Rain

By EWAN McDONALD

(Herald rating: * * * * * )

Instead of yet another Super 12 game, watch a New Zealand movie this weekend. What better time? We showed last week that even if we can't do it in football, we can win a World Cup or four in moviemaking.

Rain, the feature debut of Xenical and road-safety ad director Christina Jeffs, is the summertime, beachside, coming-of-age story of 14-year-old Janey (Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki). Her parents, Kate (Sarah Peirse) and Ed (Alistair Browning), are too busy boozing and soaking up sun separately to notice Janey and her younger brother, Jim (Aaron Murphy). As the family dissolves, Janey takes care of Jim and confronts the adult world.

Enter Cady (Marton Csokas), an eccentric photographer who lives on a boat. Janey's mother veers toward him; Ed, innocent, becomes more depressed as he loses the battle; Janey grows into womanhood through watching her mother.

In that national characteristic that is natural to so many New Zealanders and infuriating to so many others, the story unfolds subtly, with sparse dialogue and without the melodrama of an American drama. There is more body-language than spoken words; more in a glance than a statement. Conversation lasts only a few seconds and avoids finding or fixing blame.

Simple. Superb. And that goes for the story, the performances, the execution.

Crooked Earth is quite another side of New Zealand life. Described only half-jokingly as a Maori western, it stars Temuera Morrison as Will Bastion, who returns from 20 years in the Army to Raukura, his coastal hometown. His father has died, leaving him a sacred greenstone patu, symbol of leadership.

Bastion doesn't want it: the patu represents the violence he turned his back on when he flew out of East Timor. But his family is looking to him. His brother, Kahu (Lawrence Makoare), has turned the community into a dope farm, under the cloak of land-rights protest. The gang, riding horses through the night, intimidating any opposition, trades with tougher crims from the city, led by Timo (Stan Wolfgramm).

Bastion's estranged 17-year-old daughter, Ripeka (Jaime Passier-Armstrong), arrives from the city seeking her Maori roots and falls for one of Kahu's men, Api (Quinton Hita), while his former fiancee, Marama (Nancy Brunning), tries to give him some cultural history.

The ending is overblown: ultimately the film tries a little too hard to be worthier than it should. After all, it is only a movie. And last week showed we ought to be pretty happy about the way we can do those.

Rental video, DVD: Out now