TELEVISION
Our Picks of the Week
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 19 COUNTRY CALENDAR
Back to the paddock
Screening: TVNZ 1, 7.00pm
The TV institution is back for its 57th year, with an opening episode featuring a Murupara couple who built up their sheep, beef and dairy farm from nothing and now provide jobs for local people. The following episode meets a Central Otago sheep-farming couple who’ve built a business around producing coloured wool. Then on March 5, it’s a deer farm that’s diversifying into Siberian cherry trees, which provide both fruit and wood for furniture. The week after that, the show visits a former firefighter and his family in Gisborne, where they grow citrus varieties rarely seen in the local market, including pink seedless lemons and finger limes.
SEVEN DAYS ON MARS
The real Mars shot
Streaming: TVNZ+
A feature-length episode in which Professor Brian Cox visits Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, meeting the team behind the Perseverance mission to Mars. Cox on his own can veer into whimsy and waffle, but not so much here, where the very real backdrop of an active Mars rover mission and all its moving parts provide the tension. Cox’s delight at being there is deeply founded – he was 13 when he wrote to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory asking for photos from Voyager and the Viking mission to Mars. The response set him off on his cosmological career. The exploration of Mars, he explains, is not just a visit to another planet but potentially a search for the origins of life on Earth. Lucy Mangan in the
Guardian wrote, “It’s the kind of programme that … has you periodically open-mouthed at the staggering feats of humanity on display.”
MONDAY FEBRUARY 20 76TH BRITISH ACADEMY FILM AWARDS
New room, new host, new Baftas Screening: BBC UKTV, 8.30pm For 2023’s awards, the Baftas have moved from the Royal Albert Hall to the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, where the organisers are promising a “refreshed production and format” and “most ambitious and accessible night yet”. They’ve announced that “following the success of last year’s iconic performance from Dame Shirley Bassey, inspired by 60 years of James Bond, music performances will feature throughout the broadcast from music newcomers and legends alike”. Last year’s German remake of All Quiet on the Western Front leads the nominations with 14, ahead of The Banshees of Inisherin and Everything Everywhere All at Once with 10 each.
Notably, the impressionistic Bowie pic Moonage Daydream, spurned by the Oscars, gets a nod in the documentary category. Richard E Grant will be hosting for the first time.
HERE COME THE GYPSIES
Embedding with the Romani Screening: TVNZ 1, 9.45pm Media depictions of Britain’s Traveller community have often been unhelpful and stereotypical – mere “class tourism”, as one reviewer summed up a previous documentary series – but this one seems to be more solidly based, even if the UK tabloids had their usual field day with it. It offers an insight into the Romani communities who have been in Britain for more than 400 years, with a focus on the then-proposed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would criminalise nomadic lifestyles (the bill became law the year after the documentary was shot). Presenter Ed Stafford adopted the approach he took with his previous series 60 Days on the Streets, spending two months living alongside the people he was depicting.
TUESDAY FEBRUARY 21
PROFESSOR T
The search for Jasper’s secrets Screening: BBC UKTV, 8.35pm
The second season of Professor
T sees the unconventional Jasper Tempest (Ben Miller) turn first to his mother Adelaide (Frances de la Tour) then to therapist Dr Helena Goldberg ( Juliet Stevenson) to try to bring to the surface more of the secrets of his troubled childhood. Along the way, he continues to solve unusual crimes with the assistance of his offsider, Lisa Donckers (Emma Naomi).
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 22
TE MATATINI HERENGA WAKA
HERENGA TANGATA 2023
Screening: TVNZ 2, 8.00am, then February 23 and 24
See story, page 67.
Yet more unintended consequences and de-extinction ethical conundrums as the volcanic Isla Nublar erupts and baddies ship the dinosaurs to mainland US for a black-market auction, with Owen and Claire (Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard) to the rescue. As a hybrid disaster flick and mad-scientist horror film, it certainly has its moments, but the fifth in the series is just not much of a dinosaur film, which in this franchise is a problem. (2018)
BIRDS OF PREY
Feathered fiends
Three, 8.30pm
From the often-dour DC Comics cinema universe, a surprisingly fun all-female supervillain gang film that is an exuberant sequel to, and a vast improvement on, 2016’s torturous Suicide Squad.
This gives Margot Robbie a chance to shine in her second outing as Harley Quinn, who is getting on with her own mad bad life in Gotham after splitting up with the Joker. She’s joined by Black Canary ( Jurnee Smollett-Bell), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez). (2020)
I AM NOT A WITCH
A strange brew
Whakaata Māori, 8.30pm
A visually striking if perplexing Zambian folk fable about a nine-year-old orphan exiled to a camp of other females accused of witchcraft. The debut feature by Zambianborn Welsh writer-director Rungano Nyoni and its magical realism might remind some of Beasts of the Southern Wild.
(2017)
ARGO
A great escape
Eden, 8.30pm
Ten years ago, Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning flick caused many local headlines about failing to say nice or indeed accurate things about the New Zealand diplomats in Tehran at the time of 1979 Iran hostage crisis. But his ripping yarn of a film about the CIA agent who hatched a plan to extract US embassy staff by having them pose as a film crew remains his finest hour or two. (2012)
THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT
Oeuvre the top
Sky Movies Premiere, 8.30pm; Neon
Nicolas Cage stars as Nicolas
Cage in an amusingly meta and cleverly scripted comedy in which his paid appearance at a rich super-fan’s birthday party (a terrific Pedro Pascal) gets him involved in a CIA sting that itself turns into something resembling a Cage popcorn flick from his 1990s action-star heyday. (2022)
MONDAY FEBRUARY 20 WORKING WOMAN
Devil of a job
Rialto, 8.30pm
Engaging if gruelling Israeli sexual harassment drama focused on Tel Aviv mother of three Orna (Liron Ben-Shlush), who comes in for unwanted attention from her boss at the new job she hoped would help her struggling family’s finances. (2018)
TUESDAY FEBRUARY 21 BOOK OF LOVE
Latin lover
Sky Movies Premiere, 8.30pm; Neon
Predictable if passable crosscultural romcom about an uptight English writer (Sam Clafin) whose dreary romance novel becomes a Mexican bestseller after a sexed-up Spanish translation by Maria (Verónica Echegui), who becomes his local book-tour guide. (2022)
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 22 A GHOST STORY
From here to eternity Whakaata Māori, 9.00pm Director David Lowery’s poignant, poetic and profound supernatural tale about a ghost (Casey Affleck) who, from underneath the traditional white sheet, haunts the house in which he lived with his wife (Rooney Mara) as time marches on. (2017)
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 24 MEN
It’s a guy thing
Sky Movies Premiere, 8.30pm; Neon
Writer turned director Alex Garland follows his sci-fi films with a creepy-to-freaky horror about toxic masculinity running rampant in a film that feels like a collision of David Cronenberg and The Wicker Man. An unhappy Jessie Buckley seeking some R&R in an English village doesn’t seem to notice the creepy locals are blokes who all look the same – care of Rory Kinnear’s multiple-character chameleon act. (2022)
Films are rated out of 5: (abysmal) to
(amazing)