Monday new releases: 27 January 2025

A Complete Unknown, We Live in Time, Sing Sing and Wolf Man are in cinemas and Back in Action is on Netflix

Four of this week’s new releases were featured in my most recent RNZ At the Summer Movies programme and all of them have been given the text treatment by the RNZ subeditors so I direct your attention to them below

As always, the audio clips add quite a bit to the effectiveness of the pieces so the radio versions are my first preference, but if you aren’t in an audio-friendly environment, or just can’t wait, the written versions will suffice.

A Complete Unknown (Mangold, 2024)

There may be an absence at the centre of the film but what we get instead is the mesmerising effect that Dylan has on other people.

The film takes plenty of time to linger on the faces of those who are watching and wondering: the beautiful Baez, the beautifully square Seeger, square-jawed Johnny Cash played with swagger by Boyd Holbrook, and all those audience members, going from devotion to betrayal the moment those first electric chords ring out.

(Listen or read here.)

We Live in Time (Crowley, 2024)

The story of Almut and Tobias is told in non-linear fashion, jumping all over the place, which means that, as an audience, we soon learn that it isn't all going to be beer and skittles for this relationship and that structure also reflects the theme of the film which is that all of our memories are still alive in us, all at the same time. We can constantly relive and rearrange them, to make meaning, as we need to.

It's very clever - the original script is by Nick Payne - but it is the relationship between these two fine actors that elevates We Live in Time to a strong recommendation.

(Listen or read here.)

Sing Sing (Kwedar, 2023)

Like the recent Netflix documentary Daughters, which showed us what happens when the children of inmates are allowed to actually visit them and celebrate a Daddy-Daughter Dance, in Sing Sing we see what happens when we - as a society - decide to treat people with grace.

But when we choose the path of dehumanisation - as we so often do - we shouldn't be surprised at the results we get.

Both films have some astonishing statistics at the end that should convince anyone watching of the value of investing in these programmes.

The subs cut the last line which I really liked: “Time spent watching Sing Sing is a good investment, too.”

(Listen or read here.)

Wolf Man (Whannell, 2025)

I once had a terrible flu in which I experienced hallucinations for days and the way that the sickness is presented in the film reminded me very much of that. My hair, fingernails and teeth did not fall out, however, so there's a limit to how useful that story is.

Everyone in the film is pretty much underwritten - Blake doesn't have much to say for himself because he spends so much of the film in various forms of physical deterioration, but we're lucky that Garner has had lots of practice recently fleshing out thinly drawn characters and has become quite adept at it.

(Listen or read here.)

Wolf Man was shot last summer at Lane Street studios just down the road from where this newsletter is produced, with downtown Wellington standing in for San Francisco.

Back in Action (Gordon, 2025)

The climax to Back in Action starts in London’s Tate Modern Gallery and involves the destruction of enormous amounts of art and if that isn’t a metaphor for the film as a whole, I don’t know what is.

The existence of Back in Action – a Netflix-funded, star-powered, action-comedy-thriller – isn’t just a neutral contribution to the cinematic arts, it somehow reduces the sum total simply by existing.

We’ve seen a lot of these stories recently – spies-coming-out-of-retirement – and this version is as uninspired as that makes it sound. Genuinely coming out of retirement, though, is actor Cameron Diaz whose last live action performance was also with Jamie Foxx in Annie in 2014. She doesn’t seem to be regretting the choice to come back – and near the end flashes that famous smile so effectively you are reminded why she was such a box office draw back in the day – but acting alongside Foxx body doubles (who had to step in after the actor was hospitalised with a stroke for several months) must have been something of a comedown.

Diaz and Foxx play two CIA spies who have fallen in love, gotten pregnant, and decided to go into hiding with new identities rather than risk their own team revealing their whereabouts – or the whereabouts of a special USB drive that can control all the automated infrastructure in Europe, including the famous Thames Barrier.

Outed by social media – another dreary trope – they have to drag their unwilling teenage children to Europe, reunite with Diaz’s estranged mother (Glenn Close), and see off the attentions of MI5’s Andrew Scott. Scott looks for all the world that this was the part he had to take so that Netflix would pay for Ripley.

I want to apologise to the editor-in-chief who didn’t ask to have her Saturday night wasted by this rubbish and who now gets a veto on my selections for joint viewing – whether I have to watch them for work or not.