TIFF22 REVIEW: Muru [2022]

He’s chasing taniwha. New Zealand’s Tūhoe people have faced more than a century of aggression for daring to keep their culture alive. As relayed at the start of Tearepa Kahi‘s thriller Muru (a Māori word for their process of redressing transgressions), the facts are undeniable. In 1916, the police staged a raid to arrest Tūhoe prophet Rua Kenana on charges of sedition (he would later be acquitted and instead charged with resisting). A half-hour gunfight ensued leaving two dead and six wounded. Then the police staged another in 2007 to…

Read More

REVIEW: Outlaws [2019]

You’re not the sort of man that walks away from anything. I told myself not to mention “Sons of Anarchy” in my review for Outlaws before sitting down to watch. My reasoning came out of a desire to judge Stephen McCallum‘s film on its own merits without trying to compare to something as zeitgeist-y as Kurt Sutter‘s tragic downfall of a “good” man forced to do bad things in order to achieve salvation. What’s ironic, though, is that you don’t have to get too far into Matt Nable‘s script to…

Read More