Paul Casserly

Paul Casserly raves about Succession with season two about to stream on NEON.

Paul Casserly on Julia Davis’ career, creator of some of the best worst people of all time

Though Gary Hart had some actual vision and a famously lovely head of hair.

Iannucci has taken the template he honed to perfection in his political satires The Thick of It, In The Loop and Veep and applied it here to ‘real’ history.

Theory: Sorkin’s scattergun soap stylings need the restraint of an outside voice, a Lennon to his McCartney, a Danny Boyle to his Steve Jobs.

We see Churchill the grump, the great orator, the charming old bulldog, the sozzled superhero.

Feminism, fetishism, free love and good old fashioned family dysfunction make for an ambitious undertaking, one which the film ultimately fumbles…

A golf movie. Not words that should really belong together, but let’s not get stuck on that bit of rough. What we have here is a historical romance, between a father and a son, a man and a woman and a species and a sport. It’s set in 1860s Scotland and based on real life […]

Brian Cox gives good Churchill. He has the acting chops, he has the body shape, and he really knows how pull that bulldog face. He has jowls and he knows how to use them. But creating the facsimile only takes you so far, the key to a good biopic is bringing new intel to the […]

“Let’s watch a film about meat and chill.” A hard sell as a date movie perhaps but Meat is full of surprises. What I can promise is that you will be moved by this charming document of three New Zealand farmers (pig, sheep, chooks) and a hunter. I know I was. David White’s documentary is […]

How do you make a film with the Holocaust at its heart without hammering the viewer with all that weight and solemnity? Get David Hare to write the screenplay. The makers of this splendid film are also helped along by the fact that this is really an old-fashioned courtroom saga, a dramatisation of the real […]

The Salesman gets underway with an unsettling seismic event. Is it an earthquake or a bomb? The apartment building where married couple Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) live has become unstable and they scramble to flee, stopping only to help a disabled neighbour. These are good people, and as we know from director […]

From the opening scene, in which our protagonist turns an innocent courier delivery into a work of performance art, this film delivers surprises, shocks and cringe-inducing comedy at an impressive rate. Winfried (Peter Simonischek) is an ageing music teacher with an overactive practical joker gland. His retirement prompts him to visit his estranged daughter Ines […]

As a lapsed Catholic I’m always keen on a tale that documents the folly, arrogance and optimism of religious conversion and missionary zeal, especially in a colonial setting. Also, I like Japanese food and Scorsese pictures so what could go wrong? Not much as it turns out, though apart from a tea ceremony and some […]

This week long-awaited NZ music exhibition Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa opens at Auckland’s War Memorial Museum. Tracing the history of popular music from the 20th Century to the present day, Volume will allow Kiwis to get up close and personal with instruments and equipment used to make their favourite songs, step back in time […]

“You are entering a labyrinth” our bushy-tailed protagonist is told early on in this satisfying ‘based on a true’ story drama. The maze in question is a dark place as it leads to the Auschwitz death camp and the collective amnesia of post-war Germany. So, not a date movie. Set 20 years after Adolf shot […]

In Eye in the Sky, we are asked to consider the moral choices that lead Western powers to blow the bejesus out of Islamic terrorists using unmanned planes, or drones. In a twist that allows Helen Mirren and the late Alan Rickman to appear in original English flavour, the drone attack here is a British-led […]

It’s not often I’ve seen a preview audience bursting into spontaneous applause after a viewing, but as the credits rolled on Lee Tamahori’s deft retelling of Bulibasha by Witi Ihimaera, it was inevitable, possibly because we had barely wiped the tears from our eyes at the time. Mahana manages to tweak the full suite of […]

The TV series Dad’s Army was a work of comedy genius. It boasted an ensemble cast up there with Cheers, Seinfeld, M.A.S.H. and evenThe Office. It’s part of TV folklore. It presented men dressed in uniforms not as heroes but as bumbling fools. The posters may have said Keep Calm and Carry On, but if the Nazis had made it over […]

Martin Scorsese is nothing short of a master filmmaker, and the news he was teaming up with Mick Jagger and Boardwalk Empire co-conspirator Terence Winter for Vinyl, a TV series set in the 1970s record industry was, er, music to our ears. Season 1 of Vinyl starts February 15 on NEON. Read on as Paul Casserly delves into the […]

So they’re saying that DiCaprio may finally get his Oscar for his brutal performance in his latest movie, The Revenant. Why has he missed out so many times, despite having stacked up such a staggering range of class A performances, such brilliant blood- and sweat-soaked scenes? Could you get more Oscar-tastic than a bio of […]