Tuesday new-ish releases: 23 September 2025

Momentum is an under­rated com­mod­ity. After tak­ing a few days off last week to painstak­ingly rebuild some crit­ic­al work­flows (in order to pre­serve the value of dec­ades of muscle memory) I now find myself hav­ing to get this cara­van mov­ing again from a stand­ing start.

Here’s a sum­mary of what I’ve seen at the cinema recently to get the typ­ing fin­gers mov­ing again. I’ve yet to catch up with Splitsville or three of the school hol­i­day releases: Dora: Magic Mermaid Adventures, Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie or Kangaroo.

Reader RI of Auckland emailed to say that The Long Walk was a favour­ite Stephen King story of his and he was curi­ous to hear what I thought. Rich — I expect you’ve seen the film for your­self by now but here goes.

It’s one of those clas­sic King “What if” stor­ies, a decept­ively simple premise but one that gives him — and his adaptors, dir­ect­or Francis Lawrence and screen­writer JT Mollner — plenty of room to test its bound­ar­ies. What if, in an altern­at­ive post-some kind of con­flict United States, a young man is chosen to rep­res­ent each of the 50 states in an ath­let­ic con­test that would provide a spec­tacle to unite a recov­er­ing nation. What if, indeed? We’ve seen ver­sions of this before. King’s The Running Man (soon to be rebooted with Glen Powell), The Hunger Games fran­chise (which Lawrence him­self looked after for all but the first film) and the recent John Cena/Awkwafina vehicle Jackpot! which played the concept for laughs.

Of course, this is a dystop­ic scen­ario and the Long Walk con­test is a vehicle for rein­for­cing fas­cist con­trol. One young man will win a for­tune and the grant­ing of a wish but the oth­er 49 will lose their lives — pour encour­ager les autres.

Each con­test­ant is chosen by lot­tery, sup­posedly, but enter­ing the lot­tery does not appear to be vol­un­tary and the selec­tion appears to be loaded by the organ­isers, in the shape of “The Major”, played by Mark Hamill in his second King-related role this year.

The walk is non-stop — not for sleep, food or even calls of nature. Hour after hour, mile after mile, these young men walk and, while they make some­thing akin to friend­ships, they all know that the odds are stacked against them and no alli­ances will sur­vive to the end of the contest.

While all of the char­ac­ters are well-drawn, our focus is on Cooper Hoffman as Ray — the only char­ac­ter whose back­story we see — and David Jonsson as Peter. Even thought they form a bond, their motives are very dif­fer­ent, because their stor­ies are very dif­fer­ent. One is on a mis­sion of revenge because of what the régime has caused him to lose. The oth­er star­ted life with noth­ing and there­fore sees the walk as a way to do some good for oth­ers, provided he can actu­ally win it.

Uncommented on — but clearly import­ant to the cent­ral meta­phor of the thing — is the absence of women to the scen­ario, except Judy Greer as Ray’s moth­er. Seeing him off with a sand­wich at the start, help­lessly wit­ness­ing his deteri­or­a­tion from the sideline.

The Long Walk is about as bleak a story as I’ve seen in years. Lawrence eschews the high camp of the Hunger Games’ Panem for an arid mid-western semi-rural waste­land. You can feel the poverty, of hope as much as any­thing mater­i­al. The sud­den bursts of viol­ence are shock­ing and grue­some. I thought for a while that they were too much — we get the point — but there’s noth­ing gra­tu­it­ous about the viol­ence and the visu­als are just as awful as the psy­cho­lo­gic­al and emo­tion­al tor­ture these boys are put through.

A thought­ful and sober­ing watch.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale was my first expos­ure to a fran­chise that I could have sworn had been around for dec­ades I’m was assured by the editor-in chief it has only been 15 years. Time appears to do funny things in Downton as this sup­posed swan­song seemed to take forever and fly by at the same time.

Like a radio soap opera giv­en the big screen treat­ment, Downton is full of people telling you who they are and what they are think­ing, over and over again, but there’s no deny­ing that there’s plenty of pro­duc­tion value to focus on while you tune out all that expos­i­tion. There’s not much that’s any good about the film — cer­tainly very little in the way of drama — but I found myself not hat­ing it by the time screen­writer Julian Fellowes finally pays off his creaky structure.

If you have kids that are too old for Dora the Explorer and Gabby’s Playhouse this school hol­i­days and they feel up to some­thing that hints at some­thing more grown-up, you won’t go wrong with Sketch, a high-concept but low-budget fantasy adven­ture from the ‘whole­some’ com­pany Angel Studios. Atheists can feel con­fid­ent that they aren’t drop­ping their kids into evan­gel­ic­al pro­pa­ganda and the kids will get a kick out of some slightly edgi­er thrills and spills than they might be used to.

Taylor, Amber and Jack Wyatt are mourn­ing the loss of their wife and moth­er respect­ively, but are doing it alone and inef­fect­ively. Amber (Bianca Belle) is the young­est and she’s por­ing her grief, anger and fear into some pretty dis­turb­ing art­work. Taylor, their dad (Tony Hale), is try­ing to keep the fam­ily togeth­er by nev­er talk­ing about their moth­er, even to the extent of selling the home they all lived in together.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Jack (Kue Lawrence) dis­cov­ers an enchanted pond in the woods behind their house which appears to have the abil­ity to bring things to life. Jack is torn up at the pos­sib­il­ity of resur­rect­ing his moth­er by throw­ing her ashes into it but instead, by acci­dent, Amber’s note­book falls in and the vari­ous bizarre creatures and mon­sters that she has been draw­ing come to life and start ter­ror­ising the town. Only the Wyatts (with the help of the very cred­ibly annoy­ing school friend Bowman — Kalen Fox) can save both the town and reunite their fam­ily at the same time.

Easily over­shad­owed by the cap­it­al­ist fran­chises that it’s com­pet­ing with, Sketch should not be over­looked this school holidays.

Talking of fran­chises, Aaron Blabey’s The Bad Guys books (all 20 of them) have been a god­send for book­sellers the world over. Without him and Dav Pilkey, things would be look­ing pretty sad for children’s lit­er­at­ure. The second big screen adven­ture for the char­ac­ters, ima­gin­at­ively called The Bad Guys 2, did abso­lutely noth­ing for me but I can see how it might appeal to kids who love those books. So, that’s my recom­mend­a­tion — buy all the books and read them to your kids, get them hooked, and — if you take them to the film ver­sion — have a con­ver­sa­tion after­wards about how the film com­pares. Let’s get that crit­ic­al think­ing star­ted early.

Kogonada, the dir­ect­or A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, first became known as a video essay­ist with his series called Every Frame a Painting in which he looked at clas­sic films and decon­struc­ted how the visu­al choices made by dir­ect­ors con­trib­ute to the audience’s under­stand­ing of char­ac­ter, rela­tion­ship and story. He then put those les­sons into action with the sweet and heart­felt fea­ture films Columbus (an archi­tect vis­it­ing his ail­ing fath­er, strikes up a rela­tion­ship with an archi­tec­ture stu­dent in a town full of inter­est­ing archi­tec­ture) and After Yang (a sci­ence fic­tion story about a fam­ily cop­ing with the loss of their beloved android home help).

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey isn’t writ­ten by Kogonada — it’s from that well-known source of prom­ising but unpro­duced scripts, the Blacklist — but he dir­ects it with­in an inch of its life. At least, that’s what he does with the cam­era. Beautiful sym­met­ric­al tableaux abound as well as vari­ous sly homages to the great dir­ect­ors Kogonada idol­ises — the wed­ding ven­ue where Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie meet is called La Strada.

They have both found them­selves rent­ing a car for their trip from a mys­ter­i­ous com­pany run by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. They end up being manip­u­lated by their respect­ive magic­al GPS’s into fall­ing in love but not before we have been told at length about their respect­ive romantic fail­ures and the reas­ons for their fear of commitment.

I watched this a few days after the Wellington Film Society screen­ing of the 1999 kiwi clas­sic Scarfies, where the char­ac­ter details were revealed spar­ingly and care­fully, usu­ally through clev­er visu­al details. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey insists on spelling everything out and Kogonada’s atten­tion to his beau­ti­ful visu­als mean that there’s noth­ing left to try and gen­er­ate chem­istry between his two leads. They’re both beau­ti­ful and able but here there are simply no sparks.