CHILD’S PLAY

With the Film Festival approaching, you can feel the anticipation building in Auckland’s cinephile community — but there’s plenty worth your time in the coming weeks before “Kiwi moviegoers’ Christmas”. Saturday at Academy Cinema is a Bong Joon Ho double bill, where you can catch his earlier classic Mother (rated R16) alongside his latest Parasite (rated R16), the best film of the year so far. Meanwhile, one that has been largely overlooked by audiences (and critics) so far but well worth your time is, surprisingly, Child’s Play (dir. Lars Klevberg, rated R16), the remake of the earlier horror-comedy series about a killer doll. In a year full of dull, uninspired rehashes of prior franchises, this remake seems genuinely aware of the inherent trashiness of its premise and has a lot of fun with it. You could do a lot worse at a Saturday night at the movies.