Tuesday new releases: 3 February 2026
The Choral, Send Help and It Was Just an Accident are in cinemas and The Wrecking Crew is streaming on Prime Video.
The two highest profile releases of the week don’t feature in this newsletter and both are examples of a rapidly changing landscape — one I’m finding it hard to keep up with.
Brett Ratner’s ‘documentary’ Melania sucked up all the column inches but despite its notoriety couldn’t find a screen in Wellington to show it. For once, our cinematic poverty works to our advantage. If you’re at all interested in the actual film, the editor-in-chief pointed me at this excellent summary of global reviews. They all watched it so I didn’t have to1.
In arguably more seismic news, the film with the biggest box office results in Australia and New Zealand last weekend was a self-funded horror called Iron Lung by someone the press release calls a ‘YouTube megastar’, Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach. I saw the phrase “self-funded” in the Flicks summary — and having had something of my fill of horror over the last couple of years — gave it a swerve. Clearly, though, 50 million social media followers ( 38 million on YouTube alone) provided enough weight to make it a cultural phenomenon and it means I have to make some adjustments to my thinking.
I don’t spend much time on YouTube and try to remember to not be logged in to any identifiable account when I do. I’ve seen it mostly as a force for social toxicity despite the fact that I use it to learn how to do weird little things all the time. So, while the algorithm has turned a great many ordinary young folk into tragic incel white supremacists, the platform itself is something I finally have to reckon with. Even the BBC recently announced that they would be making original programming especially for YouTube this year.
This was also the week that The Atlantic published an article about how teachers of film studies are having difficulty getting students to actually sit all the way through the films:
Akira Mizuta Lippit, a cinema and media-studies professor at the University of Southern California—home to perhaps the top film program in the country—said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings: The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget. Eventually, they give in. He recently screened the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola classic The Conversation. At the outset, he told students that even if they ignored parts of the film, they needed to watch the famously essential and prophetic final scene. Even that request proved too much for some of the class. When the scene played, Lippit noticed that several students were staring at their phones, he told me. “You do have to just pay attention at the very end, and I just can’t get everybody to do that,” he said.
Having said that, the film that prompted all the queues at my local multiplex this weekend was an anniversary screening of The Lord of the Rings so maybe the classics can endure.
Back to this week’s new releases and I enjoyed Ralph Fiennes in the UK historical drama, The Choral. It was an “O.K. Choral”, if you will2. Fiennes plays a choirmaster asked to steer the choral society of a small Yorkshire town, decimated by the loss of male voices to World War One. Fiennes’ character has to battle class as well as wartime prejudice — he spent most of his professional career in Germany where the good music gets made — and the eventual choice of Elgar’s 1900 epic oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius, is a clever one.
Firstly, from a story point of view, it gives the choir something decidedly English to perform — an affection for England despite its faults being a subtext of The Choral — but it also asks modern cinema audiences to consider something outside of the classical big hits repertoire for a change. When the person sitting next to me asked her companion what she thought of the music, the replay was “Not much.” That new-fangled 125-year-old modern music!
Screenwriter Alan Bennett is a national treasure in England and watching The Choral was like enjoying a fine piece of craftsmanship. Not too inspiring but everything in its place and beautifully turned out.
Sam Raimi is also a craftsman but might not fall into the category of national treasure just yet. Send Help is his first engagement with original (i.e.not franchise or pre-existing) material since Drag Me to Hell in 20093.
At one point in Send Help, Rachel McAdams’ Linda Liddle — an unappreciated strategy executive in a big consultancy firm forced to use the knowledge gained from her Survivor fandom to keep herself and her boss alive after a plane crash strands them on a deserted island — says that "monsters are not born, they’re made”, an observation that will become true of her and Dylan O’Brien’s boorish and entitled executive as the film goes on.
