The Brutalist, Flight Risk, The Haka Party Incident, Maria and Companion are in cinemas and You’re Cordially Invited is streaming on Prime Video
Firstly, welcome to all the new subscribers brought here by my cheeky promo at the end of At the Summer Movies. I’m especially grateful to those of you who chose to become paid subscribers before receiving any updates! You are, as Michael Barrymore used to say, my kind of people.
The other day I read this BusinessWire article reporting on a recent survey of streaming habits and I was immediately drawn to this paragraph:
The survey reveals that the average American streaming service subscriber spends a staggering 110 hours a year—nearly five full days—deciding what to watch. This startling figure highlights the growing challenge of navigating an ever-expanding universe of content in the modern streaming landscape.
The survey of 2,000 American streaming subscribers underscores a critical pain point: content overload. One in five respondents feel it’s harder to find something to watch today than it was a decade ago, with 41 percent citing bloated content libraries as a primary frustration and 26 percent feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of original programming.
I hope that these newsletters are actually helping with that decision paralysis and not making things worse. If the updates are coming too often, let me know and we’ll take a look at the model. The editor-in-chief and I were talking on Saturday about whether less might be more around here but we’ll be guided by your feedback.
Most of the newsletters you get from me will be pretty brief recommendations of single feature films or shows, with a preference for titles that are available in Aotearoa New Zealand, but we do have international subscribers and I try and take them into account as much as possible.
Once a week, I survey brand new releases, either in local cinemas or on the major streaming services. These will be longer reads but will cover more territory.
It’s not always possible to get to everything in a timely manner. This week, I include The Brutalist and Flight Risk which have just had their second weekend in theatres. The new Nicole Kidman erotic drama Babygirl was playing so few sessions last weekend (only two a day in one theatre) that I couldn’t get to it and we may have to wait until it’s available digitally.
The Brutalist (Corbet, 2024)
It takes more than just length for a film to become an epic but at 215 minutes, plus a fifteen-minute interval, The Brutalist meets that first requirement. It also needs to be about something greater than just the domestic travails of its characters and it ticks that box, too.
This is a film about America and the promises made and broken by capitalism. But it’s also about something else, something I won’t reveal here because it comes in an epilogue at the end. It hits you like a gut punch and forces you to think again about everything you have just seen – even to the extent of wanting to rewatch the film immediately, from the beginning.
It’s not being clever for clever’s sake, it’s a genuinely brilliant and powerful film about trauma and the inadequacy of recovery, the impossibility of healing and the necessity of survival.
(Listen or read here.)
Flight Risk (Gibson, 2025)
I think the jury reported back a while ago on whether Mel Gibson was a decent human being or not but, if I set aside his lack of moral fibre, I have to acknowledge that he has always been a capable filmmaker. Braveheart won five Oscars. Hacksaw Ridge was a terrific film about a conscientious objector showing uncommon bravery in World War II.
But he does have a tendency to let the uglier side of his personality overwhelm the rest. Apocalypto was a thrilling chase movie set among the Mayan civilisation but his message became clear at the end when we see the arrival of the colonial ships who have come to bring Catholicism to the heathens. The less said about the gleeful sadism of The Last Temptation of Christ The Passion of the Christ the better.
Flight Risk leans in that direction, too, despite a clever set up provided by screenwriter Jared Rosenberg. A runaway mob accountant (Topher Grace) is apprehended in a remote Alaskan motel by U.S. Marshall Michelle Dockery and agrees to become a prosecution witness. A light plane is chartered to get them to Anchorage where – with backup – they can fly to New York in time for the trial. But there’s something off about this pilot (Mark Wahlberg).
A tight three-hander on board a rickety aircraft (with some convenient satellite phone calls to keep the plot moving forward), this should have been an easy film to make entertaining but, unfortunately, Gibson’s decision to make Wahlberg’s character a charmless sadist (with a penchant for making rape threats) means that his action directing is undermined by the audience’s desire to be anywhere else but stuck in a plane with him.
The Haka Party Incident (Wolfe, 2024)
The Haka Party Incident has arrived at an extremely pertinent point in the development of our race relations in New Zealand as well as the so-called debate over our constitutional arrangements. It should be required viewing for anyone who has somehow forgotten how far we have come since those days. There are attitudes displayed by pākehā New Zealanders in this film that should have been shocking even then.
(For some reason the RNZ web editors haven’t turned this review into a readable page. Too political? You be the judge and listen here.)
Maria (Larraín, 2024)
Of all three Larraín biographies, I found this one to be the easiest and most satisfying to watch and I think it comes down to the music. Not just that the operatic selections are so beautiful but that they also encourage a slower pace, a more leisurely structure. The dialogue scenes may be – to some audiences at least – frustratingly slow but I found that they matched an emotional or elegiacal tone that starts with the music.
In the first two films, the scores were much more strident, more dissonant, illustrating their characters heightened states of mind, but they kept the audience on edge, too. Anyway, no disrespect to Mica Levi or Johnny Greenwood, who are very fine modern composers, but neither of them are Puccini, are they?
(Listen here.)
Companion (Hancock, 2025)
Saturday was a stabby sort of day at the movies (see Flight Risk, above) but the execution of Companion managed to exceed the clever conceit rather than let it down.
It’s the near future and all sorts of automated gizmos are making our lives better, including domestic “emotional support” robots. Jack Quaid (The Boys) brings his electronic girlfriend (Sophie Thatcher from Yellowjackets) to a weekend away at a pal’s luxurious (but remote) lake house. There he ‘jailbreaks’ her CPU in order to commit the perfect crime.
But things immediately start to go wrong and the newly emancipated Iris – with her heightened senses and enhanced powers of self-defence – becomes someone to be reckoned with in her own right.
Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” are cleverly made use of here in service of a (slightly) on-the-nose satire about controlling boyfriends and desperate incels. It helps that it’s played with gusto, especially by supporting performers Lukas Gage and Harvey Gullén whose relationship is particularly sweet.
Companion was fun and had a decent number of surprises in its hundred-or-so minute running time.
You’re Cordially Invited (Stoller, 2025)
Cordial is the word to describe this minor rom-com from Forgetting Sarah Marshall writer and director Nicholas Stoller. Like Netflix last week, Prime Video seems content to throw buckets of money at some star power rather than a well-developed script and hope like heck that some chemistry will miraculously occur.
Will Ferrell is a widowed doting dad whose daughter (Geraldine Viswanathan) has decided to marry her boyfriend (Stony Blyden). At the same time, reality TV producer Reece Witherspoon’s sister (Meredith Hagner) has become engaged to a male exotic dancer (Jimmy Tatro) and both of these brides want to get married on the beautiful Palmetto Island in Georgia.
The tiny resort can only accommodate one wedding at a time but a tragic misunderstanding sees both events happening on the same weekend. A battle of wits ensues as Ferrell and Witherspoon attempt to make their family’s wedding dreams come true. The source of much of the humour here is that the two families are very different – the buttoned-down, old school, southern conservatism of Witherspoon’s family and the looser, more expressive, style of Ferrell’s party.
Sporadically amusing (but working exceedingly hard for it), there’s a consistent pattern in how it treats all of its characters. They are all awful right up until they each get a big reveal that provides some kind of forgivable humanising detail and allows for a sentimental moment of connection. It’s like it has all been planned out with a spreadsheet, much the way wedding planner might do things.
