Last week I celebrated the third anniversary of my arrival as regular screen critic for RNZ Nights.
This week I recognise the tenth anniversary of starting RNZ’s pivot to video with the multimedia screen criticism brand Widescreen. I was brought in to the organisation to see whether the kind of scripted (RNZ calls them ‘produced’) film reviews that are a feature of At the Movies could be done on video. I chose to take that idea and build in written content, capsule reviews, picks of the week, etc.
Not long afterwards, in one of those regular cost cutting rounds that the media experiences, RNZ realised that they didn’t need two staff film reviewers1 and offered me redundancy, but in exchange for going quietly they let me continue to write for the brand that we’d established. Even that option fizzled out with the introduction of the Life section of the website last year.
Anyway, this is the first video review that I produced for Widescreen and it’s for the first film to be produced by Netflix. At the time, we could barely see where the streamers were going to go with their own productions but clearly something was up.
Beasts of No Nation stars Idris Elba as a charismatic commander of a group of child soldiers in a fictionalised African civil war. Director Cary Fukunaga went on to direct the most recent Bond film, No Time to Die.
Further viewing (if you can stand it)
Here’s a link to the trailer I made for Widescreen — my first ever attempt at on camera presenting. To spare everyone’s blushes, I won’t embed it here.
Where to watch Beasts of No Nation
Worldwide: Still streaming on Netflix (but you’ll have to search for it)
Recent comment from reader ML regarding Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room:
A classic documentary of its kind, but don’t ignore the book that inspired it, or the incredible journalism by author Bethany McLean that “broke” the story while everyone else was looking the other way.
The number of staff film reviewers at RNZ is about to go down to zero with the departure of Simon Morris and the shuttering of At the Movies. I’ve got at least two more shows covering for him before the end and I hope you’ll listen next week and the week after.
I was hoping you were going to be the next ATM presenter when Mr Morris retired. But alas