Thursday new releases: 24 July 2025
Friendship, The Divine Sarah Bernhardt, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Four Letters of Love are in cinemas.
I pushed the boat out yesterday on At the Movies by reviewing four films instead of the usual three. Truly value for money for the New Zealand taxpayer. The show is available online now and will be broadcast on Sunday afternoon at 1.30.
Friendship
There’s a lot of talk these days about a crisis of masculinity. Men are lonely, they don’t know how to talk about feelings. They can’t make friends with other men without it getting weird. The internet and our devices are just making things worse – splintering us into tiny interest groups, radicalising our political opinions and monopolising our attention. Robinson’s Craig is a victim of all of this – he’s on his phone the entire time he’s at home but to no real visible purpose – but he's also a perpetrator. He makes apps that are designed to maximise ‘engagement’ which is another way of saying, pay attention to it not to the people around you.
It's an example of Andrew DeYoung’s clever script, like the hints that Craig’s childhood experiences may have been less than perfect. It’s a clue about where that hair-trigger sense of unfairness might come from.
Listen to the whole segment here.
The Divine Sarah Bernhardt
What the film is resolutely not interested in is what made Bernhardt such a star in the first place. It feels like a conscious choice to not show Bernhardt on stage – perhaps Sandrine Kiberlain as Bernhardt felt that no performance she could give would compare with one that is conjured in the mind’s eye from her reputation – but the film is utterly incurious about Bernhardt as an artist.
Why was she a star? What kind of connection did she make with audiences that meant they would queue around the block for tickets? The film makes a big deal of her international tours – she actually came to New Zealand in 1892! – but doesn’t attend itself to what might have been happening in the world of society, media or technology that caused such global success to happen. Where’s the magic?
In the end, she’s just another rich person with excessive tastes, hidden insecurities, a collection of exotic pets, lots of famous friends and a taste for polyamory. If The Divine Sarah Bernhardt is not interested in her art, then it’s not a portrait of an artist, it’s just gossip.
Listen to the whole segment here.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
It's not quite a remake or a reboot and it doesn’t do the basics well enough. It’s not shocking, it’s not funny, it’s not sexy and the presence of Gellar, Hewitt and another returning star Freddie Prinze Jr. just makes it feel like the kids are having to party with their parents rather than cut loose and really have some fun.
The 4th of July setting and holiday resort location reminds you of Jaws which does nobody any favours, but I was thinking that, why would you set a film during that holiday weekend and not have anything to say about America? Or maybe it did but what it had to say was so banal, I didn’t notice.
Listen to the whole segment here.
Four Letters of Love
This is a romantic film, first and foremost – the mysteries of love and marriage, how we meet and how we stay together. But it’s also about faith – the arrival of God in some people’s lives means the departure of God from others – and the film also asks the audience to take a huge leap of faith themselves.
Listen to the whole segment here.