Something to watch tonight: Thursday 29 May

Behind the Candelabra (Soderbergh, 2013)

On this day in 2019, I previewed some titles from that year’s DocEdge festival and it is dispiriting to note that none of those recommendations are currently available online in NZ. All the more reason to take a look at the programme for the 2025 edition and make a booking or two. We used to joke about the number of films coming back from NZIFF each year, but it is increasingly the case that festivals like DocEdge are the only times these films will get a run out here.

Any time a Soderbergh picture arrives on one of the main streaming services, I feel duty bound to point it out so here’s your notification that Behind the Candelabra – his Liberace biopic (and showcase for what we might surprisingly call “Matt Damon’s range”) – has just dropped on Prime. I previewed it prior to the 2013 New Zealand International Film Festival:

Behind the Candelabra is directed by Steven Soderbergh (photographed and edited by him too under his customary aliases Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard) from a script by Richard La Gravanese about the predatory and manipulative romantic practices of the closeted entertainer Liberace. Brilliant Matt Damon plays the spurned lover Scott Thorson and Michael Douglas is the diamond and fur-clad pianist. Everything that Soderbergh does here elevates a fairly run-of-the-mill screenplay, and the results are never less than entertaining. Look out for screen legend Debbie Reynolds and note that this film was the late Marvin Hamlisch’s final screen credit.

Also in that preview column: Nicolas Philibert’s wonderful documentary, The House of Radio; Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess; Tom Schilling’s Oh Boy, Emir Baigazin’s Harmony Lessons; Curtis Vowell and Sophie Henderson’s Fantail; Roger and Shirley Horrocks’ Venus: A Quest; Kim Mordaunt’s The Rocket (which we’ll come back to here one day); Dylan Mohan Grey’s Fire in the Blood; Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers; Sebastian Junger’s Which Way is the Front Line from Here?; Shirley Clarke’s Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World and (newly-minted multi-Oscar-winner) Sean Baker’s Starlet. I was on fire that year!

Saturday is my birthday so I’m taking tomorrow off (still planning to appear on RNZ at 9.30, no worries there, ED). And Monday is a public holiday in Aotearoa so the next new releases update will appear on Tuesday.