A man once told me that documentaries were the only form of cinema that still had a spine.
He wore linen. He worked in funding.
Now the spine has softened.
We are watching less.
Not out of disinterest. But distraction.
TikTok’s now teach us history. Trauma has an upload schedule.
Mr Organ and The Locksmith of the Nation
Mr. Organ knew this.
The film, not the man.
Though one could argue he’s both.
David Farrier gave us a villain too slippery for fiction. A parking enforcer who could have walked out of a Pinter play and into your nightmares.
It was funny. Then it wasn’t. Then it was terrifying.
People watched.
Then they moved on.
Just another horror story, filed under “true.”
Truth Streamed is Truth Skimmed
According to NZ On Air’s 2024 data, New Zealanders are watching less linear television.
Even streaming platforms have started to sag. Netflix’s daily reach has dropped from 42 percent to 38.
That’s not erosion. That’s rot.
Doc Edge is still here, dressing the wound.
78 films. 12 immersive projects.
Stories that shake, move, whisper.
But do people still come for the truth?
Or do they just want to be distracted by it?
Never Look Away
Even Lucy Lawless steps behind the camera — trading sword for lens — to direct Never Look Away, a raucous portrait of another warrior princess.
Not fiction. Not fable.
Just a fearless Kiwi war correspondent who never blinked, even when the world looked away.
Now that’s a story worth watching.
Living History in the Waiting Room
And now, NZIFF has named its 2025 centrepiece: a documentary on an ex–Prime Minister.
No filters. No spinning chair reveals. Just legacy under a microscope.
This is not a gimmick.
This is a mirror.
We don’t just make documentaries.
We are made by them.
But mirrors, too, can gather dust.
Poh Si Teng, Executive Editorial Producer at ABC News Studio, put it plainly.
“It’s frustrating indeed. Our industry as a whole is not faring well.”
Even decorated filmmakers, with awards and gravitas to spare, can’t get green-lit.
And then there’s Hitchcock.
“In feature films the director is God. In documentary films, God is the director.”
Which sounds noble. Until you realise God doesn’t do pitch decks.
Or take Zoom meetings.
Or optimise for discoverability.
The truth remains divine.
But lately, it’s not getting funding.
Doc Edge Still Believes
But not everywhere is lost.
Doc Edge still believes.
It believes in nuance.
In complexity. In chaos.
In stories that don’t trend — but matter.
78 films.
12 immersive worlds.
And one reminder: some truths don’t age. They outlast.
Lucy Lawless is directing.
The ex–Prime Minister is centre stage.
And God, somehow, is still in the editing suite.
So, no — truth is not dead.
But it could use an audience.
Preferably one that doesn’t skip the credits.
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
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Julia. Denzel. Leo. Clooney. Charlize.
You didn’t have to Google them. You just knew.
Now? The rope has frayed. Been tripped over. Pulled apart and posted in pieces.
The A-list isn’t a list anymore. It’s a mood. A feed. A contract that expires with the next algorithm shift.
And still, we try to make sense of who’s inside.
Star power or brand presence?
Let’s start with the obvious ones.
Zendaya. Yes. Effortlessly yes.
She can walk the Dune carpet like royalty, then vanish behind a coffee cup for six months and still trend globally.
No scandals, no interviews. Just presence.
Timothée Chalamet? Also, yes.
He’s a Dior muse, a wonky heartthrob, a walking contradiction of French cheekbones and Manhattan nerves.
He’s got the Oscar nods, the viral interviews, the surreal Willy Wonka press tour. He’s a star, even when the films are not.
But what about Taylor Russell?
Jacob Elordi?
Paul Mescal?
Anya Taylor-Joy?
Jenna Ortega?
None of them could open a Marvel film on name alone.
But they could break the internet with a single photograph.
They could front a Loewe campaign and alter the season’s silhouette.
They don’t own the box office.
They dominate atmosphere.
Fame as a filter
There was a time when to be famous, you had to be seen.
Now, to stay famous, you must be selectively unseen.
Jacob Elordi wears leather gloves to interviews and refuses to rewatch Euphoria.
Jenna Ortega cultivates mystery like a vintage Chanel ad — gothic but not gory.
Mescal smoulders in Normal People and ghosts the press line with a GAA cap pulled low.
They are curated. Branded.
Every red-carpet moment is an editorial shoot.
Every silence is a strategy.
It’s not just that they’re actors.
They’re aesthetic operators.
The collapse of charisma math
We used to measure stardom by heat. Box office, headlines, scandal, magazine covers.
Now, it’s all slipperier. Florence Pugh is in three films a year and hosts cooking tutorials on Instagram.
Margot Robbie produced Barbie and still got called underrated.
Meanwhile, the supposed A-list — the Old Guard — is either franchised out (Chris), disappeared (Brie), or mid-crisis (Ezra, Shia, Johnny).
There’s no clear succession plan. No top five. Just clusters of cool and shadows of influence.
What’s left of the A-list?
Maybe this is what we’ve become.
Fame without friction.
Celebrity without story.
Being A-list used to mean power: choosing your roles, rejecting offers, walking into a studio meeting and having them rearrange the calendar.
Now it means being able to disappear for six months and have the internet notice.
We don’t want mystery solved.
We want mystique maintained.
Not who we watch, but who we feel
Here’s what’s strange.
We no longer worship stars.
We orbit them.
They don’t beam down at us from marquees.
They slip past us, quietly. In mood boards. In lip-syncs. In tagged photos at Fashion Week.
And still, we follow.
Still, we care.
Because in a world where everything is exposed, the new A-list isn’t about access.
It’s about control.
They don’t just show up.
They shape the temperature.
And that, darling, is what we now call star power.
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
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The kind with peeling-paint poster art.
The kind with endings like cigarette smoke.
The kind no one told you to watch, and everyone whispered about anyway.
Now, those films don’t open. They drop.
And they don’t have premieres. They have thumbnails.
Yes, your favourite indie directors are making television now.
Our own Jane Campion left the black sand beaches of The Piano for the sludge and sleaze of Top of the Lake.
Soderbergh, once the boy prince of DIY cool, is now producing glossy episodes at HBO pace.
Steve McQueen turned his lens on British history and released Small Axe as a five-part masterpiece disguised as a series.
Even Marty, our beloved, chattering, church-born Marty gave Netflix his mobsters, his saints, and his long, bloody dreams.
And the stars? They followed.
Once the art house’s icy muse, Nicole Kidman now spends her screen time whispering in Monterey kitchens and clutching wine glasses.
From porcelain period pieces & corsets to vape pens and dead bodies — Kate Winslet made Mare of Easttown her new epic.
Andrew Scott, Julianne Moore, Clive Owen, Olivia Colman, Jessica Chastain — once too elegant for TV, now right at home in prestige’s marble corridors.
And let’s not pretend. Prestige TV is good. But at what cost?
Remember Who Did It First?
Before the loglines, the showrunners, the writers’ rooms…
There was David Lynch.
In 1990, Twin Peaks arrived like my mum’s pavlova dropped on a church floor.
Free to Airs didn’t know what it was. Critics didn’t either. I devoured it.
Lynch brought mood, mystery, and madness into our homes and for the first time, it didn’t feel like television. It was art.
In 2017, he came back.
Twin Peaks: The Return premiered at Cannes.
Seventeen hours of experimental narrative drift.
Critics called it the film of the year.
It was expressed from the US and screened on SKY’S SOHO channel (Now HBO).
That’s the blueprint, darling. Everyone else just borrowed it.
And Now?
The BFI (British Film Institute) asked UK audiences in a recent survey (In a very polite way of course.) what they thought of all this.
Turns out, most of them believe prestige TV now delivers more artistic and social value than UK cinema.
Not as much. More. That wasn’t a shift.
That was the cultural equivalent of being told to pack up your desk before lunch — and don’t forget your dignity on the way out.
So, What Are We Losing?
It’s not just the films, yes, they’re vanishing. It’s how we watch.
Streaming doesn’t ask for your presence. It asks for your proximity.
It’s the difference between being moved… and being distracted.
Those awkward silences, those cheap red velvet chairs, the hush before a 4:30pm afternoon screening….. that was the cinema experience I loved and remember.
Now everything has a pilot. No one has a favourite scene or moment… just a favourite line that’s shared by million’s and gone viral on TikTok.
So no, prestige TV didn’t kill indie films. We did.
We chose convenience over communion.
We chose pacing over patience.
We stayed home and forgot what it meant to be part of the story.
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
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If TVNZ is trying to be a streaming platform, who’s looking after public service media?
TVNZ used to be a mirror. Flawed, sure…..a bit too Pākehā, a bit too polite….. but it showed us something of ourselves. It gave us Gloss. It gave us Marae. It gave us kids’ telly that wasn’t trying to sell cereal.
Now? It’s trying to out-Netflix Netflix.
TVNZ+ feels like a confusing hybrid: reality shows from overseas, local dramas trying to go viral, and the occasional public interest doc buried between reruns of Love Island. It’s not that there’s no value — The Casketeers, Creamerie, Sunday still hit — but they feel like outliers in a schedule dominated by safe bets and clickbait.
The charter’s long gone. The culture budget keeps shrinking. And while News keeps its integrity (for now), it’s increasingly propping up an entertainment slate with no clear identity — or worse, one that mirrors commercial TV from anywhere but here.
The problem isn’t that TVNZ is bad at what it does. It’s that we no longer know what it’s trying to be.
Is it a public service? Or a content farm?
Is it meant to challenge, represent, reflect — or just entertain?
Because if it’s the latter, let’s stop pretending it holds a special place in our media ecosystem. Let’s stop funding it under the illusion that it’s uniquely ours. Let’s stop giving it the benefit of the doubt while smaller players like Māori Television, RNZ, and community outfits carry the cultural weight with half the resources.
Meanwhile, independent filmmakers are left battling NZ On Air for scraps. Archivists are left digitising history with duct tape and crowdfunding. And our tamariki? They’re watching YouTube and wondering why no one on screen sounds like them.
The truth is, we don’t need TVNZ to compete with streamers. We need it to counterbalance them. We need it to commission work that risks not rating well. To amplify stories no algorithm will promote. To make things because they matter, not because they trend.
Public broadcasting should be a cultural taonga. Right now, it’s a brand trying to survive.
The fix isn’t just about funding. It’s about reasserting purpose.
Until then, the screen belongs to whoever’s paying for your attention.
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
Why the Croisette still matters in the age of creator culture
I remember the first time I watched a film that won the Palme d’Or. It was Pulp Fiction, mid-’90s. I wasn’t a teenager sneaking into the video store—I was in my late twenties, already working in media, and still totally unprepared for what Tarantino’s film would do to me. The fractured structure, the rhythm of the dialogue, the way it swaggered and shocked—it felt like cinema cracking open. When I found out it had taken top prize at Cannes, I suddenly saw that festival in a whole new light. This wasn’t just arthouse territory—it was where the future of film was being rewritten in real time.
For cinephiles, Cannes wasn’t just a festival—it was church. But now? The studios are crumbling, TikTok is the new IMDb, and the average punter couldn’t name last year’s Palme winner if you paid them. So… does Cannes still serve a purpose?
Yes. But not the one it thinks it does.
The studio is dead. The myth lingers.
The Hollywood studio system—the ecosystem that Cannes once fed like an apex predator—is on life support. Disney is trimming, Paramount’s a punchline, and the theatrical model is breaking apart faster than a Scorsese monologue on Marvel.
Cannes, for decades, was a launchpad for the kind of prestige cinema that bridged commerce and culture. But when theatrical releases now last three weeks (if you’re lucky), and streaming debuts drop without warning like firmware updates, is there still oxygen in the room for a 15-minute standing ovation? Actually, yes. And that’s the point.
Take Megalopolis. Coppola, 85, mortgages a vineyard to make a film no studio would touch. Cannes rolls out the red carpet. It’s messy. Ambitious. People boo. People cheer. People argue. That moment unstreamable, unskippable—is why Cannes still counts.
Stars fade. Creators rise. But there’s a gap.
We don’t live in a movie star economy anymore. We live in a creator one. The biggest cultural reach now belongs to those who upload daily, not those who headline a December Oscar run. But there’s a difference between reach and resonance.
Festivals like Cannes still have the power to give films weight. Not views. Not likes. Weight. When a film breaks out of Cannes—like Titane, Anatomy of a Fall, or Drive My Car—it feels earned. There’s rigor. There’s context. There’s conversation.
And frankly, that’s what’s missing from the algorithm.
So what’s Cannes actually for now?
Curation.
We’re drowning in content. Netflix alone added over 1,500 new titles in 2023. Who has time to sort it? We need tastemakers—flawed, opinionated, passionate ones—to say: Watch this.
Cannes doesn’t need to be everything. But it can still be something. A compass in the chaos. A place where cinema is still treated as culture, not content.
But it has to evolve. Lose the 3am yacht parties and the gatekeeping. Program TikTok creators next to Gaspar Noé. Let editors and composers take the mic. Ditch the obsession with Dior. We’ve got enough catwalks. What we need is curiosity.
Cannes isn’t dead. But it’s not the centre of the film world anymore. It’s a lightning rod—if it chooses to be. What matters is not what’s on the red carpet, but what survives long after the carpet’s rolled up.
That’s the legacy worth preserving.
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
