Monday new releases: 28 April 2025

Sinners, Small Things Like These, Warfare, The Penguin Lessons, The Accountant 2 are in cinemas, G20 is on Prime Video and Bullet Train Explosion is on Netflix.

Welcome new subscribers tempted here by my little bit of self-promotion on At the Movies this weekend. It’s great to have you here.

Because of all the recent public holidays – and that edition of ATM – there hasn’t been a new releases update for a while so this is quite crowded. We’ll start by taking out the recycling.

Sinners (Coogler, 2025)

Jordan’s star power makes Smoke and Stack the most exciting characters, but they aren’t the heart of the film, not really. Fantastic newcomer Miles Caton plays Sammie, a talented young singer and musician, ambitious to make his fortune in the recording studios and clubs of Chicago, going against the wishes of his preacher father. It’s Sammie’s talent that produces the music that can transcend everyday life but also attract the undead.

All the while, we are captivated by Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s stunning 65mm cinematography – so different from the gritty and grainy lens flares of The Last Showgirl earlier this year – Oscar-winner Ruth Carter’s costume design and Ludwig Göransson’s music.

But the real star of the show is the virtuosity of Coogler, the balancing act of the laugh-out-loud funny moments, followed by extraordinary fantasy sequences and then classic horror jump scares.

(Read more at RNZ Life or listen at RNZ At the Movies.)

Small Things Like These (Mielant, 2024)

Cillian Murphy plays Bill and I’m going to be telling myself that he won the Academy Award for this rather than Oppenheimer last year. There’s a haunted quality about him and I think of Small Things Like These as a kind of horror film. It’s a ghost story in the way that Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone describes itself – a tragedy doomed to repeat itself time and time again.

But it’s also a kind of monster movie, with the extraordinary Sister Mary, the Mother Superior, played by Emily Watson ruling everyone’s lives from the shadows. The scenes with her are shot like a horror film, too, with the interior of the convent like Dracula’s castle and any invitation to go inside is fraught with peril.

(Listen at RNZ At the Movies.)

Warfare (Mendoza/Garland, 2025)

How real is it? I can only guess, and I don’t want to find out, but during an opening sequence of the rowdy platoon watching a racy music video, a guy in my row leaned over to his girlfriend and whispered with a laugh, “we didn’t do that.” He didn’t laugh again during the film and looked pretty ashen as he pulled his baseball cap over his eyes and quietly left the cinema with his partner.

(Listen at RNZ At the Movies.)

The Penguin Lessons (Cattaneo, 2024)

Evidently, penguins are very loyal. And so when you save their lives, they feel like they owe you. And not only that, but they are also very empathetic, which is another lesson that the film wants to teach. People seem to spend a lot of their time unloading their secrets to this particular penguin who looks very attentive and very caring of their emotional state, shall we say.

Look, it's a feel-good movie in a weekend where there's quite a lot of rugged material being released. Quite tough films going into cinemas this weekend. And this is the one that you should go to if you want to be uplifted. It'll make you laugh. Steve Coogan, one of the funniest people to ever do it on screen. And this is a very relaxed, restrained version of Steve Coogan, kind of minor key Steve Coogan.

(Listen at RNZ Nights.)

G20 (Riggen, 2025)

Reasonably big budget, shot in South Africa, and big cast, lots of action, and very zeitgeisty, you know. So there's a lot of stuff about cryptocurrency and crashing the world economies and also deep-fake digital counterfeit videos of human beings. All this stuff that's very much on people's minds at the moment. But of course, this level of heroism and of competence of this particular U.S. president puts it squarely in the realm of fantasy, doesn't it?

(Listen at RNZ Nights.)

Now, to the newer stuff. Artists Equity is a new production company put together by Good Will Hunting buddies Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and they have two films in today’s newsletter. Small Things Like These was hatched during the production of Oppenheimer when Damon and Cillian Murphy were sitting around waiting for Christopher Nolan to set up a shot and Murphy was asked what his dream project would be – Small Things Like These was the excellent result.

But production companies do not survive on modestly budgeted respectable literary adaptations alone. They either need some elevated horror (see A24) or a franchise of their own. Affleck starred in the sleeper hit The Accountant back in 2016 and so Artists Equity went about buying the rights to exploit this rather daft intellectual property.

They’ve tempted screenwriter Bill Dubuque (The Judge, Ozark) and director (The Way Back) to rejoin the party along with returning performance talent J.K. Simmons, Cynthia Addai-Robinson and – most pertinently – Jon Bernthal.

Bernthal plays Braxton, brother to the autistic vigilante bookkeeper of the title, Christian Wolff (Affleck). Braxton is not autistic but would appear to be very much on the ADHD spectrum as he is a violent freelance security consultant of no fixed abode. Wolff needs him to help solve the murder of a mentor who was on the trail of some bad news El Salvadoran people traffickers.

Flirting dangerously between empathy and making autism the butt of the film’s humour – there is an autism spectrum consultant credited but there are also three times as many cat trainers – the film is mostly memorable for the buddy banter between the brothers rather than the action sequences which are as noisy and bloody as they all seem to be in these R-rated days. The nastiness of the violence in these things is really only forgivable if the baddies really, really, deserve it which means there’s a bit of an arms-race going on in that department, too.

Finally, a Saturday night streaming action-entertainment that actually delivers. We actually watched Bullet Train Explosion on ANZAC Day but it felt like a Saturday, so it passes the test. With flying colours, in fact.

A tenuous sequel to the 1975 thriller, Bullet Train, which inspired the Reeves-Bullock-Hopper classic Speed, the new film is about a Shinkansen travelling a regular route from Aomori to Tokyo but on this particular afternoon a bomb has been placed aboard that will explode if the train’s velocity drops below 120kmh.

The passengers react in different ways to this news: a disgraced politician thinks this might rehabilitate her reputation, an online influencer tries to take control of the ransom process, a school class who had just been on a trip to the magnificent Shinkansen engineering facility at first panic but then start to take care of each other.

And then there’s the staff. Clearly supported by Japan Railways, the film does pay the selfless and dedicated train manager and driver plenty of respect – not to mention those in the operations centre whose expertise is hopefully going to save 350 lives.

At one point, they hatch an extraordinary plan to extend the end of the line at Tokyo Station by 50 metres in only two and a half hours so it can join the southbound Tokaido line and give the rescuers more time. Viewers in Auckland and Wellington who commute by rail will be laughing hollowly at this point – the New Zealand equivalent of this plot would be a threat to blow up the rail replacement bus if the points network at Wellington station isn’t completed in less than 18 months.