Monday new releases: 17 March 2025

Black Bag, Hard Truths, Firebrand and Lucky Winners are all in cinemas.

There’s a big new release movie missing from this week’s roundup – the new film from The Russo Brothers, The Electric State. Evidently it’s the most expensively produced feature film ever from Netflix and sounds like it should be perfect Saturday night entertainment – a lighthearted piece of sci-fi featuring wise-cracking robots and big name movie stars.

But I’ve had too many of my Saturday nights wasted by these big budget, high concept, star-studded extravaganzas recently (The Gorge, Back in Action, Fly Me to the Moon, You’re Cordially Invited) and this weekend we decided in favour of some family nostalgia instead. Wolfgang Petersen’s beloved 1984 fantasy The Neverending Story has just been released on 4K UHD in a handsome collectors’ edition, so we watched that instead.

I will come back to The Electric State later this week as I’m curious to see what US$350m of Netflix money buys you – a decent script? – but the murmurings around the reviewer community are not positive.

The organisers of New Zealand’s French and British & Irish film festivals can be rightly proud that their alumni are dominating quality cinema releases at the moment. It’s a sign that the New Zealand International Film Festival no longer has a lock on all the best films and that those other festivals are a great way to see highly regarded films earlier than almost anywhere else. Three-quarters of the four new pictures this week premiered in those festivals last year.

But first, the second Steven Soderbergh/David Koepp collaboration in the last six weeks, espionage thriller Black Bag.

Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are married British agents. Fassbender’s George is handed a list of five internal agency suspects in the theft of a crucial piece of technology and is only moderately disconcerted to find his wife Kathryn is on it.

In order to flush out the mole, he organises a dinner party at his home and plays some psychological games with the guests who all appear to have either a motive or a weakness.

This is about as efficient as an entertainment delivery system can be in our current era. It’s easy to imagine an idea like this being turned into a six-part series with multiple extra twists, turns and shootouts, but this is a tight 94-minutes that rewards intelligence and attention.

If I have a beef with Black Bag, it's that the supporting characters – well played by classy actors – are more like Lego bricks for the plot rather than fully-fledged humans in their own right, but it’s the twisty relationship between Blanchett and Fassbender that we are here for – and the shameless indulgence of the production in which everyone looks a million bucks and lives in an utterly desirable designer residence. Great grown-up escapism.

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths might be the first contemporary drama that I’ve seen that actually references the Covid pandemic and lockdowns – not as a central theme but the kind of conversation that we all still have. If you were to watch most so-called contemporary stories you would be forgiven for thinking that Covid never happened and yet it casts a shadow over us all still.

Hard Truths is about a different kind of trauma – the complicated grief and guilt around the death of a parent who wasn’t particularly well loved. Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) inflicts her pain on everyone around her – long-suffering husband Curtley (David Webber), withdrawn adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and well-adjusted sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) especially – but she clearly doesn’t spare herself. A clean-freak with a hyper-articulate anger at the world, she reminded me of another of Leigh’s famous ragers, David Thewlis’s Johnny in Naked (1993). A mouth that can only get her into trouble and the only escape is to withdraw and stay in bed all day.