Movies

I’ve recently (accidentally) gone back-to-back with movies ranging from relentlessly bleak and cerebral to horrifically violent and morbid. Watching Calle Málaga, directed by Maryam Touzani, was a tonic for the soul.

Warm and uplifting, it takes place in Tangiers, following the cheeky, defiant, and resourceful widow María Ángeles-Muñoz (Carmen Maura) after her estranged daughter arrives at short notice to alert her that she is selling the apartment María has lived in for over 30 years, giving her the option to come back with her to Madrid or be shipped off to a nearby retirement facility.

Not wanting to leave the streets and community she knows and loves and the cemetery full of friends and family behind, María secretly moves back into her home while the sale is pending. She finds it emptied of all the things she’s collected over a lifetime, all of it sold to an antiques dealer. As she engages enterprising ways to buy back her belongings, her life takes on new colours.

While the script is deft and humorous, there are potent layers of silence too. The best friend and nun Josefa (María Alfonsa Rosso) is a favourite character. She meets María’s hilarious tales with telling facial expressions, while María’s silences in response to her daughter’s betrayal highlight the futility of words and the strength and dignity of remaining quiet.

A thematic undercurrent of fading empire adds its own accent to the film but never quite rears its head. The apartment, bought for a song, is furnished in old-world fashion, and María fondly recalls her days working in the Teatro Cervantes during the golden age of the Spanish protectorate. Her daughter exclaims that she is the last one of her friends to remain in Morocco, the rest having followed their children and grandchildren back to Spain. Yet it is María’s love of Tangiers that defines her, and the rich colours and textures of the ancient city – with its narrow, labyrinthine streets filled with sounds and smells and people – make it a character in its own right.

Other silences in the film were a source of frustration. Threads didn’t get pulled and questions went unanswered that had the potential to adjust the light cast on each character, especially regarding the daughter, who felt quite 2D. When the credits rolled, I felt slightly shortchanged. But then again, those gaps and silences leave space for the imagination.

The debut feature film of director duo THUNDERLIPS (Sean Wallace and Jordan Mark Windsor) follows the immaculate conceiver Mary (Hannah Lynch), a millennial rotter living with her overbearing mum Cynthia (Yvette Parsons) in a housing complex. Mary becomes alien pregnant when her nervous and gawky neighbour Boo (Arlo Green), endowed with an extraterrestrial appendage, accidentally fires a cosmic load on her pants after a brief encounter in the shared laundry.

What follows is a stomach-flipping, blood-draining, visceral whirlwind through the hospital system as Mary attempts to put a stop to the turbo-paced growth of the alien parasite. This clever sci-fi body-horror comedy is more than just the exaggerated and violent rearranging of Mary’s body and life as she is rent asunder from the inside out. Beneath the galactic spunk, litres of Powerade-blue vomit, projectile breast milk, and mucus-drenched sheets, it dissects the humiliations that come with the reproductive process and the sudden loss of agency over one’s body when family, religion, doctors, police, and politicians get involved.

The film is riddled with Kiwi deadpan comedy, but the ‘yeah nah’ and ‘she’ll be right’ pleasantries of the doctors, nurses, and police become insidious when paired with their do-nothing attitude. Comments like ‘you asked for it’ and ‘maybe it’s fate’ derail agency, while the lengths Mary takes to abort the alien shines a gruesome light on the dangerous situations people find themselves in when confronted with an unwanted pregnancy and a system built by men who deny their right to choose.

The characterisation and acting are spectacular on all fronts, capturing classic Kiwi types and their role in upholding systemic and societal issues over plenty of cups of tea. A special mention to Jackie van Beek who plays Ann, Boo’s uptight and starchy mum hellbent on protecting her son and keeping the mess off the carpet.

Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant is a must-see, bold, and batty exploration of autonomy and consent. Blending gore, humour, and depth in healthy measures, it highlights the outsized expectations placed on women (and their partners) when they accidentally find themselves up the duff and out on a limb.

Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film contains many of the hallmark features that make his cinema so discernible: vibrant colours, eccentric and strong female protagonists, queer themes, politics of the gaze. This time, however, he turns the camera on himself to produce a scathing self-portrait that deals with the problem of vampirism in filmmaking.

The story intertwines two parallel plotlines set 20 years apart. Characters and events tug at and mirror each other and are influenced by Almodóvar’s own experiences, making the way life informs fiction not just a fact but the film’s mechanism.

Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a film director (his hair impossible not to recognise as a nod to Almodóvar’s own shock of silver) experiences creative crisis writing his new script in the apartment he shares with his devoted (but mostly ignored) partner Santi (Quim Gutiérrez). Drawing from his own situation and the life updates from Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), his longtime PA – on sabbatical to care for her girlfriend whose son is undergoing a life-threatening surgery – he writes into being the anxiety-riddled indie film director Elsa (Bárbara Lennie) who has been reduced to making TV ads and can’t shake terrible migraine attacks. She meets her partner Bonifacio (Patrick Criado) at a hen’s night, where he performs a quintessentially Almodóvarian striptease to Grace Jones’ Libertango, after which she invites him to feature in an underwear advertisement.

She too largely ignores her partner (a revelation of the director’s own dwindling feelings about Santi) and is inspired to write a new script based on the lives of two bereft friends she is caring for on the Canary island Lanzarote. When Mónica reads Raúl’s script she immediately recognises herself and her partner.

The film explores the ethical problem and betrayal of repurposing another person’s trauma to propel a story while also highlighting the way fiction can pick and choose, stretch and bend those lived experiences. It is a self-conscious critique of Almodóvar’s own cinema which is filled with stories about the lives of women – though the women who populate his films are one of the reasons I go back time and again to his films.

While I’m always a fan of the cerebral, the cleverness sometimes got in the way of me experiencing any real affinity or depth of emotion toward the characters, and I still can’t work out the title. But that didn’t deter my enjoyment of getting to step foot in the colourful and strange world of Almodóvar.

I love books about writing and movies about cinema; they cut open the belly of the art form and expose its spleen and inner machinations. El ser querido (The Beloved) from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen does exactly this: a film set on a film set in 1930s Spanish-ruled Western Sahara, that is in fact being shot in Fuerteventura – another imperial outpost. This level of alienation plays out in other ways throughout, highlighting the power of cinema to deceive.

Javier Bardem plays Esteban Martínez, a controversial Spanish film director and celebrated Oscar and Cannes Palme d’Or winner who invites his estranged daughter Emilia Vera (Victoria Luengo) – whom he hasn’t seen for 13 years – to lunch and offers her a leading role in his upcoming film. The lunch is tense, setting the scene for what is to follow. Emilia accepts the role, but not without serious consideration of the trauma caused by her father’s drunken and often violent behaviour when she was a young girl – which Esteban flatly contests as fictions conjured up by her mother to pit her against him.

El ser querido might’ve been one of the best examples I’ve seen of actors having to act as though they aren’t acting. We see Emilia trying to keep it together when the camera is rolling. We witness Esteban’s controlling, anger-fuelled, and toxic manner on set, which is chillingly offset with sporadic bouts of charm that help maintain his mythic status among the crew.

While exploring a dysfunctional father-daughter relationship, it also lays bare the harsh and unglamorous realities of a film set, the power imbalances built into the industry, and the filmic devices that propel a story: narrative, scene composition, cinematography, sound. Scenes mirror or are pitted against each other (e.g. a tyrannical film director makes a film critiquing the Spanish Empire, built on the foundations of patriarchy). Fictive layers put reality on shaky grounds. The film switches between black and white, analogue, and colour, shifting mood and making the audience think about what function each camera serves. The sound at times is removed to strip a scene bare and home in on gesture and set. The same scene is performed over and over again. The sun scorches. The wind burns. The director always has the final say.

There were moments when the film lacked energy and I was hoping it would wrap up quickly. Whether this too was intentional, I wouldn’t be surprised.  

For anyone expecting a mature exploration of polyamory and non-conforming relationships, this film isn’t for you. For those wanting to laugh out loud, physically cringe, and immerse yourself in a tense, fast-paced comedy-drama testing what happens when a rocky marriage brushes up against the hot, atypical love between two eccentrics still in the throes of their honeymoon phase, then please go see The Invite.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, a decidedly unhappy married couple Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogan) invite their upstairs neighbours Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) to a dinner party. Destined from the start to be doomed, the evening doesn’t unfurl; it spirals, explodes, collapses, and drags itself exhausted to bed.  

Angela and Joe embody all the tropes of a marriage on thin ice (nit-picking, passive aggressiveness, complacency, blame) while Piña and Hawk flaunt their passion with loud banging and growling through the ceiling every night and lots of heavy petting on the sofa after dessert.

Cruz, as usual, is an onscreen magnetic force. Norton pulls off his moderately sleazy character effortlessly. Wilde is so tightly wound and anxious it makes you hold your breath. Rogan truly comes into his own in his spectacular performance of the down-and-out music teacher who was once in a rock ‘n’ roll band, undercutting the evening’s proliferating absurdities with incredulous one-liners that let a breeze into the claustrophobic atmosphere.

A four-piece chamber comedy, the simple premise makes for a film filled with dialogue, taking place in the intimacy of a few rooms in Joe and Angela’s recently renovated apartment. Nothing tells you that the audience is gripped more than hooting and hollering from somewhere out back of the theatre. The sharp command of tension had the audience at the film’s mercy, cleverly building and releasing in all the right moments. Pair this with the fact that everyone who has ever been in a relationship is most likely witnessing aspects of their own foibles on the big screen, and I imagine viewers come away feeling very seen – or rather – exposed.

I didn’t love the ending; it tied too neat a bow around the evening. At the same time, endings are hard and it’s difficult to know where to finish…

Mar Musa opens with the pastel colours of dawn sweeping across a vast desert landscape. Built into the side of a rugged, treeless mountain, the ancient monastery Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi looks more like a citadel, camouflaged save for the architectural straight lines that give it away.

The monastery’s history is deeply tied to the economic, political, and social fate of Syria, beginning in the 4^th century. Mar Musa, directed by Shahab Kermani, follows the monks and nuns living in the monastery through intimate, observational storytelling as they navigate post-war devastation in Syria. The monastery’s key tenets are to practice and promote interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims, provide radical hospitality to all faiths, and close the distance between the two religious groups to move towards a more peaceful and mutual life.

We see the community sharing meals together with visitors of both faiths, smiling and laughing as they discuss profound theological questions and the horrors of war. Their faith is resolute, and love and understanding is at the heart of the gatherings. This is despite the grave personal losses and trauma experienced by everyone. Including the abduction of community founder Father Paolo Dall’Oglio by ISIL and the destruction of the 1,500 year old Mar Elian monastery in a nearby town.

The cinematography is spectacular, cutting between landscape, daily life, and interviews. Inside the monastery we get an intimate portrait of prayer and contemplation against the backdrop of Byzantine iconography, lit up by votive candles and columns of light coming through small openings near the ceiling.

The community visit nearby towns completely ravaged by war. The footage of street after street lined with rubble was some of the most shocking scenes of destruction I’ve ever seen – made all the more profound in the strength of the people that have chosen to remain.

The documentary is slow and meditative with a hypnotic score that won Best International Sound award at the Doc Edge Festival. I could’ve happily just watched the weather change on the desert below and listened to the monks, nuns, and visitors as they chatted over shared meals. Their lives are centred around healing the deep fractures within the country. The message of unity was poignant, and as the credits rolled, I could only wonder what the future holds for the place.

With my dates all mixed up I arrived at The Roxy cinema precisely one week early for a Doc Edge Festival documentary. Thankfully, The Lives of My Father was about to start, which made arriving 168 hours early completely worth it.

Directed by Magnus Skatvold, The Lives of My Father tells a story of espionage, lies, propaganda, and the uncovering of a father’s extraordinary double life. Didrik Hallstrøm was always told his ever-absent father Bjørn was a journalist who visited war-torn lands to get on-the-ground news. After recovering video tapes boxed up in the attic, he discovers that his father worked for the CIA, having been recruited by the agency after generating successful anti-Russian slogans when he worked in advertising.

The extraordinary footage reveals the escapades of a truly singular man whose life could come straight out of a Cold War spy novel. We see Bjørn firing AK-47s in the Kuwaiti desert and infiltrating cocaine laboratories in Colombia. We see him in the jungle in Cambodia and caught in crossfires on the frontline of the Bosnian war.

Instead of glamourising Bjørn’s escapades like a Hollywood blockbuster would, The Lives of My Father turns the lens toward the shadowy side of a double life. Bjørn is unwell and nearing the end of his life. For the first time, Didrik confronts his father about his past through a series of interviews. Bjørn is larger than life, charismatic, obstinate, and good-humoured, chain smoking his way through the interviews, only ever stopping briefly to puff on his inhaler.

Accounts from Bjørn’s ex-wife, friends, and colleagues reveal the effects of his work: a son who grew up without a father, a wife who raised her children alone, and colleagues who had no idea that the journalism was a cover for something much more dangerous and covert.

Over the course of the documentary the lines blur between propaganda, journalism, and espionage. We are confronted by the global meddling of the CIA, the lengths a man is willing to go to complete his missions, and the reality of living life as a spy.  

A truly thought-provoking and captivating documentary, there are no heroes and no villains. Instead, there are complicated people reckoning with their pasts in the hopes to move on.

Modern Whore is a hybrid film based on a memoir of the same name by Andrea Werhun. It blends documentary with fiction, featuring reenactments, testimonials, animations, and archival footage in a fast-paced and spirited reimagining of Werhun’s life as a sex worker. She teamed up with director Nicole Bazuin for the documentary, where she explores agency, labour, intimacy, and identity, telling stories about the behaviours of clients, the owners of her escort agency, and the unique growing pains of learning on the job.

The documentary is subversive. It takes the typically bleak genre of sex work films, grabs the microphone, and displays the real life of a sex worker straight from the horse’s mouth. The film includes conversations between Werhun and fellow sex workers, who discuss their experiences of sex work through the lens of race, gender diversity, and neurodivergence – though only ever in short cameos. It also includes conversations between Werhun and her mother, and with her long-term partner – both of whom are incredibly supporting of her.

It’s upbeat, it’s colourful. It deals with the darker side of sex work without making it the whole side. While it empowers and gives agency to sex workers who often don’t get to tell their own stories, I couldn’t help but feel some moments are self-indulgent. It makes sweeping statements about sex work based on Werhun’s very specific experience, while at the same time barely reaching below the surface. The over-dramatisation is often jarring and slapstick, and while it covers a lot of themes, it sometimes reads like the diary of a teenager. Then again, without her unreserved confidence, a film with total agency like this one would never get made.

All that being said, I appreciate that Modern Whore is radical and important. Sex workers are often portrayed only as victim or villain, and here is a film featuring a three-dimensional and uncategorisable woman who is both empowered and embodied. In Canada sex work is not legal, making it a critical film about labour rights. Here in Aotearoa, it will challenge the biases of some of its more prudish and discriminatory audiences. Ultimately, I was engaged throughout and I would encourage people to head along and check it out. It will be screening as part of the Doc Edge Film Festival at the Roxy Cinema on Saturday the 25^th of July. 

“Maman died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” Those are the famous establishing lines in Albert Camus’ 1947 absurdist fiction The Stranger. The novel follows Meursault, a detached, emotionally flat young pied-noir man in French Algeria, whose apparent indifference to the death of his mother becomes the central focus of a trial he is later put on after murdering an Arab man on the beach beneath a blazing noonday sun.

I’m always nervous to watch a screen adaptation of a film – I’ve been let down so many times. I loved the novel when I first read it. For months after I held a scalpel up to my thoughts and actions, never more acutely aware of the performative nature of being.

François Ozon’s 2025 adaptation blew my expectations out of the water. Black and white, set in 1930s Algiers with spectacular performances from Benjamin Voisin (playing Meursault) and Rebecca Marder (his girlfriend Marie Cardona), the film is aesthetically striking. The monochrome format emphasises light and shadow and each scenes composition, only adding to the psychological intensity. With Camus’ sparse and detached prose described as ‘l‘écriture blanche’, or ‘white writing’, and the central, repeated motif of a blinding and oppressively hot sun, it was immediately obvious that a film adaptation could never have been in a colour format.

The novel received criticism due to its upholding of colonial views of indigenous Algerians as second-class citizens and its antipathetic treatment of Arab characters. The film, on the other hand, cleverly sets the story against the backdrop of French colonialism, giving a contemporary perspective on race and empire, and in some ways, challenging the absurdist backbone of the original text.  

While the slow burn might be difficult for some to sit through, for me the pacing was fundamental to the atmosphere, enabling each scene to feel essential, layering one on top of the other and building to the crescendo of the trial and Meursault’s subsequent sentence. The novel is short yet dense, hailed as a foundational text on absurdism that requires multiple readings. I found that the movie only added new depths to my understanding of the philosophical theory. Watching the film and reading the book calls the viewer’s heart into question, which to me is always a sign of excellent art.

Known for his spare, emotive black-and-white portraits of the denizens of queer, creative, and intellectual circles in 70s and 80s New York, Peter Hujar’s Day is a verbatim account of a certain day in the photographer’s life. Directed by Ira Sachs and shot on Super 16mm film stock, the film is a quiet yet commanding time capsule, a chance to eavesdrop on a dramatic reimagining of a tape-machine recorded interview between two friends, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw).

The warm tones of the film, with deliberately janky cuts and scratches, shows them moving around Rosencrantz’s stunningly dressed apartment, shifting with the sun from table to couch to rooftop to kitchen while Hujar describes in detail what he did the day before. It is gentle and meditative, affectionate and slow. The pace gives space to the audience to consider the mechanisms of memory and legacy, the sieving effect of time, and the tragic loss of not only a brilliant photographer, but a human being with aches and pains and concerns around money, health, and work – just like the rest of us.

What marks his day as different from anyone else’s are his phone calls with the likes of Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz, his appointment with Allen Ginsberg to photograph him for The Times – who was cool, distant, and took to chanting at every available moment – and his plans to photograph William S. Burroughs the following day. Otherwise, he takes several naps, puts off his work, eats Chinese takeout, and only seems to come alive after midnight, when he practices Bach on the harpsichord.

While perhaps only compelling to fans of Hujar, or audiences interested in artistic process, Whishaw and Hall do an incredible job of what would be a complex performance to pull off: the subtle embodiment of quirks and mannerisms of two historical figures to make it appear effortless and documentarian. Each frame feels like a picture, and for me the 76-minute runtime was the perfect length. Running like an alternate reel the entire time is a sense of loss, knowing that Peter Hujar, among many of the friends he photographed, died of AIDS in 1987 in the midst of the crisis, the devastating effects of which had profound effects on his artistry and legacy.

It’s a little difficult to know what to say about the sequel to a cult classic like The Devil Wears Prada. Set 20 years after where we left off, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) has become a successul investigative journalist, Emily (Emily Blunt) has become a fashion executive at Christian Dior, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is still the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine – though the magazine is struggling with the decline of print media, and she is no longer allowed to throw her coat at her interns due to HR complaints – and Nigel (Stanley Tucci) is still as loyal and charming as ever.

What ensues is a tide of glamour and high fashion (with a surprising number of sequins, dungarees, and culottes), endless references to the original lore to make the fans happy, and a movie that oscillates from so-bad-it’s-good to plain bad from start to finish.

But can we ask for much from a sequel? The script was sharp and full of the quotable one liners that made the first such a hit – especially from Miranda, Emily, and Nigel. The plot was modern, with talk of Ozempic, glow ups, and viral memes. Streep and Tucci give phenomenal performances. It was fun picking out the celebrities making brief cameos, from Lady Gaga to Donatella Versace. It was slightly amusing watching them poke fun at the rise of tech bro giants and the subsequent loss of artistry and humanity that comes with AI.

What really bothered me was Andy Sachs. Following an online faux pas from Runway she is called in to save the day. It’s hard to believe in her moral integrity as a do-good investigative journalist when it slips out the backdoor the second she enters the high-fashion building, is taken to the dressing room, and loaned a Gabriela Hearst maxi dress before heading off to the Hamptons. What’s more, and this is a personal preference, but watching The Devil Wears Prada 2 in today’s climate felt almost as tone deaf as when the makers of Sex and the City 2 thought offering up a glitzy sequel would provide an escape from the gloom of the financial crisis of 2010. But hey, it was fun. I laughed. I cringed. It’s a sequel to a classic. You might as well go check it out.

What kinds of skeletons in your partner’s closet are you able to cope with? Where is your line? Has the world’s capacity to forgive shrunk in the age of outrage? Who is exempt? How do we judge intent? Are the kids alright?

The Drama, directed by Kristoffer Borgli, follows couple Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) in the week leading up to their wedding as their relationship is tested by an unexpected conversation about their pasts. A film that makes you feel desperately uncomfortable and laugh out loud in unexpected moments, it takes you on a ride through an unravelling crisis that is twice cooked in the pressure of the looming wedding.

Pattinson does a wonderful job playing the charming and bookish Charlie, whose somewhat clean past makes him appear meek rather than saintly. Watching Charlie fumble with his words is incredibly painful. We see him grapple with his newfound knowledge, oscillating between fear and outrage, forgiveness and various forms of escapism, making him both moderately pathetic but also entirely human. Zendaya is captivating as always, putting a light touch on a complex character whose past is being scrutinised from the moral high horse of the present.

At first glance, the relatively simple plot might appear shallow, but I believe it asks the audience deeply personal questions, with as many answers as there are people in the room. The film could only ever be polarising – it’s in the title. The Drama plays out because people pass judgments on other people, and everyone in the audience might have a different idea about which character is the voice of reason.

All this might sound abstracted because I don’t want to give away the twist, and even without an in-depth analysis, the film is fun. It sent laughter and groans through the audience multiple times, and the onstage chemistry between Zendaya and Pattinson is infectious. But still, for me The Drama is about the individual’s moral compass in a world full of outrage (and it is fair enough to be outraged). If I had to put in my two cents though, I’d call on the strong human impulse to forgive.