Monday new releases: 25 August 2025

Correction: In Friday’s news­let­ter, I said that Gut Instinct was a New Zealand exclus­ive rent­al release on AroVision. Within moments, AroVision’s Andrew Armitage reached out to let me know that it is actu­ally a world­wide AroVision exclus­ive. That’s right, no geo­b­lock­ing from any­where on the plan­et. Here’s a link to the Gut Instinct page at AroVision and the ser­vice has apps so you can screen their rent­als on your home TV.

We’ve had house­guests this week­end so trips to the cinema for new releases have been some­what restric­ted. Indeed, even find­ing com­mon ground on the two new fea­tures that have dropped on stream­ers proved impossible. I showed the trail­ers for Eenie Meanie (Disney+) and Night Will Fall (Netflix) to the assembly but neither felt enough like Saturday night fare and we ended up watch­ing the new 4K res­tor­a­tion of Coppola’s The Conversation on UHD disc instead.

Despite being over 50 years old instead of brand spank­ing new, the clas­sic para­noid thrill­er got the thumbs up from every­one and promp­ted plenty of debate and requests watch the DVD extras.

The Conversation turned out to be in con­ver­sa­tion, if you like, with a film we did get to see in cinemas on Saturday, David Mackenzie’s Relay. Similarly occu­pied by secrets, sur­veil­lance, trust and betray­al, Relay’s first two-thirds is about as good as mod­ern thrillers get. If your favour­ite bits of spy movies is the atten­tion to detail of trade­craft, then you’ll be in clover like I was. The film’s title comes from the Tri-State Relay Service, a way for the hard-of-hearing to have tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions involving a third party speak­ing and tran­scrib­ing the con­ver­sa­tion between two people. “Go ahead.”

Riz Ahmed’s secret­ive cor­por­ate fix­er uses it to hide everything about his iden­tity as he nego­ti­ates the return of sens­it­ive doc­u­ments that have been stolen by whis­tleblowers who sub­sequently get cold feet. Indeed, for the first half of the film he doesn’t have a single line of dia­logue, sug­gest­ing he might be play­ing anoth­er deaf char­ac­ter, as he did when he blew us all away as the rock drum­mer in Sound of Metal (2019).

He’s engaged by a ter­ri­fied Lily James, who is in pos­ses­sion of a report accus­ing her former genet­ic crop mod­i­fi­er employ­ers of pro­du­cing tox­ic wheat. They’ve been mak­ing threats and now she wants to return the report and make the whole prob­lem go away. But, she knows what she knows, and Ahmed’s Ash has the only solu­tion that can keep her safe. But keep­ing these dan­ger­ous secrets secret puts mil­lions of oth­ers at risk — from pois­on­ous food products to unsafe phar­ma­ceut­ic­als — and is start­ing to eat away at his own conscience.

The premise and exe­cu­tion of the first two acts is so good that it shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing that the con­clu­sion doesn’t quite meas­ure up. Endings are hard. But Relay is still one of the tight­est and most sat­is­fy­ing thrillers of the year.

There’s a shot near the finale of Relay which shows Ahmed in the back of a New Jersey police car with the slo­gan, “Trust. Integrity. Partnership.” stuck on the side. It’s a help­ful guide to the themes of the film, I sup­pose, if a bit on the nose, but it’s not the only example this week. In Ari Aster’s Eddington, Joaquin Phoenix’s small town sher­iff turned may­or­al can­did­ate fes­toons his work vehicle with polit­ic­al slo­gans and the one he’s seen in front of most often reads “YOUR BEING MANIPULATED”. He’s dead right, of course, but the manipulator-in-chief is Mr. Aster himself.

Eddington is a fic­tion­al small town in New Mexico — actu­ally por­trayed by the won­der­fully named Truth or Consequences — and Aster intends it to be a kind of micro­cosm of frac­tious United States soci­ety in the 2020s.

The film is set in May 2020. Covid is spread­ing around the world, thou­sands of people are dying, there is no vac­cine and the only pro­tec­tion against the spread are the deeply incon­veni­ent impos­i­tions on per­son­al free­dom that were mask­ing man­dates, social dis­tan­cing and lockdowns.

The vir­us hasn’t arrived yet in Eddington¹ but the restric­tions have and Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe Cross butts heads with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) over how to enforce them. We learn that the pair have his­tory between them. In fact, every­one in the town seems to have his­tory, as each char­ac­ter is used by Aster to rep­res­ent some aspect of American disfunctionality.

It’s said that com­edy equals tragedy plus time but, not only are we not far enough away from these events for Aster’s cyn­ic­al detach­ment to be amus­ing, the frac­tures he is por­tray­ing for laughs aren’t even over. Trump’s second ascend­ancy, polit­ic­al assas­sin­a­tions over vac­cine man­dates², ter­ror­ist attacks on the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta³ are all signs that we can’t treat the Covid peri­od as “what a crazy time that was, what were we think­ing?” because we are still deal­ing with the fal­lout every day.

Even here in New Zealand, on my way to the Eddington screen­ing at the fest­iv­al, I saw a bill­board arguing for retri­bu­tion against politi­cians, sci­ent­ists, stat­ist­i­cians, epi­demi­olo­gists and oth­er pub­lic ser­vants who did their best to keep us safe.

But Coronavirus is just the first salvo in Aster’s “state of the nation”. Cryptocurrency, con­spir­acy the­or­ies, per­son­al growth grift­ers are all fea­tured (but without any deep­er ana­lys­is of how and why people are being so eas­ily manip­u­lated and by whom). The most dis­ap­point­ing ele­ment, though, is his treat­ment of the Black Lives Matter move­ment — George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis in May 2020, spark­ing protests across the coun­try and Aster finds amuse­ment in the stu­dents of Eddington tak­ing to the streets in ‘ally­ship’.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

There’s no deny­ing the film­mak­ing chops in Eddington. There are some extremely well dir­ec­ted set-pieces and one stun­ningly executed sur­prise, but it’s in the ser­vice of some­thing that’s ulti­mately hollow.

Also in the flurry of films going on wide release after their fest­iv­al ses­sions, Sophie Henderson and Curtis Vowell’s loc­al com­edy Workmates. I included it in my NZIFF pre­view a few weeks ago:

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.

Also in that NZIFF pre­view: David Croneberg’s The Shrouds (which goes on wide release in New Zealand on Thursday), The Ballad of Wallis Island, music pseudo-documentary Pavements and har­row­ing Ukraine war doco 2000 Meters to Andriivka.

1. By the end of 2020, 2243 Covid-related deaths would be recor­ded in New Mexico. ↩︎
2. Minnesota state rep­res­ent­at­ive Melissa Hortmann was assas­sin­ated along with her hus­band and her dog on 14 June and the per­pet­rat­or has said his ori­gin­al inten­tion was to ini­ti­ate a cit­izens arrest over the Covid man­dates in the state. ↩︎
3. A gun­man fired over 500 rounds into the CDC Building in Atlanta on 8 August, killing a first respon­der. ↩︎