Monday new releases: 8 September 2025

It’s been a big — and mostly sat­is­fy­ing — week for new motion pic­tures so, to squeeze everything in, these are going to be what we call in the biz “cap­sule reviews”1.

Fight or Flight is in sim­il­ar ter­rit­ory to one of last week’s favour­ites, The Toxic Avenger: a high concept, low cul­ture, crowd-pleaser, shot for pen­nies on the dol­lar in Eastern Europe (Hungary instead of Bulgaria this time) with vil­lains so mon­strous that they thor­oughly deserve the sat­is­fy­ing wal­lop­ing they get.

After years in the movie star wil­der­ness, Josh Hartnett plays a prop­er action hero at last: Lucas Reyes — a former Secret Service agent who has spent years of his own in the wil­der­ness due to a mor­ally defens­ible but polit­ic­ally unfor­giv­able indis­cre­tion. Living in an alco­hol­ic haze in Bangkok, he’s giv­en a shot at redemp­tion. A mys­ter­i­ous ter­ror­ist known as the Ghost — leaves no trace, no known ali­ases or descrip­tion — may finally have dropped a clue in the form of a trail of blood lead­ing from a dodgy veter­in­ari­an to the air­port and a flight to San Francisco. Reyes has to get on that plane, identi­fy the Ghost and make sure they are alive to face justice on the oth­er side.

Unfortunately, there’s been a leak and almost every­one else on the flight is some kind of mer­cen­ary or bounty hunter, want­ing the Ghost to become — as the kids say these days — unalive. And so begins a joy­ously demen­ted remix of Snakes on a Plane and the Brad Pitt pic­ture Bullet Train. There are plenty of gags at the expense of glob­al air travel as well as cre­at­ive use made of intern­al air­liner geo­graphy. It’s when our hero dis­cov­ers a chain­saw in the cargo bay that you know things are really going to kick off.

Hartnett appar­ently he did all his own stunts in the film — as well as some excel­lent drunk/stoned act­ing — but there’s also some­thing meta going on here, as if he’s actu­ally play­ing Channing Tatum play­ing Lucas Reyes rather than invent­ing a char­ac­ter from fresh cloth.

Margaret Gordon’s long-awaited doc­u­ment­ary about loc­al music legend Shayne Carter, Life in One Chord, was a ton­ic of a dif­fer­ent kind. The two words that came to mind watch­ing the first few scenes were ‘love’ and ‘laughter’ — not words that usu­ally come to mind when talk­ing about kiwi musos.

As the dryly amus­ing Carter (Straitjacket Fits, Double Happys, Dimmer, etc.) takes us up the steep Dunedin hills of his child­hood, you can see that — des­pite some hard times tak­ing place in the home he grew up in — he is grate­ful to have escaped the fate of some of his con­tem­por­ar­ies, the ones referred to in the title of his auto­bi­o­graphy, Dead People I Have Known. Returning to his high school — where des­pite his punk­ish rebel­lion, he seems to be remembered fondly — and to the com­munity its hall in Maori Hill where the “Dunedin Sound” first found its voice.

Carter is refresh­ingly free of angst, even if the book alluded to more per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al chal­lenges than the film allows for. This would make a good double-feature with the Marlon Williams film, Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds, as both artists are com­ing to terms with their Māori her­it­age in a world that hasn’t been encouraging.

In Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor announces her­self as a cre­at­ive force to be reckoned with, win­ning the Waldo Salt Best Screenplay prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for a film that she also dir­ects and stars in.

She plays Agnes, a New England lit­er­ary aca­dem­ic, wrest­ling with the trauma of a sexu­al assault while she was a grad stu­dent. Told in out-of-sequence chapters, Victor shows how the shift­ing sands of grief, pain and loss make it impossible to do what most of the people around you want, which is to put it behind you (or at least be pre­dict­able about it).

An excel­lent sup­port­ing cast play char­ac­ters who show vary­ing degrees of actu­al sup­port. Sorry, Baby feels heart­break­ingly authen­t­ic but at the same time is charm­ing and funny. I feel like the reli­ance on the lit­er­ary can­on to provide scaf­fold­ing — Woolf, Baldwin, Nabokov and that heart­less pat­ri­arch­al mon­ster Ted Hughes are all enlis­ted — is the kind of short-cut that first-time screen­writers tend to lean on but that quibble is minor.

More than minor quibbles, though, about The Roses, a com­ic vehicle for Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch which is based on a 1981 nov­el which in turn was pre­vi­ously adap­ted for Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in the late 80s.

It’s a mis­an­throp­ic story of a mar­ried couple, fall­ing out of love and find­ing ways to des­troy each oth­er in the pro­cess. Cumberbatch is an arrog­ant archi­tect whose sig­na­ture build­ing blows down in a hur­ricane, prompt­ing his gif­ted chef wife, Colman, to make her hobby res­taur­ant into a suc­cess. The resent­ment of each oth­er — fuelled it must be said by vast quant­it­ies of fine alco­hol and some annoy­ing friends — even­tu­ally leads to a break­down but no backdown.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

I think we are sup­posed to see these char­ac­ters as equally awful and equally to blame, but I couldn’t help think­ing that Cumberbatch’s down­fall is not so much an act of God as the res­ult of his own hubris while Colman’s suc­cess is because she is excep­tion­al at cook­ing and people like work­ing with her. Therefore, Cumberbatch’s grow­ing hatred has more than a few miso­gyn­ist­ic undertones.

(I should point out that the editor-in-chief leaned in the oth­er dir­ec­tion — Colman’s char­ac­ter should have been able to bal­ance work and moth­er­hood because that’s what women have been doing for generations.)

In the battle between Colman and Cumberbatch, the act­ors, though there is no con­test. We’ve known for years that there are very few per­formers who come alive on screen quite the way that Colman does and, while he does his best — bless — I can still see the cog­nit­ive wheels turn­ing for Cumberbatch as he tries des­per­ately to keep up.

Occasionally, when a film clearly requires less than 100 per­cent of your atten­tion, the mind can wander and I found myself think­ing dur­ing The Conjuring: Last Rites, what kind of a film it might be if Colman and Cumberbatch were play­ing the fam­ous occult grift­ers invest­ig­at­ors, Lorraine and Ed Warren and not Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson.

It’s Farmiga and Wilson’s last go at the couple, even though the torch is clearly being passed to the next gen­er­a­tion so we surely haven’t seen the last Conjuring, espe­cially with box office this big.

Supposedly, the Smurl fam­ily of Pennsylvania was the Warren’s last case — we can add a mir­ror now to the com­ic­ally long list of demon­ic­ally pos­sessed inan­im­ate objects — and the film loses momentum in the middle as it gives Farmiga and Wilson an extra vic­tory lap or two — but it reaches a suit­ably thrill­ing cli­max, which should keep fans happy.

I’m becom­ing some­thing of a con­nois­seur of places pre­tend­ing to be some­where they are not and Devon fail­ing to authen­tic­ally resemble California in any way in The Roses is a clas­sic — the grass is all wrong, the sand is all wrong, the sky is all wrong — but I was also imme­di­ately thrown by the work­ing class 1980s street the Smurl’s live on in Last Rites. I felt I’d seen it before some­where and, sure enough, it was built on the same Bovingdon Airfield run­way that Patrick Garland used to con­struct a Ramallah street in Warfare earli­er this year. 

Don’t ask me how I know these things, I just do.

Much more authen­t­ic is Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee’s re-envisioning of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 drama High to Low. Having spent six days in New York in my life2, I can com­pletely vouch for how Lee presents his beloved city on screen, not least that the best view of Manhattan is prob­ably from Brooklyn.

Especially from the pent­house apart­ment of music mogul David King (Denzel Washington). Respected, suc­cess­ful, com­fort­able, he’s about to enjoy a luc­rat­ive cash-out of his label, except he’s hav­ing second thoughts about the pos­sib­il­ity of pre­ma­ture retire­ment and let­ting go of his legacy.

There’s a kid­nap­ping attempt on his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) but they take Trey’s best friend Kyle (Elijah Wright) instead and — know­ing that Kyle is the son of King’s driver, Paul (played by Elijah Wright’s real-life fath­er, the great Jeffrey Wright) — the believe that they still have lever­age, ask­ing for $17.5m. This is, coin­cid­ent­ally, the amount King needs to buy back his record label so the amount of lever­age they actu­ally have is ques­tion­able. Will King use his ‘save the record label’ money to ‘save the son of his friend’ — his son’s best friend?

This restored my faith in Saturday night stream­ing premi­eres. Apple have shown once again that who­ever buys/commissions their fea­ture con­tent has taste and an appre­ci­ation for cinema. Highest 2 Lowest feels like a movie rather than some­thing squeezed out of a tube. Not just any movie, it feels like a Spike Lee joint which means that every choice has energy and a degree of “I might not have chosen to do it that way but …”

There’s a scene later on in the film between Washington and rap­per ASAP Rocky (as a rap­per called Yung Felon) that dares you to take your eyes off it for a second. Washington may be 70 but there’s some­thing about work­ing with Lee that makes sure he’s still got game.

New to Aotearoa stream­ing audi­ences, but out for a while inter­na­tion­ally, Mariska Hargitay’s doc­u­ment­ary about her movie star moth­er, My Mom Jayne, is a tre­mend­ously mov­ing study in how people cursed with fame or infamy are still com­plex, full-bodied, fas­cin­at­ing human beings.

Hargitay is best-known as the star of the long-running crime show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but she was the daugh­ter of the blonde bomb­shell Jayne Mansfield. Hargitay was only three when Mansfield died in a car acci­dent — she was in the back seat of the wreck with two of her broth­ers — and has no memory of her. Indeed, only know­ing the pop cul­ture car­toon char­ac­ter that her moth­er became, she con­sciously tried to make career choices that her moth­er wouldn’t have made.

At the age of 60, Hargitay decides she needs to know who this woman really was and the doc­u­ment­ary is that jour­ney of dis­cov­ery with the help of her sib­lings and remain­ing friends of the fam­ily. Except, Jayne didn’t have too many friends — she had people who wanted a piece of her, to con­trol her, to dic­tate how she was per­ceived. Far from being a dumb blonde, Mansfield could speak four lan­guages, play the viol­in and piano, and was intent on becom­ing a ser­i­ous act­ress. But that wasn’t what Hollywood wanted for her.

Moving and sur­pris­ing, this film reclaims Jayne Mansfield for her daugh­ter, but is also a remind­er that every fam­ily is full of char­ac­ters with their faults and insec­ur­it­ies, no mat­ter how many magazine cov­ers they appear on.