Tuesday new releases: 10 February 2026

We Bury the Dead, Is This Thing On?, Shelter and Scarlet are all in cinemas.

I’m laid low by a heavy cold at the moment so I don’t have it in me to write these up.

Luckily, thanks to RNZ I already talked about them at length so there are links below. Listen and enjoy.

We Bury the Dead turns out to be the film I liked best of the four — a mel­an­choly twist on the zom­bie genre, set in a Tasmania where every­one has been killed by an American mil­it­ary weapons exper­i­ment. Daisy Ridley plays the griev­ing wid­ow of Matt Whelan, who volun­teers to help with the clean-up after hear­ing rumours that the dead aren’t all stay­ing dead and there might be chance to reconcile.

I talked to Mark Leishman about this on Thursday night’s Nights.

The old At the Movies slot on Sunday after­noons has been replaced by a seg­ment on Culture 101 called The Big Screen. I’m one of a trio of rotat­ing crit­ics who come into chat ad lib with host Perlina Lau about new releases. My co-contributors are Kate Rodger and Michelle Langstone.

I had my first go on Sunday after­noon¹ where I reviewed the last three of this week’s new releases: Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (loved everything in front of the cam­era, hated everything that the cam­era did to pho­to­graph it), Jason Statham vehicle, Shelter (it’s the vari­ations on a Jason Statham theme that are inter­est­ing and this is more gritty and sat­is­fy­ing than most), and Mamoru Hosoda’s “trippy” take on Hamlet, Scarlet.

I’ve no guar­an­tees that this afflic­tion will be over by tomor­row or Thursday so I may not be back in your inbox this week. Apologies.

1. Incidentally, the old At the Movies pod­cast feed has been recon­figured so that all RNZ on air movie reviews should show up. Just me at the moment … ↩︎