Monday new releases: 8 September 2025

Fight or Flight, Life in One Chord, Sorry, Baby, The Roses, and The Conjuring: Last Rites are in cinemas, Highest 2 Lowest is streaming on Apple TV+ and My Mom Jayne is on Neon.

It’s been a big — and mostly satisfying — week for new motion pictures so, to squeeze everything in, these are going to be what we call in the biz “capsule reviews”¹.

Fight or Flight is in similar territory to one of last week’s favourites, The Toxic Avenger: a high concept, low culture, crowd-pleaser, shot for pennies on the dollar in Eastern Europe (Hungary instead of Bulgaria this time) with villains so monstrous that they thoroughly deserve the satisfying walloping they get.

After years in the movie star wilderness, Josh Hartnett plays a proper action hero at last: Lucas Reyes — a former Secret Service agent who has spent years of his own in the wilderness due to a morally defensible but politically unforgivable indiscretion. Living in an alcoholic haze in Bangkok, he’s given a shot at redemption. A mysterious terrorist known as the Ghost — leaves no trace, no known aliases or description — may finally have dropped a clue in the form of a trail of blood leading from a dodgy veterinarian to the airport and a flight to San Francisco. Reyes has to get on that plane, identify the Ghost and make sure they are alive to face justice on the other side.

Unfortunately, there’s been a leak and almost everyone else on the flight is some kind of mercenary or bounty hunter, wanting the Ghost to become — as the kids say these days — unalive. And so begins a joyously demented remix of Snakes on a Plane and the Brad Pitt picture Bullet Train. There are plenty of gags at the expense of global air travel as well as creative use made of internal airliner geography. It’s when our hero discovers a chainsaw in the cargo bay that you know things are really going to kick off.

Hartnett apparently he did all his own stunts in the film — as well as some excellent drunk/stoned acting — but there’s also something meta going on here, as if he’s actually playing Channing Tatum playing Lucas Reyes rather than inventing a character from fresh cloth.

Margaret Gordon’s long-awaited documentary about local music legend Shayne Carter, Life in One Chord, was a tonic of a different kind. The two words that came to mind watching the first few scenes were ‘love’ and ‘laughter’ — not words that usually come to mind when talking about kiwi musos.

As the dryly amusing Carter (Straitjacket Fits, Double Happys, Dimmer, etc.) takes us up the steep Dunedin hills of his childhood, you can see that — despite some hard times taking place in the home he grew up in — he is grateful to have escaped the fate of some of his contemporaries, the ones referred to in the title of his autobiography, Dead People I Have Known. Returning to his high school — where despite his punkish rebellion, he seems to be remembered fondly — and to the community its hall in Maori Hill where the “Dunedin Sound” first found its voice.

Carter is refreshingly free of angst, even if the book alluded to more personal and professional challenges than the film allows for. This would make a good double-feature with the Marlon Williams film, Ngā Ao E Rua - Two Worlds, as both artists are coming to terms with their Māori heritage in a world that hasn’t been encouraging.

In Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor announces herself as a creative force to be reckoned with, winning the Waldo Salt Best Screenplay prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for a film that she also directs and stars in.

She plays Agnes, a New England literary academic, wrestling with the trauma of a sexual assault while she was a grad student. Told in out-of-sequence chapters, Victor shows how the shifting sands of grief, pain and loss make it impossible to do what most of the people around you want, which is to put it behind you (or at least be predictable about it).

An excellent supporting cast play characters who show varying degrees of actual support. Sorry, Baby feels heartbreakingly authentic but at the same time is charming and funny. I feel like the reliance on the literary canon to provide scaffolding — Woolf, Baldwin, Nabokov and that heartless patriarchal monster Ted Hughes are all enlisted — is the kind of short-cut that first-time screenwriters tend to lean on but that quibble is minor.

More than minor quibbles, though, about The Roses, a comic vehicle for Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch which is based on a 1981 novel which in turn was previously adapted for Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in the late 80s.

It’s a misanthropic story of a married couple, falling out of love and finding ways to destroy each other in the process. Cumberbatch is an arrogant architect whose signature building blows down in a hurricane, prompting his gifted chef wife, Colman, to make her hobby restaurant into a success. The resentment of each other — fuelled it must be said by vast quantities of fine alcohol and some annoying friends — eventually leads to a breakdown but no backdown.