Reviews

Loren Taylor’s The Moon Is Upside Down was finished, I think, a couple of years ago. It certainly picked up an award last year at a film festival in Tallin, Estonia of all places. It’s the latest in that Kiwi format that…

In what might be the best New Zealand drama ever produced (sorry, Top of the Lake), Robyn Malcolm (Upper Middle Bogan) plays a character not often seen on screen: a ballsy middle-aged woman who is brilliant and infuriating. Malcolm –…

When she first saw the child actors that would be playing the young versions of Dilworth survivors, Mary Durham nearly burst into tears on set. “Seeing these children and their little bright shiny faces so full of promise really hit…

David Jacobson is standing in the toilet of a queer nightclub, looking very much out of place. He’s been called there by three strangers, who found his name in a phone belonging to a young man named Leon, who is…

A small but spirited 1954-set drama about a group of “delinquent” teenage girls who plan a daring escape from the one-dock New Zealand island where they’ve been sent for institutional Christianization, Māori filmmaker Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu’s “We Were Dangerous” does…

A lay preacher finds himself caught in the crossfire of two warring tribes in 1830s New Zealand in Lee Tamahori’s The Convert. In some measures, arguably the most important measures, Liam Maguren says the film hits its marks. No voyage…

We open on expansive shots of a version of Christchurch, gleaming bright and a little too pretty. The setting of Dark City: The Cleaner has an unmistakable comic book quality, with artfully unreal newspapers and brands, pristine 70s busses and…

Searching for a high-stakes flick to get the blood pumping? You don’t have to look too far. In fact, this spine-chilling series boasts a South Island twist that will keep you couch-bound — and checking the doors are locked. Dark…

Reviewed by: Danny Mulheron This is the best written, acted and directed New Zealand series I have seen. Robyn Malcolm has never been better as Penny, a stocky willful maverick on the verge of becoming a hermit.  Given  Cassandra’s dilemma…

Taika Waititi’s latest directorial work, Next Goal Wins, didn’t exactly open to rave reviews overseas. In the Guardian, Waititi’s latest project was described as a, “lacklustre fact-based string-puller”, while Vulture wrote “the film is … so sloppily assembled, and so…

REVIEW By Mia Maramara. On paper, this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner reads like a fairly typical courtroom drama: a French man falls from the roof of his home while doing repairs and is found, dead in the snow, by…

“Sex is wonderful, don’t let this s… ruin it for you.” Rather than simply confiscating the offending cellphone, straight-shooting Central Boys’ College biology teacher Penny Wilding (Robyn Malcolm) has decided to turn the discovery of pornographic material on a student’s…

A version of this review ran in The Spinoff’s weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. It’s not true that there is a house style to New Zealand television drama, but there are some threads that show up quite…