Ratatouille posterOur annu­al oppor­tun­ity to wor­ship at the feet of Pix­ar arrives this week in the shape of Rata­touille (I’m a fan, can you tell?). Writ­ten and dir­ec­ted by Brad Bird, who made The Incred­ibles and Iron Giant, Rata­touille is about a rat named Remy with a tal­ent for fine cuisine but who, obvi­ously, isn’t wel­come in the kit­chen. Voices include Peter O’Toole, Ian Holm and the lovely Janeane Garo­falo. Read­ings, Empire, Regent-on-Man­ners, Light­house Petone, Sky City Queens­gate.

Writer and dir­ect­or of Wait­ress (Empire, Light­house Petone, Pent­house), Adrienne Shelly (alumni of the once-great Hal Hartley), was sadly murdered soon after fin­ish­ing the film – as point­less and ran­dom an act as you can ima­gine. There aren’t enough women film dir­ect­ors in the world as it is without los­ing them like that.

[The rest of this week’s new releases after the jump.]

Mean­while, back at the mul­ti­plex, two films are being snuck out after poor reviews Stateside. The Inva­sion is a ver­sion of the clas­sic sci-fi chiller Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers, made first in 1956 by Don Siegel and then again in 1978 by Philip Kauf­man: both are clas­sics. Nicole Kid­man and Daniel Craig are the stars of the latest ver­sion (Read­ings & Sky City Queens­gate). Nic­olas Cage plays a man who can see two minutes in to the future in Next, dir­ec­ted by Tawa’s finest cross-dress­ing Bond-film dir­ect­or Lee Tama­hori (Read­ings, Regent-on-Man­ners, Sky City Queens­gate).

A Pent­house exclus­ive return­ing from the Fest­iv­al is Aus­trali­an drama Romu­lus, My Fath­er star­ring Eric Bana and fea­tur­ing Mar­ton Cso­kas and Franka Potente (Run, Lola, Run). Based on a mem­oir by philo­sophy pro­fess­or and author Rai­mond Gaita, Romu­lus is “a story of impossible love that ulti­mately cel­eb­rates the unbreak­able bond between fath­er and son”, a sen­tence that appears no less than three times at the offi­cial site.

Wait­ress is reviewed at Funer­als & Snakes; the oth­ers will be online next Tues­day night and, for those that prefer to read these reviews in the bath, the Cap­it­al Times ver­sion will appear next Wed­nes­day.