – although there is a bit of that – but tact­ile feel­ing, mater­i­al feeling.

It opens with a close-up of Priscilla’s bare feet walk­ing on pink shag pile but from then on you get the sense that as an audi­ence mem­ber you can feel it all – mohair sweat­ers, green baize black­jack tables, taffeta.

Coppola has always had a sense of the import­ance of stuff – it says more about the own­er or wear­er than we give it cred­it for – but it seems to reach new heights here.

Priscilla was fourteen-years-old when she fell into Elvis Presley’s orbit while he (and her fam­ily) were sta­tioned in Germany in the Army in 1959. They were both chil­dren, except that Elvis was already 24.

Priscilla, the film, fol­lows a lin­ear tra­ject­ory from those first meet­ings, through flir­ta­tion and rela­tion­ship to mar­riage, moth­er­hood and then divorce.

It could have ended up a tra­di­tion­al biop­ic – and leans that way at times – except that Coppola’s eye for illu­min­at­ing detail and Cailee Spaeny’s exquis­itely cal­ib­rated per­form­ance keep bring­ing us back to a young woman (like Marie Antoinette in Coppola’s 2006 film) who has become trapped by a life of lux­ury and frus­trated by unknow­able rules.

Paradoxically, by fore­ground­ing Priscilla, the film becomes more insight­ful about Elvis than any recent film. Improbably tall Australian act­or Jacob Elordi gets the voice right and we’re mostly spared any attempts at recre­at­ing him in per­form­ance. We just the get the mer­cur­i­al, petu­lant, needy and insec­ure ver­sion of him.

Like Elvis’ life, the final third of the film is uneven and unhappy and by the time we get to 1971 it’s clear that Coppola shares Priscilla’s view that its bet­ter for all of us if we just leave Elvis behind.

Argylle has been out less than 24 hours in Aotearoa and already the stink from the rest of the world has reached here. I didn’t hate it as much as I have hated pre­vi­ous Matthew Vaughn films (i.e. a lot) and it’s a big expens­ive mess, to be sure, but there’s a sliv­er of some­thing ori­gin­al in Jason Fuch’s script.

For a few years now, the phrase “An Apple Original” indic­ated that there was going to be a level of taste involved in a pro­duc­tion but Argylle is now a counter-factual, a brand dam­aging exer­cise for all involved (except Mr. Vaughan).

Bryce Dallas Howard is Elly Conway, an anxiety-riddled cat-lady who is also the author of a series of phe­nom­en­ally suc­cess­ful spy nov­els fea­tur­ing the tit­u­lar secret agent Argylle (played in the recre­ations by Henry Cavill, whose charm the film over­rates considerably).

The books are extremely pop­u­lar in the espi­on­age com­munity, it turns out, because they have a habit of eer­ily pre­dict­ing real world events. Competing organ­isa­tions now want her to write the next chapter so they can steal a march on their enemies.

I won’t go into more detail because the plot twists are the reas­on this movie exists, suf­fice to say that des­pite being over­blown, over­stuffed and over-confident, there are two sequences near the end that are actu­ally quite nov­el – my wife calls one the “Hello Kitty Boss Brawl” – but then it adds anoth­er twist and anoth­er long set-piece by which time we are all ready to go home.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Early in the film, Conway has a book event at a small Colorado moun­tain town and I think I am safe in pre­dict­ing that this will be the only time that Matthew Vaughn will make it to Telluride.

Anthony Shim’s Korean-Canadian drama Riceboy Sleeps made a trip to mul­tiple inter­na­tion­al fest­ivals in 2022 and 2023 (includ­ing the New Zealand International Film Festival last year) and is now emer­ging in loc­al cinemas.

A little bit like last week’s selec­tion A Thousand and One, it is a multi-year story about a single moth­er fiercely pro­tect­ing her young son but the rela­tion­ship between them fray­ing any­way. This is also a migrant story – from Korea to Canada in the 90s and early 2000s.

Until I watched Kore-eda’s Broker the oth­er day, I didn’t know how com­mon it is for unwanted Korean babies to simply be left on door­steps and then raised in orphanages.

That’s the begin­ning of the story here, too. So-Young (Choi Seung-yoon) was raised an orphan and then left with a small child when her part­ner dies, all before the film starts. Illegitimate chil­dren in Korea are denied cit­izen­ship so she packs the boy up and they move to Canada for a bet­ter life.

The film piles it on pretty thick from there but I did appre­ci­ate the cine­ma­to­graphy by Shim and Christopher Lew – long takes, a gently mobile cam­era and Kodak 16mm film grain. It looks great and the changes in aspect ratio show­ing the pas­sage of time are really well done.

But the story, auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al or not, was just too relent­lessly tra­gic for me.

Plenty of tragedy in Society of the Snow but a remark­ably uplift­ing end­ing too.

It’s the second cine­mat­ic ver­sion of the fam­ous “Miracle of the Andes” story about the Uruguyan rugby team who crashed in the moun­tains on their way to Chile in 1972.

Turns out the notori­ous can­ni­bal­ism story is only one of many ghastly aspects of the affair as only 16 people (out of the ori­gin­al 45) sur­vive for over 70 days in the beau­ti­ful waste­land sep­ar­at­ing the east and west of Latin America.

One of the most trau­mat­ising pieces of cinema I’ve ever seen was Bayona’s recre­ation of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in his 2012 film The Impossible and the crash sequence here is incred­ible – and incred­ibly dif­fi­cult to watch.

The screen­play (by Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego) doesn’t shy away from any aspect of the chal­len­ging mater­i­al and also helps delin­eate all of the many char­ac­ters, helped by the cast­ing of rel­at­ive unknowns from Spain Uruguay and Argentina.

On a tech­nic­al level, this is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Stunning prac­tic­al effects, seam­less digit­al VFX, extraordin­ary Atmos sound mix, Oscar-nominated hair and makeup. The fact that all of that skill is in the ser­vice of such a great story makes it a ‘must watch’ in my book.

Just so you know, I’m not totally immune from the algorithm and when I switched on Netflix last night and saw this one pro­moted at me, I couldn’t go to bed until I’d fin­ished it.

Perfectly cal­ib­rated nos­tal­gia for my gen­er­a­tion, The Greatest Night in Pop is a ter­rible but accur­ate title for a doc­u­ment­ary that you can show your kids to per­suade them how tal­en­ted 80s music stars actu­ally were. Michael Jackson was clearly a phe­nomen­on and we get to see why.

A com­bin­a­tion of recut foot­age from the four cam­er­as that recor­ded the entire record­ing ses­sion for “We Are the World” with talk­ing head memor­ies from some who were there (there are self-effacing turns by Lionel Richie, Huey Lewis, Bruce Springsteen and many oth­ers), the film is very well edited por­trait of a par­tic­u­lar time and place.

I’d like to high­light some of the tal­ent that was there who we don’t remem­ber so well – James Ingram, Kim Carnes, Kenny Loggins and Steve Perry from Journey all make you stop and say, ‘Wow! You could really do this.’

Also, if you ever find your­self suf­fer­ing from social anxi­ety, trust that you will nev­er look as uncom­fort­able as Bob Dylan did that night.