Monday new releases: 13 January 2025

Conclave, Nosferatu, The Room Next Door and Den of Thieves: Pantera are in cinemas and Juror #2 is a VOD rental.

I saw a comment from a friend of mine yesterday suggesting that the last two weeks at the cinema saw plenty of contenders for a Best of 2025 end-of-year list and it’s hard to argue with.

This is the time of year where New Zealand cinemas are crammed with the big awards contenders (and Den of Thieves: Pantera) as films try and maximise the attention they can get, before the Oscars make the final distinction between winners and also-rans.

All but one of today’s summary were featured in last week’s At the Summer Movies for RNZ – hence this newsletter is free to everyone.

Conclave (Berger, 2024)

I was perhaps expecting something with a bit more theological meat to it, but this is a political thriller not a religious one. When characters talk about a crisis of faith, it is faith in the machine of the church that they are talking about, not God.

The conclave is supposed to sequester the cardinals from the real world, to bring them closer to God and his will (whatever that is) but the world and its needs keep on intervening, suggesting - perhaps - that by locking themselves away, these wise men lose focus on the people they are there to serve.

This one in particular benefits from listening to the segment with all the clips from the film intact.

Nosferatu (Eggers, 2024)

Nosferatu is a horror film, of course. There are a few jump scares, plenty of dread and some scenes that are pretty gory, but Eggers' direction is show-offy. He has a signature 90-degree camera move in which the subject goes from horizontal to vertical inside the frame and that's pretty effective, at least the first time he does it.

But he's not terribly interested in his characters, apart from Ellen. Even poor old Orlok can't rise above monster territory which means his fate eventually means very little to us.

Stylish above all, with wonderful craft on display from the entire production, I found Nosferatu to be a bit bloodless, if I'm honest. Not enough heart to put a stake through.

(Read or listen here.)

The Room Next Door (Almodóvar, 2024)

My favourite Almodóvar films, like Volver, Bad Education, Pain and Glory and Julieta, play out like elegant mysteries, using film’s ability to move back and forth through time to reveal the truth about people’s lives – their sacrifices, losses, heartbreaks and recoveries.

The Room Next Door uses the same techniques but I’m afraid I ended up no wiser about these women and their relationship. Swinton’s Martha remains an enigma throughout, and I can’t say with any confidence what changes about Ingrid, after everything she goes through.

Has she conquered her fear of death? Or is there more now, after coming so close to it?

There are several scenes that break into the main story, and they are memorable in their own right, but try as I might, I can’t see how they relate to – or illuminate – the rest of it. This could possibly be a ‘me’ problem, or it could be that something has been lost in translation somewhere.

(Listen here.)

Den of Thieves: Pantera (Gudegast, 2025)

I’m still weighing up whether to include this in the next At the Summer Movies on Wednesday but just in case I don’t, here are some thoughts.

Originally released in 2018, the first Den of Thieves completely passed me by (perhaps because of my well-documented aversion to Gerard Butler). With the sequel arriving in cinemas this weekend, it behooved me to check the first one which turned out to be an odd mix of a terrifically executed Los Angeles Federal Reserve heist surrounded by wildly unpleasant examples of toxic masculinity wrapped up in a package that resembled nothing as much as a bogan remake of Michael Mann’s Heat.

I’m not the first person to notice the resemblance and the filmmakers barely bother to hide it as they use many of the same locations, notably Long Beach docks and the Vincent Thomas Bridge (famously and erroneously renamed the St. Vincent Thomas Bridge by Robert De Niro in Mann’s film).

Den of Thieves was at the violent and ugly end of the modern crime movie spectrum with Butler playing the Pacino role as a good cop with a bad attitude, obsessed with bringing down the crew behind a number of high-tech robberies while his personal life is falling apart.

Pablo Schreiber plays the De Niro role, the brains of the criminal gang, although this milieu is of tattooed and muscle-bound ex-military types rather than the Italian suit-wearing, bookshop frequenting, inspiration.

The new film takes a very different tack, as if someone has worked out that the fading of the Fast & Furious franchise leaves the field wide open for another series of globetrotting, car chase movies with wisecracking lead actors and a multi-ethnic crew. In fact, Den of Thieves: Pantera plays as if the producers have bought an original script and then tried to shoehorn it into this new franchise they are trying to create.

We have relocated to Europe and the tone is more comedic, Butler’s character “Big Nick” is far less of a bully and more of a fish-out-of-water in the downtown Nice diamond district (portrayed by the Canary Islands of all places) instead of the backstreets of LA (which in its own turn was mostly Atlanta).

The one thing Pantera has in common with the original film is the quality of the heist. It’s a clever scheme and the sequence is shot and edited to merit some genuine tension but, once again, what’s surrounding it is an incoherent mess.

There will now be more Den of Thieves films and one hopes that Mr. Butler’s co-star, O’Shea Jackson, spends the interim working on his acting than his physique and that when someone inevitably suggests that the next heist take place in space, there’s yet another gritty LA muscle car film waiting in the wings take over.

Juror #2 (Eastwood, 2024)

It’s a serious, well-acted, tightly wound drama. Eastwood isn’t a showy director like Robert Eggers from Nosferatu, but he is interested in characters having to reckon with the results of their actions, most famously the Oscar winning Unforgiven from 1992.

Juror #2 isn’t quite that masterpiece, but it is an excellent courtroom drama and it won’t let you down.

(Listen here.)