Stuff to Watch on Sky and free-to-air TV this week
Watch the movie that Thomasin McKenzie rejected Top Gun: Maverick for and seek out our only Palme d’Or winner, writes James Croot.
Last Night in SoHo
(8.30pm, Sunday, Sky Movies Premiere)
Some may describe dropping out of Top Gun: Maverick to join this time-spanning, psychological horror as madness, but Kiwi actor Thomasin McKenzie’s starmaking turn in Edgar Wright’s 2021 tale is proof she made the right decision. Don’t let the presence of 2020’s queen Anya Taylor-Joy fool you, this is the McKenzie show(case). She plays Eloise ‘‘Ellie’’ Turner, an aspiring fashion designer who lands a plum position at the London College of Fashion, but it comes with the perils of moving to the big smoke, where new sights, sounds and temptations overwhelm her.
The Legend of Baron To’a
(8.30pm, tomorrow, Whakaata Māori)
A 2020 Kiwi action-comedy that feels like a cross between Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, cult Kiwi movie Tongan Ninja and the wacky criminal world of Guy Ritchie movies. Kiel McNaughton offers up a South Auckland suburbia filled with colourful characters and menace around every corner, wonderfully choreographed fight and chase scenes, choice dialogue and plenty of over-the-top male posturing. The classy cast includes Shavaughn Ruakere, Nathaniel Lees, Uli Latukefu and a bulked-up Jay Laga’aia.
East Coast Rising (9.10pm, Thursday, TVNZ 2)
The North Island’s East Cape is home to Aotearoa’s secondlargest iwi, Ngā ti Porou. They have a deep connection to the Heartland Rugby team Ngā ti Porou East Coast. As this documentary shows, the players are considered heroes, despite not having won a game in eight years before the 2021 season. Enter Gisborne-born, ex-All Black winger Hosea Gear, a man determined to change the team’s fortunes.
The Walkers (9.40pm, Thursday, TVNZ 2)
Stan Walker and his whā nau are back for a second season of
this raw, entertaining and unfiltered look into their lives. In 2022, life is busy, as we follow Stan and Lou as they adjust to living together as a married couple in Whanganui, the exciting announcement of pe¯ pi, and Stan releasing his new te reo Mā ori album.
McLaren (7pm, Friday,
Prime)
For a generation of Kiwis, Bruce McLaren was a legend and hero. For anyone born after 1970 though, he seems little more than the name on a car, intermediate school or retirement village. That’s what Roger Donaldson’s 2017 docudrama aims to put right, offering up a comprehensive biography of the race-car designer, driver, engineer and inventor, from his early diagnosis of Perthes disease to his tragic death at 32.
The Piano (8.30pm, Saturday, Eden)
The only New Zealand film to have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Jane Campion’s 1993, 19th-century-set tale of sexual emancipation in the mud and bush stars Holly Hunter, Sam Neill, Harvey Keitel and a young Anna Paquin. Campion, Hunter and Paquin took home Oscars from the following year’s Academy Awards.
Westworld (8.30pm, Monday, SoHo)
Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose and Aurora Perrineau join the cast for the fourth season of this dystopian sci-fi series. Described as ‘‘a dark odyssey about the fate of sentient life on Earth’’, it will feature an amusement park modelled after a version of a Mafiacontrolled 1930s America.
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