Simon Morris

2 months ago | rnz.co.nz | Simon Morris

Nickel Boys was the darkhorse of this year's Oscars, although it was enthusiastically praised by the few people who actually got to see it - critics and academy members mostly. It never made the cinemas and streaming service Amazon Prime has only now finally released it. Nickel Boys was clearly not an easy sell - on paper.

2 months ago | rnz.co.nz | Simon Morris

New Zealand films do occasionally try the patience of their supporters. Yes, we've made some terrific movies, but out in the general Cinema of Unease, there's a tendency towards the glum and the grumpy. With one glorious exception.

2 months ago | rnz.co.nz | Simon Morris

Writer-director Andrea Arnold is a one-off. She seems to be rooted in British urban realism - films like Fish Tank and this week's Bird. But she also directs hit TV series like Big Little Lies, and surreal features like Cow - I quote - "a close-up portrait of the daily life of two cows." It's an hour and a half long. My favourite quote of Arnold's is: "I went to film school; you'd just never know it".

2 months ago | rnz.co.nz | Simon Morris

While romantic comedies and dramas tend to concentrate on personal relationships, comic-book movies have lately been backing away from such trivia. DC and Marvel seem far more occupied with things like multiverses, alien invasions, explaining the intricacies of the various plots and so on. In other words, mostly the sort of thing that would inspire your average, obsessive 13-year-old male comics fan. It wasn't always so.

Feb 12, 2025 | rnz.co.nz | Simon Morris

Review - September 5 takes on, you'd think, well-covered territory - the tragic events of the Munich Olympics of 1972, when a dozen Israeli athletes and coaches were held hostage by a group of terrorists calling themselves Black September. But this film is more interested in how we learned that story. The events, and their aftermath, were the basis of Steven Spielberg's 2005 thriller Munich. But September 5 has a different focus.