Tuesday new releases: 30 September 2025

Prime Minister and One Battle After Another are in cinemas and Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery is streaming on Disney+.

I should let you know from the off that I am utterly unable to be objective about Prime Minister, Lindsay Utz and Michelle Waltz’s documentary about Jacinda Ardern, to the extent that I was in tears through most of it.

That might be a PTSD response to the trauma of the Covid era and its disappointing aftermath, but it’s also a grief response at what we — and the world — have lost in terms of empathetic and human-centred politics. It hit home to me in the first few moments of the film, as Ardern’s daughter Neve hops on to a big yellow American school bus with her mother’s words “I love you” ringing in her — and our — ears, that Ardern wasn’t just hounded from politics, she has been forced out of New Zealand entirely.

The intimacy of the film is astounding — Ardern’s partner Clarke Gayford wielding a home movie camera at convenient and inconvenient times, revealing the bone deep care that Ardern took to her responsibilities, despite the constant wondering whether she was up to it and that gnawing realisation that, despite not wanting the job, at that moment she was the best person for it.

It’s easy to be cynical about politicians’ motives — I read a constant refrain in my social feeds that current PM Christopher Luxon is only in it for the eventual knighthood, which I don’t believe for a moment is true even though I agree with none of his prescriptions for what ails us — and Prime Minister insists that we don’t forget the humans at the centre of the story¹. For Ardern, her realness was both her superpower and her kryptonite.

My theory about the power and focus of New Zealand’s elimination approach to the vaccine is that it came from the experiences that Ardern has already had as prime minister.

Firstly — as the film shows in emotional detail — she had already experienced two tragedies in office. 51 people were killed — and 89 injured, many severely — in the Christchurch mosque attacks and 22 died as a result of the Whakaari/White Island eruption and I believe that her starting point when Covid struck was that no one else was going to die, a clarity of purpose that was beyond others who insisted on seeing everything through a cost-benefit lens.

Secondly, she already had experience with a pandemic. In 2017, the cattle bacterium M. Bovis was discovered in New Zealand herds with the potential to cause immense damage to one of this country’s biggest industries. Ardern’s Labour government decided — against the advice of the opposition and many in the public service who said it wouldn’t be possible — that it could be eradicated with drastic controls on the movement of livestock (and the culling of thousands of infected beasts) and they were proved to be correct. That was an inspiration for the “go hard, go early” model of Aotearoa’s Covid response.

One final observation from Prime Minister relates to the loud and aggressive lobby that sprang up against those Covid measures, resulting in Ardern’s resignation and Labour’s loss of the 2023 election. The occupation of Parliament grounds and the eventual riotous eviction comes as a huge shock in the film — and we knew it was coming! For international audiences, less well versed in New Zealand politics, it must come as a thunderbolt.

But there are earlier clues as to the kind of turn that politics is taking. In one scene, when Ardern and other senior government leaders are talking to representatives of the Muslim community following the Christchurch tragedies, Green Party co-leader James Shaw is on the same couch clearly sporting a big black eye, received from a random disaffected member of the public as he was walking to work one morning. It didn’t land as heavily on the rest of us as it obviously did for Shaw, but with hindsight we should have seen where things were heading.

If I’ve learned anything in my 57-plus years on this planet, it’s that if you want something done — and done with diligence, care, respect and situational awareness — you should ask a woman to do it, an observation confirmed by both Prime Minister and Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a documentary by Ally Pankiw on Disney+. (It’s also confirmed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, but in a very different context.)