Monday new releases: 24 February 2025

I’m Still Here, Tinā, Bird, Neneh Superstar and The Monkey are in cinemas.

In the opening sequences of Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here we see an upper-middle class Rio family enjoying the best that life has to offer. They have a house on the beach, in the shadow of Sugarloaf Mountain. Father Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) is a former politician and now a prosperous architectural engineer. He’s building the family a bigger, more modern house where each of the five children can have a room of their own.

It’s 1970 and Brazil is ruled by a military dictatorship, but a decent, hardworking family like the Paiva’s shouldn’t have anything to worry about, especially as Rubens has left his political career far behind.

Except that he hasn’t and – like a lot of educated and progressive Brazilians – he is secretly doing what he can to support the struggling resistance movement. The rest of the family is unaware of the messages being passed among the various happy houseguests, until the police arrive unexpectedly to take him away for questioning.

So begins a decades-long nightmare for the rest of the family, led by matriarch Eunice (Fernanda Torres), as they try and discover the truth about Rubens’ disappearance and build some kind of a life for those who are left behind.

Director Walter Salles (possibly best-known for his terrific adaptation of The Motorcycle Diaries twenty years ago) has created a soft-spoken masterpiece here. Every aspect of the cinematic craft is first-rate and it all goes to support a portrait of a family that could have ended up histrionic but instead is full of astute observations and perfectly calibrated characters.

It’s hard not to watch I’m Still Here through the lens of current events. In the film we see how it is that many people find it easy to support authoritarianism (especially if it is a path out of poverty), but also it makes the risks of resistance abundantly clear. Like Paul Lynch’s novel about a possible rise of fascism in Ireland, Prophet Song, I’m Still Here is reminding us that this absolutely can happen here or anywhere but that dictatorship also sows the seeds of its own destruction.

Tinā is a crowd pleasing local film that takes as a starting point the deadly Christchurch earthquake that occurred fourteen years ago, almost to the day. For many in the city, the trauma of that event is impossible to escape, but Miki Magasiva’s film (co-written with Mario Gaoa) suggests that, for some people at least, art and community can be a way through it.

Anapela Polataivao plays dedicated teacher Mareta whose daughter is killed in the terrible collapse of the CTV building. Three years later, still all-but paralysed by grief, Mareta is offered a relieving job at a prestigious local college and rediscovers her calling as both a teacher and choir master – music is what will heal her and gifted but heartbroken singer Sophie (Antonia Robinson).

Tinā is a film of moments, many of which land but probably just as many fall flat. The grounding in the real life tragedy of post-quake Christchurch isn’t matched by the almost fantasy portrayal of the education system and the heavy-handed approach to social issues. Questions of class and race are drawn with a very broad brush, especially the character of Deputy Principal Wadsworth (Jamie Irvine) whose cartoon bigotry feels plucked from a much less subtle film.