Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

CLINT EASTWOOD’s purple patch continues with Letters From Iwo Jima. The iconic American director gave new life to the war movie with Flags of Our Fathers. Now he provocatively tells the bloody World War Two end-battle from a Japanese perspective. Particularly Saigo, Nishi and Shimizu, who are grunts, and General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who was the real Japanese soldier in charge on the island. (Sadist Lieutenant Ito represents the uncompromising kamikaze, suicide bombing view.) Kuribayashi is an urbane, perceptive man who spent time in America before the war. Watanabe, wasted in the condescending, muttonheaded The Last Samurai, puts in an exceptional performance. It’s not quite Burt Lancaster’s magnificent The Leopard, but a sense of history, culture and mortality moves through Kuribayashi.

Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

“SOMEONE once asked me, ‘Why don’t they put a ‘the’ in front of CIA?’ And I said to him, ‘do you put a ‘the’ in front of God?’” CIA surely is a remarkable institution, The Good Shepherd grapples with its formation through and after World War Two, through the eyes of fictional composite character Edward Wilson (Matt Damon). Wilson, who is recruited by Robert De Niro’s spy master, heads overseas counter-intelligence. It is a role that consumes his life, stultifying his marriage with Angelina Jolie’s fetching high society wife. The part is inspired – not in the insipid Pursuit of Happyness way – by the real lives of major spooks James Jesus Angleton and Richard Bissell. A host of good actors, particularly De Niro himself, add weight to proceedings as spies and players around the espionage scene. Alec Baldwin is again notable as one agent; as in The Departed dialogue between him and Damon scores.

Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

“I AIN’T Jo Bloggs window washer. I’m hardcore.” Squeegee Bandit documents Starfish, aka Kevin Whana, a colourful window washer working the cars on South Auckland’s streets. Empathetically and imaginatively directed by Sándor Lau (Behaviours of the Backpacker), the documentary charts a year of Starfish’s fiery life. He’s a Taranaki Maori, a descendent of the formidable warrior chief Titokowaru (whose “I shall not die” speech was recorded in River Queen) and son of a 28th Battalion soldier. Lau contextualises Starfish’s demons with his tough life, including colonisation’s collateral damage. He was adopted out as a child and bullied by his foster mother, forced to wear soiled underwear on his head in front of his friends.