Lars and the Real Girl posterFirst up, Lars and the Real Girl is delight­fully odd indie star­ring Ryan Gos­ling as a lonely and dam­aged young man who finds love on the Inter­net. With a doll named Bianca. Para­mount, Pent­house.

Also at the Para­mount, just for Wahine Week is a doc­u­ment­ary about the dis­aster called The Wahine Dis­aster. Anoth­er doc­u­ment­ary, that I missed in my sweep last week, is John Pil­ger­’s The War on Demo­cracy which is now play­ing at the Light­house Petone only. It was ori­gin­ally going to play at the Para­mount as well but was cut by the own­ers for being ‘too left wing’. Some Para­mount cus­tom­ers have already begun a boy­cott protest­ing this simple-minded attack on free speech (not to men­tion an attack on the Para­mount itself and it’s grand his­tory of show­ing films with a human­it­ari­an and anti-estab­lish­ment pos­i­tion). Feel free to voice your dis­pleas­ure to the man­age­ment.

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

If that isn’t enough doc­u­ment­ary for you, Helen Smyth’s excel­lent invest­ig­a­tion of an eld­erly Cuban double-agent ¿La Ver­dad? (The Truth?) is play­ing exclus­ively at the Empire in Island Bay.

Back in the land of block­busters, Will Fer­rell offers up anoth­er sports movie (bas­ket­ball this time): Semi-Pro. Read­ings only. Fam­ily-friendly fantasy The Spider­wick Chron­icles can be found at Read­ings, Empire and Embassy. Finally, How She Move is anoth­er urb­an dance com­pet­i­tion movie: Read­ings and Regent.

Lars and the Real Girl and ¿La Ver­dad? (The Truth?) are reviewed this week at Funer­als & Snakes while the oth­ers will get their spot in the lime­light next week.