Monday new releases: 1 July 2024

Ka Whawhai Tonu: Struggle Without End, The Taste of Things, Inside Out 2 and A Quiet Place: Day One are in cinemas, The Royal Hotel is a digital rental or Blu, Remembering Gene Wilder is on Netflix

Before we begin, here’s a quick remind­er that the com­plete ver­sion of this weekly guide to new releases is only avail­able to paid sub­scribers, every­one else gets a sample.

Thanks to every­one who has joined the paid pro­gramme, those who have giv­en gift sub­scrip­tions and those who have recom­men­ded me to oth­er read­ers. As we approach the first anniversary of the re-launch here at Substack, this week­end I was delighted to see us reach round num­ber mile­stones in both free and paid subs. It means the world to me.

Ka Whawhai Tonu: Struggle Without End is not the first time that the pivotal 1864 siege of Ōrākau dur­ing the New Zealand Wars has been por­trayed on film. Pioneering New Zealand film­maker Rudall Hayward told it as Rewi’s Last Stand twice – once as a silent film in 1925 and again with sound in 1940.

The te reo Māori word whakapapa is strictly defined as gene­a­logy or lin­eage but I have heard it used in dif­fer­ent mod­ern con­texts – rather than a per­son­al line of des­cent it can be used to out­line the des­cent of an idea, a pur­pose, a philo­sophy. In that sense, then, Ka Whaiwahi Tonu whakapapas back (I’ve also heard the word used as a verb like this) through Aotearoa cinema his­tory (includ­ing Geoff Murphy’s Utu) and Māori screen rep­res­ent­a­tion, a per­fect example of how Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) travels for­ward in time while sim­ul­tan­eously look­ing back towards the past.

The Rewi of Rewi’s Last Stand is Rewi Maniapoto, chief of Ngāti Maniapoto. In the new film he is played by loc­al legend Temuera Morrison. His forces have been driv­en back by the colo­ni­al army and they are stuck in an unprom­ising pos­i­tion. Reinforcements have arrived from oth­er tribes and they are des­per­ate to engage – not to waste all that energy and all their weapons – but Maniapoto argues for a retreat over cer­tain defeat, the only way he believes they might keep their land.

He loses that argu­ment and hur­ried arrange­ments are made to defend the Ōrākau Pa before the colo­ni­al army arrives.

We see most of this through the eyes of two fic­tion­al char­ac­ters – young folk. Haki or Jack (Paku Fernandez) has been taken pris­on­er. A child sol­dier with an English fath­er (Jason Flemyng), he’s look­ing for a way out and to find his dead mother’s fam­ily. Also trapped in a role they do not want is Kopu (Hinerangi Harawira-Nicholas). She’s a medi­um, a chan­nel to the gods, but it is her mother’s ambi­tion that drives that choice of career.

These two bond as the battle begins and it is largely they who we fol­low as the tragedy of Ōrākau unfolds.

Tim Worrall’s script is unafraid to con­sider the many con­tra­dic­tions of Māori soci­ety of the time, the dif­fer­ences of polit­ic­al opin­ion as well as the dif­fer­ent rates of adop­tion of pāke­hā ways and tech­no­lo­gies. But it also makes clear that – 24 years after the sign­ing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the pos­i­tion of Māori in colo­ni­al New Zealand is desperate.

Michael Jonathan, the dir­ect­or, is a screen vet­er­an but this is his first fea­ture film and it is a robust and effect­ive action film. The pacing is excel­lent, with plenty of lulls in the battle for us to focus on the char­ac­ters, but when the fight­ing starts it is thrill­ingly shot.

A much more sed­ate exper­i­ence is The Taste of Things, a quick return from the suc­cess­ful French Film Festival.

Based on a hundred-year-old nov­el, in turn set thirty-odd years before the being pub­lished, the film is about the rela­tion­ship between gour­mand Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and his cook/assistant (and lov­er) Eugénie (Juliette Binoche).

Yes, it’s about food – lov­ingly, respect­fully, gor­geously presen­ted food – but it is also about love across the class divide. Eugénie repeatedly refuses Bouffant’s pro­pos­als of mar­riage but not his entry to her bed­room. They are a per­fect part­ner­ship in the kit­chen but she does not believe that she can be his equal in life. She chooses not to share his table when they cook extraordin­ary, exten­ded, meals for his friends.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

I pre­sume Bouffant’s abil­ity to indulge his gast­ro­nomy comes from being inde­pend­ently wealthy – money is nev­er men­tioned but there is no short­age of fine ingredi­ents and wines – but he is ser­i­ous about his art and the film is ser­i­ous about respect­ing it. Anh Hung Tran (Norwegian Wood, The Scent of Green Papaya) won the Best Director award at Cannes last year, and he knows just when to linger – on the food or on the faces.

Young fans of the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out have now had nearly ten years to gen­er­ate expect­a­tions for the sequel, Inside Out 2, help­ing to make it this year’s box office juggernaut.

I’m not a young fan but I did love the first film and can report that the new one pushed all the same but­tons for me.

Riley has reached puberty and all heck is break­ing loose in the emo­tions depart­ment with Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui and the new boss Anxiety now demand­ing con­trol over our old friends Joy, Sadness, Fear, etc.

I’m not one of those people who thinks that Pixar is some­how flounder­ing. While box office and atten­tion has been badly affected by the pan­dem­ic and an unhelp­ful stream­ing theatres release strategy, the films them­selves are as strong as they’ve ever been. Turning Red was fant­ast­ic! I loved Soul.

Inside Out 2 shows the same ridicu­lous levels of care and atten­tion that we have come to expect. There’s not a wasted, dare I say it, emo­tion or beat. Of all the Hollywood machines we are con­fron­ted by, Pixar is the one that hides the mech­an­ic­als the best. This film is obser­v­ant, kind, whole­some and – if you are the par­ent of a young teen­ager – prob­ably helpful.

Another fran­chise instal­ment that has no right to be as good as it is, A Quiet Place: Day One bene­fits greatly from hav­ing Michael Sarnoski, the writer-director of Pig, at the helm.

Before this week, the Quiet Place films had passed me by but I gave myself a crash course in these high concept, well executed but actu­ally quite silly, mon­ster movies.

The plan­et has been invaded by mon­sters from out­er space. They can’t see (or swim) but have hyper-sensitive hear­ing which allows them to identi­fy human tar­gets from a long way away, unless they are com­pletely silent. They are also very fast runners.

The latest pic­ture takes us back to the first day of the inva­sion and focuses on dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters from John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s fam­ily from the first two films.

The prodi­giously tal­en­ted Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave, Us) is Samira, a New York poet liv­ing in a New Jersey hos­pice, count­ing down the days until her dis­ease takes her life. Persuaded to vis­it the city one last time – prom­ised pizza – she and her ser­vice cat, Frodo, are caught up in the ali­en inva­sion giv­ing us a very Pig-like single-minded quest to reach an unlikely goal against ter­rible odds before it is too late.

After each off these films, I have so many ques­tions – if they arrived from space, why can’t the ali­ens use their fly­ing machines to cross the water that they are so afraid of – but it is to Sarnoski’s cred­it that I didn’t think of these things dur­ing the film.

Last October, we recom­men­ded the 2016 Australian doc­u­ment­ary, Hotel Coolgardie, and we evid­ently aren’t the only ones who rated that deeply troub­ling film. Kitty Green (The Assistant) has adap­ted that story of young female back­pack­ers trapped in out­back hospo and turned it into the horror-thriller that the doc­u­ment­ary threatened to become.

Green recog­nises that the sense of dread comes from the real­isa­tion that any of the men in that lonely bar could turn from ami­able boof­heads to some­thing more sin­is­ter at any moment. Dolly (played by Daniel Henshall who was ter­ri­fy­ing in Justin Kurzel’s debut The Snowtown Murders in 2011) is the excep­tion here – he is a bad seed from the get-go.

The sis­ter­hood isn’t spared. There’s plenty of risky beha­viour on dis­play and only Julia Garner’s Hanna seems to appre­ci­ate the risks.

Briefly, because it will prob­ably show up in your Netflix recom­mend­a­tions, Remembering Gene Wilder is a warm doc­u­ment­ary about an act­or who no one has a bad word for. There are no great sur­prises for any­one with a passing famili­ar­ity with his work but the tra­gic dis­in­teg­ra­tion of such an agile mind due to Alzheimer’s is very sad.

There’s, clearly, lots of love in this film and also some­thing mel­an­chol­ic in Wilder’s own recol­lec­tions (from the audiobook of his 2005 auto­bi­o­graphy, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art).

Many of Wilder’s col­leagues and con­tem­por­ar­ies are now gone – Cleavon Little, Richard Pryor, Sidney Poitier, Gilda Radner of course – so the movie is pad­ded out a bit with people who per­haps weren’t quite as close.