Latest video: Punch-drunk power

By Ewan McDonald

Karma, perhaps, that in the week when New Zealand decides what face it wants to show to the new millennium, one of the defining subjects of the past is highlighted.

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? - the second part, the continuing story, if not strictly the sequel of Once Were Warriors - arrives in the video stores.

Director Ian Mune picks up the story a few years after Warriors. Beth Heke (Rena Owen) has left Jake the Muss (Temuera Morrison) and is happily settled elsewhere, and the kids are grown up. Jake has found a new woman, Rita, but still pops down to the pub for a beer and a punchup.

As the movie opens Jake is in another fight while across town his son, Nig, is killed in a gang brawl. Nig's girlfriend Tania (Nancy Brunning) and brother Sonny (newcomer Clint Eruera) vow to avenge his death.

Warriors was up-front, raw. Broken Hearted is a darker world of gang violence and poverty that doesn't let up. As Jake partially redeems himself, tries to remedy his neglect of and alienation from his son, he is still using his fists in the end as he flails out of his depth, unable to deal with the new situations he's faced with.

Morrison is impressive as ever; Brunning, a world away from Shortland Street, even better as the gang moll. Like Warriors, chances are you won't enjoy Broken Hearted, but if you're living in New Zealand this week you owe it to yourself to watch it.

* Hank and Jacob Mitchell are brothers, living in a small Midwest town where Hank fills bags of feed for a grain merchant and his intellectually challenged younger brother has a near-fatal attraction for trouble. One day they're out in the snowbound countryside in their pickup truck, with a buddy, when a fox nearly causes them to crash. Following it, the three find a wrecked plane. The pilot is beside it, dead. Just as cold is the cash next to him, $4 million in a gym bag.

Hank (Bill Paxton), his wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda), Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and their accidental offsider need A Simple Plan if they're to get away with keeping the dough. They wait to see if they'll be found out, but the opposing pressures of keeping the secret while dreaming about unthought-of wealth, if they get away it, begin to tell.

Bleak as the Fargo-like landscape, but definitely worth your evening.

* A Civil Action is based on a real-life story and is a fascinating legal thriller. But all the details of the case - and the outrageous cover-up surrounding it - don't make a gripping movie.

Jan Schlichtman (John Travolta) is a ruthless personal-injury lawyer who has built his career on a facade of caring. When he is forced to re-evaluate a particularly unappetising case, he sees a way of easing his conscience and making a bundle. Robert Duvall is sensational as his opponent, a man with enough experience to ignore outward appearances.

* George Gulden is an English professor at a New England university, the distant and distracted sort of fellow who wears a tweed jacket, is more at home with his books and his lecture notes than his family, and is played by William Hurt. His dutiful wife, Karen, is dying of cancer in the way that only Meryl Streep can; he calls their daughter, Ellen (Renee Zellweger), home from her once-brilliant, now disintegrating, New York magazine career to nurse her.

This is One True Thing, which sounds like a cliched weepie about a family coming apart and pulling together as its core, the mother, dies. It's rather better than that, largely because of the on-screen relationship between Streep and Zellweger and the unusual way the story is told.

Director Carl Franklin, better known for routine crime stories like Devil in a Blue Dress, allows the local DA to act as narrator, flashing back to a series of interviews which hint that mum might have had a little help along the way into the next life.

Recommended. Highly.

* Now for one from right out of left field. Gadjo Dilo is the third in a trilogy of movies about gypsy life in modern Europe. The second in Tony Gatlif's series Latcho Drom (1996) is the best known, but this has been a hit at film festivals, too.

Stephane (Romain Duris) is a cool Parisian who travels to a Romanian village looking for the gypsy singer who recorded one of his father's songs. By the time Stephanie arrives it's snowing, he's a mess and the locals snub him as a "gadjo dilo" or "crazy stranger."

A drunken old fiddler (Izidor Serban) takes him in and, with Sabina (Rona Hartner), who's running away from a bad marriage, teaches him the language and culture.

Snapshot of a culture that is dying in the last days of the 20th century when almost everything must be homogenised into a global lifestyle, Gadjo Dilo is an absolute gem. Guess I should also tell you that it's in Romanian with English subtitles.

* Chris Roberts has been making Wing Commander computer games for years and, regrettably, it gave him the money to turn the game into a movie. Starring Freddie Prinze jun, the story is set about 500 years in the future, where the Kilrathi have decided to blast humanity and its galactic empire back to the Dark Ages. Brave-young-pilot-with-special-powers Christopher Blair (Prinze) fronts up to lead the forces of good into battle with the evil aliens ... er, stop me if you've heard about this phantom menace before.

A flop. Well, perhaps more of a floppy.

* Also out this week: A Rock And A Hard Place; Between The Lies; Inferno; Rag & Bone (Dean Cain, Robert Patrick); The Ninth Justice (Andy Garcia, Kate Nelligan, Harry Belafonte).