Tuesday new releases: 30 September 2025

I should let you know from the off that I am utterly unable to be object­ive about Prime Minister, Lindsay Utz and Michelle Waltz’s doc­u­ment­ary about Jacinda Ardern, to the extent that I was in tears through most of it.

That might be a PTSD response to the trauma of the Covid era and its dis­ap­point­ing after­math, but it’s also a grief response at what we — and the world — have lost in terms of empath­et­ic and human-centred polit­ics. It hit home to me in the first few moments of the film, as Ardern’s daugh­ter Neve hops on to a big yel­low American school bus with her mother’s words “I love you” ringing in her — and our — ears, that Ardern wasn’t just houn­ded from polit­ics, she has been forced out of New Zealand entirely.

The intim­acy of the film is astound­ing — Ardern’s part­ner Clarke Gayford wield­ing a home movie cam­era at con­veni­ent and incon­veni­ent times, reveal­ing the bone deep care that Ardern took to her respons­ib­il­it­ies, des­pite the con­stant won­der­ing wheth­er she was up to it and that gnaw­ing real­isa­tion that, des­pite not want­ing the job, at that moment she was the best per­son for it.

It’s easy to be cyn­ic­al about politi­cians’ motives — I read a con­stant refrain in my social feeds that cur­rent PM Christopher Luxon is only in it for the even­tu­al knight­hood, which I don’t believe for a moment is true even though I agree with none of his pre­scrip­tions for what ails us — and Prime Minister insists that we don’t for­get the humans at the centre of the story¹. For Ardern, her real­ness was both her super­power and her kryptonite.

My the­ory about the power and focus of New Zealand’s elim­in­a­tion approach to the vac­cine is that it came from the exper­i­ences that Ardern has already had as prime minister.

Firstly — as the film shows in emo­tion­al detail — she had already exper­i­enced two tra­gedies in office. 51 people were killed — and 89 injured, many severely — in the Christchurch mosque attacks and 22 died as a res­ult of the Whakaari/White Island erup­tion and I believe that her start­ing point when Covid struck was that no one else was going to die, a clar­ity of pur­pose that was bey­ond oth­ers who insisted on see­ing everything through a cost-benefit lens.

Secondly, she already had exper­i­ence with a pan­dem­ic. In 2017, the cattle bac­teri­um M. Bovis was dis­covered in New Zealand herds with the poten­tial to cause immense dam­age to one of this country’s biggest indus­tries. Ardern’s Labour gov­ern­ment decided — against the advice of the oppos­i­tion and many in the pub­lic ser­vice who said it wouldn’t be pos­sible — that it could be erad­ic­ated with drastic con­trols on the move­ment of live­stock (and the cull­ing of thou­sands of infec­ted beasts) and they were proved to be cor­rect. That was an inspir­a­tion for the “go hard, go early” mod­el of Aotearoa’s Covid response.

One final obser­va­tion from Prime Minister relates to the loud and aggress­ive lobby that sprang up against those Covid meas­ures, res­ult­ing in Ardern’s resig­na­tion and Labour’s loss of the 2023 elec­tion. The occu­pa­tion of Parliament grounds and the even­tu­al riot­ous evic­tion comes as a huge shock in the film — and we knew it was com­ing! For inter­na­tion­al audi­ences, less well versed in New Zealand polit­ics, it must come as a thunderbolt.

But there are earli­er clues as to the kind of turn that polit­ics is tak­ing. In one scene, when Ardern and oth­er seni­or gov­ern­ment lead­ers are talk­ing to rep­res­ent­at­ives of the Muslim com­munity fol­low­ing the Christchurch tra­gedies, Green Party co-leader James Shaw is on the same couch clearly sport­ing a big black eye, received from a ran­dom dis­af­fected mem­ber of the pub­lic as he was walk­ing to work one morn­ing. It didn’t land as heav­ily on the rest of us as it obvi­ously did for Shaw, but with hind­sight we should have seen where things were heading.

If I’ve learned any­thing in my 57-plus years on this plan­et, it’s that if you want some­thing done — and done with dili­gence, care, respect and situ­ation­al aware­ness — you should ask a woman to do it, an obser­va­tion con­firmed by both Prime Minister and Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a doc­u­ment­ary by Ally Pankiw on Disney+. (It’s also con­firmed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, but in a very dif­fer­ent context.)

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Lilith Fair was a fest­iv­al of women music­al artists that criss-crossed North America for three tours in the late nineties. It was a sur­prise hit and helped gal­van­ise the pos­i­tion of women in the music industry at a time when they were still seen as nov­elty acts by radio and con­cert pro­moters. Led by Canadian singer-songwriter, Sarah McLachlan, Lilith Fair made truck­loads of money, developed female tal­ent both on and off stage and proved that big sta­di­um events could still be human-scale.

I real­ised watch­ing the film that, actu­ally, my music­al taste wasn’t fixed in the eighties as I thought it had been. Turns out, as I listened to clips of per­form­ances by McLachlan, Lisa Loeb, Tracy Chapman, Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, etc. that that CD-oriented era of great songs, well sung and beau­ti­fully recor­ded, was my happy place and the film took me back there. It’s an excel­lent story and — once again — brought a tear to the eye. I’ve heard that there’s a doc­u­ment­ary about the Indigo Girls and, after see­ing their con­tri­bu­tion here, that’s one I need to seek out.

One Battle After Another deserves a column all to itself — and will prob­ably get one soon­er rather than later — but I still find myself mash­ing it over in my head sev­er­al days after we watched it. Anderson is clearly one of the best we have but, as I said to Mark Leishman on the radio last Friday night, there’s no shame in hav­ing both major and minor works. (Sign ‘o’ the Times = major, Lovesexy = minor, it’s just nat­ur­al.) Anderson’s last film, Licorice Pizza, was enjoy­able but felt like a minor work. His last film inspired by author Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice, felt like a minor work (but I can be per­suaded). One Battle After Another is clearly a major work, a state­ment piece to place along­side There Will Be Blood, The Master and Phantom Thread.

But the ‘how’ of it is what I’m strug­gling to artic­u­late at the moment. Aspects of it — par­tic­u­larly the ton­al shifts — are things I would be crit­ic­al of in oth­er films but delighted me here. The fact that its con­text is polit­ic­al — and has a deeply polit­ic­al role to play in our cur­rent moment — is import­ant but the film’s actu­al polit­ics aren’t that easy to put your fin­ger on.

On Friday, I said that it was about how expect­ing ideo­lo­gic­al pur­ity from your team­mates is a fool’s game because people gen­er­ally are just too weird to be able to deliv­er it, and it’s our weird­ness that intrigues and delights Anderson more than the spe­cif­ics of our politics.

Explosives expert “Bob” (Leonardo DiCaprio) is left hold­ing the baby when his part­ner in life and ter­ror­ism, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) rats the French 75 revolu­tion­ar­ies out and then escapes from wit­ness pro­tec­tion to con­tin­ue the struggle else­where. Bob escapes into hid­ing and 16 years later, daugh­ter “Willa” (Chase Infiniti) has become the tar­get of obsessed G‑man Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) while Bob has giv­en in to weed and paranoia.

Bob — and the rest of the 75 — were clearly not up to the task and had to be sac­ri­ficed but on the oth­er side of the ideo­lo­gic­al equa­tion, secret­ive white suprem­acists the Christmas Adventurers are start­ing to have their doubts about their own ambi­tious recruit, Lockjaw.

But there’s some­thing else going on here — some­thing about ally­ship and how Bob’s rela­tion­ship to the revolu­tion will only ever be second-hand. Throughout the film, he’s flounder­ing around — DiCaprio in anoth­er great “sweaty fuckup” role — sur­roun­ded by people for whom, because of their gender, skin col­our, ori­ent­a­tion, the res­ist­ance is not aca­dem­ic, not some­thing to roman­ti­cise while watch­ing The Battle of Algiers on TV.

My favour­ite char­ac­ter — at the moment — is Benicio De Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, calmly wan­der­ing around chug­ging “a few small beers” while res­cuing the dozens of migrants he has been shel­ter­ing from an immig­ra­tion raid in which his com­munity is just col­lat­er­al dam­age, while the actu­al tar­get (DiCaprio’s Bob) is obli­vi­ous to them all.

Full of thrill­ing cine­mat­ic sur­prises, One Battle After Another is a fant­ast­ic night at the movies, a great remind­er of what a ride it can be.

1. Former Deputy PM and Finance Minister Grant Robertson offi­ci­at­ing at Ardern and Gayford’s wed­ding, for example. Ardern intro­du­cing new­born Neve to cur­rent Labour lead­er of the oppos­i­tion as “Uncle Chris”, is anoth­er. ↩︎