New Zealand
Next Goal Wins review - football's lamentablesTuesday, 26 December 2023
For those who ever wonder if soccer scoreboards, or score-line captions on TV, can ever be made to reach three figures, consider the match between AS Adema and SO l’Emyrne, two teams in Madagascar, in 2002. It ended 149-0, but that was only because... Read more... |
Juniper review - a classic role for Charlotte RamplingSaturday, 24 September 2022
Juniper provides, above all, an absolutely unforgettable role for Charlotte Rampling. New Zealander Matthew J Saville, who devised the script and directed the film, based her character, Ruth, on his own feisty and well-travelled grandmother, who had... Read more... |
Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD: The PianoTuesday, 06 September 2022
Jane Campion’s enigmatic, triple-Oscar-winning film looks as beautiful as it did when it was released almost 30 years ago. Holly Hunter (you can’t help thinking she’s been underused ever since, give or take her performance in Campion’s Top of the... Read more... |
Album: Tami Neilson - KingmakerWednesday, 13 July 2022
We music journos miss stuff too. This writer had not come across New Zealand-based Canadian singer Tami Neilson before, despite the fact she’s been around for over a decade and this is her sixth studio album. How did I miss her?Kingmaker contains... Read more... |
Baby Done review - romcom done rightThursday, 21 January 2021
Romcoms. We all know the tried and tested formula: immature guy, uptight girl, they meet, they like each other, hate each other, and end up in love. It’s as reliable as it is unrealistic, and sometimes it takes a film like Baby Done to remind you... Read more... |
Savage review - an immersive look at gang culture in Wellington, New ZealandThursday, 10 September 2020
Not to be confused with Savages, the Oliver Stone film of 2012 about marijuana smuggling, Savage is a story of New Zealand street gangs: how to join and how to escape, which, when you’ve got the words Savages and Poneke (the Maori name for... Read more... |
The Luminaries, BBC One review - one of the most visually arresting dramas of the yearMonday, 22 June 2020
Alarm bells start ringing whenever you discover an author is adapting their own work for a screenplay. In the case of New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, the alarm proves to be false. Over the course of seven years, and apparently 200 drafts... Read more... |
Patricia Grace: Potiki review – a searching examination of human natureSunday, 23 February 2020
With the publication of her first work, Waiariki (1975), Patricia Grace became the author of the first ever collection of short stories by a Māori woman. In the four-and-a-half decades since, she has established herself as a canonical figure in... Read more... |
Album: Tami Neilson - CHICKABOOM!Friday, 14 February 2020
What’s going to make you fall in love with Tami Neilson? Will it be the way she cackles her way through the chorus of “Ten Tonne Truck”, her foot-stomping rags to riches daydream about a down-on-their-luck performing family who head for Nashville... Read more... |
Nalini Singh: A Madness of Sunshine review – a lacklustre thrillerSunday, 15 December 2019
Nalini Singh's debut thriller thrusts us into Golden Cove, a small coastal town in New Zealand at "the edge of nowhere” that isn't everything it seems. What on the surface is a sun-bleached paradise made recently popular with back-packers is... Read more... |
Anahera, Finborough Theatre review - blistering family drama from New ZealandSaturday, 07 September 2019
With power comes responsibility. One without the other is sickening -- and both iterations are on show in Emma Kinane's searing new play about a child runaway in New Zealand. Social worker Anahera (played by Acushla-Tara Kupe, pictured above... Read more... |
Oceania, Royal Academy review - magnificent encountersTuesday, 02 October 2018
In the video, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner smiles shyly before beginning. As she speaks, her voice gains conviction, momentum, power. Her poem tells of the Marshall Islands inhabitants, a “proud people toasted dark brown”, and a constellation of islands... Read more... |
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