Friday new releases*: 24 October 2025
Roofman and Black Phone 2 are in cinemas and Mr. Scorsese is streaming on Apple TV.
This week certainly got away from me. Not in the way it did for the people who are still without power, or are flood damaged or whose roofs were torn off by the high winds, but enough to be mildly inconvenienced by the vicissitudes of paid employment.
On Wednesday I recorded this week’s episode of RNZ At the Movies so my new release reviews are recycled from there.
Roofman (Cianfrance, 2025)
Channing Tatum plays Manchester, producing a much more effective version of the larger-than-life movie star pretending to be an ordinary, turn of the century, working class joe, than Dwayne Johnson’s much-hyped painkiller addicted cage fighter in The Smashing Machine. But the film does rely on Tatum’s relaxed charisma – much as I imagine the real Manchester successfully stayed out of jail by winning over the congregation of the local church and single mother Leigh (Kirsten Dunst, also dialling the back the movie stardom effectively) and her kids.
Cianfrance also makes excellent use of Tatum’s physical grace, without turning him into a kind of superhero. He also has a documentarian’s eye for real-life locations and lived in faces and the film itself is much more downbeat than the advertising would suggest.
(Listen to the complete segment here.)
Black Phone 2 (Derrickson, 2025)
Black Phone 2 draws on a few more horror tropes than the tightly focused original – including the Nightmare on Elm Street idea of the villain being able to kill you in your dreams – but that opening up is good as it offers some bigger outdoor set-pieces and some very spooky effects of poor Gwen being hurled around the camp kitchen by invisible forces.
The small cast are all well-drawn and clearly meant to be more than just fodder for kills, there’s a strong moral core to the ‘good vs. evil’ contest, which is as it should be, and there’s enough gore to keep most horror fans satisfied. The sound design – there’s no designer given that credit but the score is by Derrickson’s son Atticus – also makes a strong contribution to overall creepiness of things as well as the well-oiled jump scares.
(Listen to the complete segment here. You can also listen to my conversation with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights here.)
Mr. Scorsese (Miller, 2025)
The final episode contains some moving personal revelations and Miller’s careful build up to them is commendable. You won’t see him and his later career in quite the same way again. Mr. Scorsese humanises the man as well as telling the story of an artist. At the end, it draws an elegant line from the Catholic altar boy in 1950s New York and the self-destructive and rebellious young man to the elder statesman of today, using one of my very favourite films of his, the 2016 film Silence, as the guide.
(Listen to the complete segment here.)
The show is online now and will air on RNZ National on Sunday at 1.30pm.
Tonight at 8.40, I’ll be chatting with Emile Donovan once again on Nights. Topics will be Springsteen: Deliver Us from Nowhere in cinemas, The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix) and Bollywood classic Sholay (Tubi).
Next Monday is a public holiday in Aotearoa New Zealand and on Wednesday I’ll be recording and posting the next At the Movies so expect further interruptions to the posting schedule.