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Hello and welcome to this week’s film review wrap – the big movies landing in cinemas this week.
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By Sandra Hall
Send Help
★★★½
(MA), 113 minutes
The opening scenes of Send Help play like one of those AI-generated vignettes proliferating online. A bully is tormenting somebody well-meaning and ill-equipped to deal with the onslaught when the tables are turned, the bully is thoroughly humiliated and their victim comes out on top.
And that’s where the film’s air of predictability evaporates. Once director Sam Raimi’s
enthusiasm for black humour goes to work on this set-up, you’re not sure what’s going to happen next.
At the start, Rachel McAdams’ Linda Liddle, the office nerd with a genius for mathematics, is being verbally abused by Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), her new boss, a preening loudmouth determined to put her down because she was a favourite of his father’s, her former boss. Having awarded her promised promotion to a member of the odious boys’ club who make up his circle of chief executives, he grudgingly includes her in a business trip to Thailand aboard the company’s plane, but the plane crashes en route, killing everybody aboard except for Bradley and Linda.
They wash up together on a remote island which looks a little like the one which became home to Tom Hanks in Castaway, but there’s no sign of Wilson, the volleyball which kept him company. Instead, Linda and Bradley must deal with one another while navigating a radical shift in status.
After treating Bradley’s leg wound, Linda, an avid fan of the TV series Survivor, swiftly rigs up a shelter, secures a supply of drinking water, catches a fish dinner and manages to coax a campfire into being by using two sticks and a lot of friction. After making a feeble attempt to pull rank, Bradley finds that he can do little but lie back and watch her in action.
Raimi, who shot part of the film in Sydney, rejoices in the comedy of exaggeration. Linda’s finest moment comes when she sharpens a stick and goes into battle with a wild boar, emerging blood-soaked and victorious to dump the boar’s severed head beside Bradley on the sand. But the script’s main focus is on Linda and Bradley’s see-sawing relationship – especially when they start being nice to one another. Even though we’re encouraged to conjure with the possibility that romance is in the air, it’s hard to imagine that Bradley could ever be trusted.
And Linda, too, is hiding a few secrets which are gradually revealed as she adapts to her altered circumstances. McAdams brings great verve and humour to the part. Linda in office mode is another exercise in exaggeration, dressed up with a beige cardigan, battered lace-ups and a chronic stoop, all of which highlight the makeover taking place on the island with her delirious discovery of the warrior woman within. The big question is how far she’s going to go with this new version of herself.
O’Brien is also good at ringing the changes. As the two of them sit by the fire one night, exchanging confidences about unhappy episodes in the past, they give every sign of being sincere – something which adds an extra charge to the next inevitable act of betrayal.
There are gaping holes in the plot which become very conspicuous when we reach the end, but Raimi has issued an early warning that he’s not out to make sense here. He treats us a crafty mix of blood, gore and gallows humour featuring two actors inviting us to share in the great time they’re having.
By Jake Wilson
FILM
Infinite Icon: A Visual Memoir ★★
(M), 118 minutes
I can’t pretend I’ve ever been a fan of Paris Hilton in even the loosest sense, but the fact anyone is still talking about her in 2026 marks some kind of achievement. She and her team built a brand and have kept it going – and in the process helped establish a template of 21st-century celebrity for others to follow, starting well before YouTube and Keeping Up With The Kardashians and social media as we know it today.
At the height of her early-2000s fame, Hilton was everywhere, though you could be forgiven for wondering exactly why. Fame appeared to be her birthright as a scion of the Hilton hotel dynasty, profiled in both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker before she was out of her teens.
Paris was an It Girl, that much we knew, and a self-described “club kid”. She modelled, she sang, she made terrible movies. She had a pet Chihuahua, a signature fragrance and a sex tape. Most famously, she starred alongside her friend Nicole Richie in five seasons of the reality sitcom The Simple Life, in which they wandered across the American heartland rubbing shoulders with salt-of-the-earth types while claiming not to know one end of a cow from the other.
As with Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, there was an undeniable vein of misogynist nastiness in how the media treated Hilton in her heyday, though it’s undeniable, too, that Hilton herself made the choice to play up to her ditzy persona in The Simple Life and elsewhere.
What the real person was like underneath it all was anyone’s guess, and I can’t say much illumination is offered by Bruce Robertson and JJ Duncan’s Infinite Icon: A Visual Memoir, a belated tie-in to Hilton’s similarly titled 2024 album (only the second of her career).
The musical numbers are pure camp, of a self-conscious and harmless kind: flanked by buff male dancers in glittery shirts, Hilton strides around the stage whisper-chanting slogans like “Welcome to the bad bitch academy”, which flash up on screen in hot pink cursive.
In between are the confessional segments in which Hilton vows to seize control of her narrative and show us who she is on the inside. This is seldom convincing, and not only because every word out of her mouth is delivered in the same flat, bored tone, whether she’s testifying to her lifelong love of music or describing her former self as “a scared, broken girl who was made to feel like she didn’t matter”.
It would be unfair to jump to the conclusion that the voiceover narration was written by AI, but the flow of banality is so relentless that it wouldn’t make much difference if it had been. “Every smile, every cuddle, every little moment with them feels like pure magic,” she says of her young children, who get about two minutes on camera – possibly not a statement the average parent would make if strict honesty were the goal.
At nearly two hours, Infinite Icon: A Visual Memoir is an endurance test for all but the most dedicated. Still, I emerged not wholly disliking its subject, and willing to believe that being Paris Hilton hasn’t been a bed of roses in all respects: aside from her ADHD diagnosis (“my superpower”), we hear about the abuse she suffered at boarding school and the nightmares she had regularly until not long ago.
Nowadays, she says, she only dreams about “fun, happy things”, like partying and being back at the club. If that’s so, good for her – though it all seems a bit low-energy, to cite another reality TV star of yesteryear.
In cinemas from Thursday
By Jake Wilson
It Was Just An Accident
★★★★
(M), 101 minutes
Jafar Panahi has been a significant figure in world cinema since the 1990s, but at this point he’s probably better known for his battles with the Iranian government than for any of his films. Charged in 2010 with making “propaganda against the system”, he’s been obliged to work semi-clandestinely ever since, and has spent a significant amount of time under house arrest or in prison.
It Was Just An Accident is the first Panahi feature for many years where he doesn’t appear on camera as a version of himself. Still, the ordeals he’s been through feed directly into this cagey moral parable, which won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is probably his best work since This Is Not A Film in 2011.
Typically for Panahi, the story is told in a straightforward, somewhat austere manner: there’s no background music, for example, which helps emphasise the significance of certain sounds. Just as typical is the sly irony of the storytelling, repeatedly setting up expectations then veering off in a different direction.
We start with a family driving down a darkened road: the father (Ebrahim Azizi) at the wheel, his pregnant wife (Afssaneh Najmabad) by his side, their young daughter (Delnaz Najafi) jumping about in the back seat.
But these aren’t the characters we’ll be following over the course of the movie. Rather, one accident leads to another: the car hits a dog that runs out into the road and when the father goes to get his car repaired, he crosses paths with a mechanic named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who has an inkling they’ve met before.
Could this outwardly inoffensive family man be the interrogator who tortured Vahid in prison? Fate having offered him a chance to exact revenge, Vahid barely hesitates – but before things get too far out of hand, he decides that after all he’d better confirm this isn’t a case of mistaken identity.
That entails checking in with Shiva (Mariam Afshari), who once faced the same interrogator and is now working as a wedding photographer – meaning that the couple whose special day she’s documenting get drawn into the story in turn.
And so the chain of accidents proceeds, with the main portion of the film unfolding over little more than 24 hours – another typical Panahi device, ensuring that tension never lets up.
The humour that creeps in gradually is the kind commonly found in thrillers or even superhero movies. While the stakes may be life and death, Vahid and his fellow would-be avengers are regular people (played by non-professionals) who bumble around and squabble as any of us might.
But the handling of the theme of revenge has none of the flippancy we’re used to within the conventions of entertainment. While Panahi doesn’t presume to say when forgiveness is preferable to justice, he takes the question seriously – and while the ending isn’t exactly reassuring, some degree of hope is implied in the way he allows his characters freedom to make the choice.
By Sandra Hall
FILM
Blue Moon ★★★★
(MA) 100 minutes
Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon is named for the most famous song written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart during their 20-year showbiz partnership in the 1930s and ’40s.
Hart, an alcoholic, died in 1943 at the age of 48, having worked with Rodgers – with a few interruptions – right up to the end. By then, Rodgers had also taken up a new collaborator – Oscar Hammerstein – and Linklater’s film is set during the opening night of Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s first stage triumph, Oklahoma!
Most of the action takes place at the storied Broadway institution, Sardi’s, where Ethan Hawke’s Larry Hart hovers at the edge of the celebrations – an ill-tempered spirit lamenting the public’s enthusiasm for a show with an exclamation mark beefing up its title. Nor is he wild about Hammerstein’s lyric marvelling at a field of corn grown as “high as an elephant’s eye”. In his view, the show’s excess of corn is its major flaw.
If you’re a fan of Hart’s work as a lyricist, you may be recalling some of his wittiest achievements at this point – The Lady is a Tramp, for one. Even more memorable was his success at getting a line about Schopenhauer into Zip, the stripper’s song he and Rodgers wrote for one of their most sophisticated musicals, Pal Joey.
Linklater and Hawke have had a film about Hart in mind since reading a draft script by novelist-screenwriter Robert Kaplow, 12 years ago. Inspired by a cache of letters sent to Hart by a Yale University student who signed herself Elizabeth, Kaplow created the character of Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old undergraduate who’s formed a strong but platonic attachment to Hart. Hart, however, fancies that he’s in love with her even though he’s homosexual and much of their conversation is devoted to her accounts of romantic adventures with men her own age.
Hart’s own confidant is Sardi’s bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), who’s keeping him company before the Okahoma! party is due to begin. Elizabeth, too, is going to join him in the bar and while he waits, he treats Eddie to a monologue about the changing nature of Broadway musicals, his resentment of Hammerstein and his feelings for Elizabeth.
When Hawke first read Kaplow’s script, he was too young for the role. Not anymore. But his height remained a problem. He’s 29 centimetres taller than Hart – a difficulty that Linklater and his production team overcame in a variety of ways from lowering the bar stools to digging a trench in the floor. A supremely unflattering comb-over completes the effect.
It’s a bravura effort which has deservedly scored an Oscar nomination. Linklater, a director who’s never afraid of taking a chance, really goes out on a limb here and much of Hawke’s dialogue is delivered in long takes as a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of long-held regrets and frustrations. It also builds into a valediction, marking both the end of Hart’s career and the passing of his kind of musical theatre. At one point, he turns to the bar’s only other customer who turns out to be the New Yorker writer, E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy). Silent up to now, White joins Hart in a conversation which develops into shared paean of praise for the written word.
Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, infusing his fondness and admiration for his old friend and collaborator with a rueful exasperation over his chronic unreliability. He hasn’t yet given up on him – an act of faith which makes Linklater’s uncompromisingly idiosyncratic film even more poignant.
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