New Zealand
Thomas H. Green
Tami Neilson’s career is long and storied. The short version is that she began with a 1990s Canadian family band (opening for Kitty Wells, aged 10!), moved to New Zealand and became a country star there, then, over the last decade, has been “discovered by" and worked with all manner of US artists, ranging from Ashley McBryde to Willie Nelson. Her latest album is named in honour of the signage on Nashville Broadway, “the patron saint of heartbreak in downtown”, as she puts it. Less cheekily characterful than her output of recent years, it still has much to recommend it.Where her last album, Read more ...
Tami Neilson
I was born Tamara Lee Neilson. I had an Uncle Kenny and an Aunt Dolly (who played guitar and banjo, respectively). I mean, did I really have a choice to become anything but a Country singer?I fell in love with Dolly Parton when I was six years old, spinning her records on my dad’s record player while dancing on the olive green shag carpet of our living room. At 10 years old, I opened for Kitty Wells, the Queen of Country Music and the first woman to ever have a number one hit on Country radio, with my family band, The Neilsons. I knew I wanted to be like these women when I grew up; wear Read more ...
David Kettle
Bellringers, Roundabout @ Summerhall ★★★★ Dystopian climate-crisis dramas seemed ten-a-penny at the Fringe a few years back, but they’re far thinner on the ground in 2024. Which makes this deliciously elusive, oblique debut drama from Daisy Hall all the more intriguing, and valued.Clement and Aspinall appear in monk-like cassocks in a church belfry, apparently summoned by a fast-approaching storm. It’s their job to ring the tower’s bells, perhaps to alert residents of their Oxfordshire village to the impending deluge, or even act as some kind of community-protecting talisman simply by Read more ...
David Kettle
Heartbreak Hotel, Summerhall ★★★★ If the show’s title leaves you expecting schmaltz and dodgy Elvis impressions – well, you might be disappointed, and possibly pleasantly surprised. This quietly powerful two-hander from New Zealand-based company EBKM is a cool, sometimes almost clinical dissection of heartbreak and break-up, one that delves with unflinching clarity into the physiological and psychological aspects of loss and grief when a relationship comes to an end.Yes, at times it feels a bit like a lecture – if one delivered with songs, courtesy of Karin McCracken’s new-found Read more ...
James Saynor
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 of an on-field protest. (They were all own goals.)A more shocking shellacking was a year earlier when American Samoa lost 31-0 to Australia in a World Cup Qualifier. It was the biggest loss in international football history, or possibly in school playground history, or possibly in back garden history against the dog – and is now the starting point Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
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 led a full life, and then returned home – where she drank substantial quantities of gin every day.The other main character, her troubled grandson Sam (excellent newcomer George Ferrier), is also based on real life. In Saville’s own late teenage years, his time at a boarding school in Hamilton was beset by the experience of his contemporaries Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
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 Lake) is magnificent as the black-haired Ada, a mysteriously mute Scot who is sold by her father to frontiersman Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill) and joins him as his wife in the wilderness of 19th-century New Zealand.Ada brings her daughter and sign-language interpreter, Flora, the marvellous 11-year-old Anna Paquin, with her, as well as the precious Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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 the best kind of raw heartfelt country and scalpel-sharp lyricism, catchy songs spiked with a sassy rockabilly twang that propels them towards fresh territory. It boasts direction and energy which, with any justice, would see it racking up sales well beyond the niche. In short, an absolute zinger of an album.Neilson hails from a family of singers, Read more ...
Owen Richards
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 there is a better way. One that is funnier, more believable, and yes, even more romantic.Stand-up comic Rose Matafeo and Harry Potter alum Matthew Lewis star as Zoe and Tim, the last couple standing in the marriage and baby stakes. Everyone else is boring and settling down, but these two (and Zoe’s new-age friend Molly) are quite happy as things are Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
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 Wellington, where the film is set) tattooed on your face, like Danny, aka Damage (Jake Ryan), is not going to be easy.There’s a lot of standing around in the dark beside fires in braziers in scabby back yards, beer-drinking, claw-hammer-wielding and endless grunting of the F and C words. Most of the gang-members, impressive though they look (many of them Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
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 of the first episode alone, Catton has eloquently distilled her 848-page novel The Luminaries into six 60-minute episodes for the BBC. In the process, she’s stripped away the novel’s structure and a lot of its detail to create something more appropriate for a visual medium. The result is spectacular, but very different from the original Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
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 postcolonial and Māori literature. Grace’s second novel, Potiki (1986), winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and now re-released after thirty-four years, is an anguished account of a small family living on a remote stretch of New Zealand’s coastline. Set “at the curve that binds land and sea”, it is a searching examination of human nature, Read more ...