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Welcome to our annual TimeOut Summer Movie Special.
Across the following pages we've gathered together extensive features on five of the holiday's season's biggest films, and there's a guide to everything else hitting local cinemas in the coming weeks - traditionally a time when end-of-year blockbusters are screening
alongside possible Oscar contenders.
It's an intriguing season this year - there's no big established franchise like a Potter, a Bond or a Narnia. Though, of course, the backers of The Golden Compass are hoping there will be enough box office momentum for the other parts of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy to follow. It's had a pretty slow start on its first weekend in the United States, so if you want to see the rest of Lyra's adventures you might have to go more than once.
And so far as those Oscar movies go, it's hard to see many obvious contenders as yet. It's shaping up as year of obscurity with the early awards going to a couple of crit-flicks which not a lot of people have seen.
So far the awards season is shaping up like an arm wrestle between the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, both of which aren't out here until early February. A colleague has seen Blood and pronounced it brilliant. I've seen No Country and it is too. But it's sure not for everyone.
And you've got to wonder as various minor American awards crank up the Oscar "race" whether anyone who actually goes to the movies for entertainment rather than a cushy job is really going to give a stuff by the time the Academy Awards roll around in late February. I doubt it.
Anyway, what No Country for Old Men did do was remind me of that deceptively simple trick which can make a movie magic - the great ending.
I don't know whether the the Coens stayed true to the Cormac McCarthy book they adapted for the film for their poetic finale - a sort of zen rumination after the bloodshed of the previous two hours. I suspect so.
But the ending is brilliant, quietly resounding, the sort of thing that makes the rest of the movie stick in the mind while being a little daunting for its tangential touch.
It's not the only great ending that's ground its way into my movie memory banks of late.
A preview DVD of the year's greatest action movie The Bourne Ultimatum reminded me of its terrific closing. There's Jason Bourne-or-whatever-his-real-name-is, having dived off the CIA building into the East River lying motionless presumed dead under the surface as the later news reports of his probable demise and the arrest of his spymasters swirl through the soundtrack. At the cue of "but no body has been recovered" Bourne kicks into life and swims away.
It might play as cheap trick to allow for yet another sequel. But it's a perfect major chord of an ending, complete with a song from Moby.
And talking of music and great film endings, there's also Once, which opened last week on a couple of screens around town.
It's got an absolute gem of a final scene which - this shouldn't spoil it for those who haven't seen it - a crane shot which must have accounted for much of the film's tiny budget, a piano, a first floor window and one of the many lovely songs performed by the film's leading couple which make it such a transcendent feelgood wonder of a film.
Cue music. Fade to black.
What are your favourite film endings? Tell us at timeout@nzherald.co.nz