Thursday new releases: 30 October 2025

Pike River and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere are in cinemas, Frankenstein is in cinemas for a short while before landing on Netflix and A House of Dynamite is now streaming on Netflix.

Once again, a busy week sees me resorting to linking to RNZ pieces rather than writing anything fresh. But it’s all gold, so there’s that.

You can hear the whole episode of this week’s At the Movies online here or on air on Sunday afternoon.

Pike River (Sarkies, 2025)

Is it a perfect film? No, it’s not. It is excellent on its own terms but to be perfect it would need to provoke some kind of change – structural change, meaningful change, permanent change – on behalf of those 29 men. It would need audiences to leave the theatre fired up about the injustice of the system and the inadequacy of our culture and determined to do something about it.

Helen Kelly would have known all this but – as she is ably portrayed by Lucy Lawless – in the film she’s a fellow cancer sufferer, an empathy engine, not the tireless activist for systemic reform that she was in life.

The gains that were made to our Health & Safety legislation in 2015, partly as a result of Pike River, are about to be unwound by a government that argues that the risk of workers not coming home at the end of the day should be shouldered by the least powerful not the most, all in the name of “going for growth”. While our politicians argue about what the economic “value of a life” should be, we should be telling them what we think is acceptable and that it’s not 29 men dying in a mine with bugger all safety protections.

But that isn’t what this film does. It wants to provide catharsis – a “punching the air” moment – that will send audiences out feeling good, but we shouldn’t be feeling good, we should be furious.

(Listen to the full review.)

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (Cooper, 2025)

Springsteen is such an interesting character. Only someone deeply insecure would allow himself to be called “Boss” by everyone, would be almost painfully perfectionist in the studio and in rehearsal, would insist on explaining his songs at length in concert because he has a very deep drive to be understood, or rather to not be misunderstood.

That’s also the reason why this film exists, yet another way to burnish the legend and legacy of the man and also explain why he is the way he is and wrote the songs he wrote. Compare Springsteen with the songwriter that he was supposed be the natural successor to, Bob Dylan, who famously doesn’t give a stuff what you think or what you think his songs are about. They just are.

The Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, from last year had one contribution from Dylan himself, a scene that never actually happened. Compare that withDeliver Me from Nowhere, where Springsteen has been alongside it every step of the way. It’s constricted and constrained, it has also has this need to explain everything, to not let you walk away until you’ve got it. It’s like those poetry readings where the introduction to the poem is twice as long as the poem itself.

(Listen to the full review or my conversation with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights.)

Frankenstein (Del Toro, 2025)

The production values are absolutely first class. Del Toro still insists on digital effects enhancing rather than replacing physical ones. Kate Hawley’s costumes should surely merit some attention come awards season. All of the actors got the memo about how heightened their performance style needs to be but only Jacob Elordi as the Creature uncovers any more subtle layers and Mia Goth as Elizabeth, love interest to both Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein and his more innocent brother WIlliam (Felix Kammerer), is so underwritten as to be not much more than an accent in a dress.

I was surprised to note that the final scenes of Frankenstein are very similar to the final scenes of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, to the extent that I’ve been joking that Deliver Me from Nowhere could be the subtitle for both films. They are both about failed parenting and the possibility of forgiveness and both those scenes are tender counterpoints to the bombast that has come before.

(Listen to the full review.)

A House of Dynamite (Bigelow, 2025)

This was the first of the season’s Netflix titles to get a cinema release this year — an indication of some prestige, and a warm-up to the likes of Frankenstein, Ballad of a Small Player, Train Dreams and, the big one, Wake Up Dead Man: Knives Out Mystery which local cinemas are relying on greatly prior to the new Avatar.

I spoke about this one to Nights substitute host Mark Leishman (these are machine-transcribed words):

It’s real gripping stuff that’s kind of a white knuckle ride. I will say that the ending of the film is going to polarise people. I was in a cinema last night watching it and as the film finished and the credits started there was one voice coming out loud and clear going, “Oh come on!”

So not everyone’s going to be on side with how this film finishes. But I thought it was absolutely tremendous, brilliantly performed. And the thing about it is that it presents this situation in a way that is all too plausible and nightmarish and you realise how little, even the experts know about what is really going on in the world.

We were trained I think in the days of the Cold War to believe that something like a nuclear war might be triggered by a kid playing a video game in Matthew Broderick and War Games and what have you, but it was never going to happen as a result of enemy action because they were all too darn smart for that. But this is a film that basically tells us that a cascade of things could go wrong quite easily in and around the fog of war. It is really quite terrifying and but brilliantly exciting at the same time.