Death Proof posterI have it on good author­ity that Quentin Tarant­ino gave his per­son­al per­mis­sion for the Film Fest­iv­al to screen the com­plete Grind­house exploit­a­tion double-fea­ture as he and Robert Rodrig­uez inten­ded, des­pite it being yanked early from Amer­ic­an cinemas due to dis­mal box office: how­ever Road­show inter­vened to pre­vent the screen­ing and the only way NZ audi­ences can see Grind­house will be on DVD at some future time. That big screen exper­i­ence has been replaced by an expan­ded ver­sion of Tarant­ino’s Death Proof, open­ing today at Read­ings and Sky City Queens­gate. The tale of a crazed stunt­man (Kurt Rus­sell) stalk­ing two sets of beau­ti­ful women includ­ing kiwi stuntie Zoe Bell and Sydney Poit­i­er, Death Proof looks like more of that pat­en­ted Tarant­ino-like fun.

The rest of this week’s new releases after the jump…

We’re Here To Help is a little kiwi movie based on the true story of Dave Hende­r­son, the Christ­ch­urch busi­ness­man who took on the might of the IRD, lost, and then won. The film stars ex-pat kiwi Erik Thom­son as Hende­r­son with Michael Hurst as Rod­ney Hide. Empire Island Bay, Rialto and the mighty Embassy.

Robert Red­ford returns to the dir­ect­or’s chair for the first time since The Legend of Bag­ger Vance in 2000 with Lions for Lambs, a heavy-hit­ting drama about US polit­ics and the type of manip­u­la­tions that took them to war in Iraq. Described as “an eth­ics lec­ture” by one IMDb com­menter it stars Red­ford him­self, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise and plays at Read­ings, Rialto, Pent­house and Sky City Queens­gate.

The Joy Divi­sion movie that is actu­ally about the band Joy Divi­sion opens today at Rialto and Para­mount. Con­trol is the first film dir­ec­ted by famed rock pho­to­graph­er Ant­on Cor­bijn and has been acclaimed as the best brit­ish film of the year by many crit­ics. Arriv­ing unher­al­ded this week is a film called The Last Trap­per, a doc­u­ment­ary about a year in the life of 50 year old trap­per Nor­man Winter, who lives in the wilds of Canada. He lives a simple life hunt­ing and fish­ing, with Nebaska, a Nahanni Indi­an and that’s all I know, except its a Pent­house exclus­ive.

Finally, the third annu­al DOCNZ doc­u­ment­ary fest­iv­al gets under way at both Regent-on-Man­ners and the Para­mount today – the offi­cial web site is here and there should be some­thing for every­one des­pite the idi­ot­ic mar­ket­ing mater­i­al.

The usu­al story applies: all these apart from DOCNZ which I don’t have time for will be reviewed at Funer­als & Snakes next Wed­nes­day (and in print at the Cap­it­al Times).