What’s going to make you fall in love with Tami Neilson? Will it be the way she cackles her way through the chorus of “Ten Tonne Truck”, her foot-stomping rags to riches daydream about a down-on-their-luck performing family who head for Nashville with dreams of country stardom?

Nalini Singh's debut thriller thrusts us into Golden Cove, a small coastal town in New Zealand at "the edge of nowhere” that isn't everything it seems. What on the surface is a sun-bleached paradise made recently popular with back-packers is revealed to be much more sinister.

With power comes responsibility. One without the other is sickening -- and both iterations are on show in Emma Kinane's searing new play about a child runaway in New Zealand. 

In the video, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner smiles shyly before beginning. As she speaks, her voice gains conviction, momentum, power. Her poem tells of the Marshall Islands inhabitants, a “proud people toasted dark brown”, and a constellation of islands dropped from a giant’s basket to root in the ocean. She describes “papaya golden sunsets”, “skies uncluttered”, and the ocean itself, “terrifying and regal”. She tells of “songs late into the night” and “a crown of fuchsia flowers encircling / aunty Mary’s white sea foam hair”.

Once pleasingly described on the Flight of the Conchords radio show as "the King of New Zealand", Neil Finn has a new gift for his subjects (and the rest of the world, happily) in the form of this album, which sees him recording with son Liam for the first time. 

The first words we hear in The Piano are the thoughts of Holly Hunter’s Ada, and they set up the film’s premise perfectly: “I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why… not even me. My father says it is a dark talent …Today he married me to a man I have not yet met.” Ada and her young daughter (a deservedly award-winning turn from a young Anna Paquin) pitch up on a bleak New Zealand beach. With them is Ada’s beloved Broadwood piano, transported from Scotland and left abandoned on the sand when her colonist husband claims he has no room for it in his house. Ada’s keyboard is her main means of communication, so what ensues is bleak indeed.

Writer/director Jane Campion’s screenplay is an enthralling Victorian gothic melodrama, its sharp edges softened by Stuart Dryburgh's exquisite cinematography and a mellifluous Michael Nyman soundtrack. Sam Neill plays Alisdair Stewart, Ada’s emotionally stunted partner. Neill’s is a career-defining performance, his haunted features conveying a world of pain and frustration behind a stiff upper lip. There’s a shocking moment near the end when Alisdair’s self-control deserts him, Neill making the scene alarmingly credible. Alisdair’s rival for Ada’s affection is Harvey Keitel’s Baines, an illiterate settler with Maori tattoos who buys the titular piano and offers to sell it back to Ada in return for lessons. Despite an erratic Scottish accent, you can understand his appeal to Ada, Baines’s plain-spoken earthiness a stark contrast to the prissy Stewart.

But the film is stolen by Hunter and Paquin, the former’s mesmeric, mute performance overwhelming. As with Neill, it’s all in the eyes and the posture, Ada’s feistiness, anger and sorrow expressed with the tiniest gesture or glance. Paquin’s outspoken Flora unwittingly initiates The Piano’s violent climax, Hunter collapsing in the mud like a punctured balloon. Though Campion originally intended The Piano to have a tragic ending, the coda is unexpectedly upbeat, Dryburgh’s autumnal colours finally giving way to something warmer and brighter. I won’t say any more in case there are still readers who haven’t seen this, surely one of the truly great films of the past few decades.

Studio Canal’s two-disc set looks and sounds marvellous. The commentary by Campion and her producer Jan Chapman is illuminating, the pair revealing that they initially rejected Hunter as too short for the role of Ada, and that Neill’s eruption of anger terrified them. There’s also The Piano at 25, an interview with Campion and Chapman filmed at Karekare beach. Hunter appears in a brief "Making Of" extra, her gregariousness and actual speaking voice a delicious surprise.

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Overleaf: watch the new trailer for The Piano

Following his irreverent superhero reboot Thor: Ragnarok, one of 2017’s most distinctive blockbusters, and his quirky Kiwi indie comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople in 2016, it’s fair to say that interest in New Zealand director Taika Waititi’s back catalogue is high. Hence, no doubt, the DVD release of Waititi’s second feature, 2010’s big-hearted coming-of-age comedy Boy.

It’s fair to say, too, that the director’s signature style – his bathetic, deadpan wit; his unapologetic silliness; his big emotions – are all there in this earlier movie. But there’s a more serious side to Boy: a sense of ambition to deal with weightier issues, ones of grief, masculinity, family, even hope and potential (a word that the film’s lead seems understandably obsessed by). But they’re all delivered with such a remarkable lightness of touch, and a glorious sense of the absurd, that anything approaching portentous sermonising is swiftly undercut.

Boy (James Rolleston) – real name Alamein, after the World War Two battle – is a Michael Jackson-obsessed 11-year-old in remote Waihau Bay in New Zealand in 1984, gamely looking after his gaggle of younger siblings and cousins while their grandmother is away at a funeral. Among them is his younger brother, six-year-old Rocky (Te Aho Eketone-Whitu, pictured above with James Rolleston), who’s convinced he has telekinetic superpowers, although they never seem to work (or rarely, at least).

After the surprise arrival of his semi-estranged father, also named Alamein (Waititi, pictured below with James Rolleston) – who’s been behind bars for robbery – accompanied by two deadbeat hangers-on, Boy is initially awe-struck. But he soon begins to see through the man’s bluster and bravado, and to realise that the heroic qualities he idolised in his dad existed only in his imagination.

Waititi gets astonishingly natural, utterly convincing performances from his two young leads – both amateurs at the time of filming (Rolleston, the story goes, turned up as an extra before being snapped as a replacement lead just days before filming started). Eketone-Whitu in particular is mesmerising as the otherworldly Rocky, not quite connected with events around him, immediately suspicious of his returning father’s motives, and barely comprehending the tragic fate of his mother. As their needy man-child of a father, Waititi walks a fine line between gormless humour and behaviour that’s far less forgiveable. It’s rather a broad portrayal, but one that’s persuasive nonetheless.Waititi makes reference to the deprivation of his isolated community, but context is never overemphasised – Boy is very much the story of its characters, despite its portrayal of a Maori people somewhat adrift from the modern world. Likewise, Adam Clark’s expressive cinematography contrasts the jaw-dropping splendours of the North Island landscape with the grimy poverty of a community that seems to be simply killing time.

Boy isn’t without its problems, one of which is its uneven pacing. Waititi seems to throw everything he can at his frenetic exposition – dance routines, animated kids’ drawings, asides to camera and plenty more – but then the far slower second act seems to drag, even threaten to lose its way. And it’s a shame that producers couldn’t rustle up any special features or commentaries to fill out this DVD release. But it’s a tender, big-hearted, often downright hilarious movie all the same, one that feels fresh, sincere, and never calculated. As in his later Hunt for the Wilderpeople – although here in a less polished, grittier way – Waititi dares to place kids firmly as his film’s focus, never patronising or romanticising them, but instead celebrating their strength and resilience. 

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Boy