Review of The Insatiable Moon (2011) by Jason B — 06 Mar 2011

Its heart's in the right place; it's the rest of it that's out to lunch... Riddell scrapes together the footage she can from in and about the same suburban row of shops, but the detail's sloppy - much of the film unfolds around a halfway house where the manager curses incessantly and leaves his cleavers unattended on going to answer the phone - and if she was intending to throw a spotlight on the sorry state of mental health care in small-town New Zealand, she could do with easing up on the broad comedy, singing and dancing that tends to drown out her most salient points.

Paratene - known to British audiences as the forbidding tribal elder in "Whale Rider" - is a watchable, likable presence forced into a cutesy character straitjacket: it sounds funny to say a son of God role is beneath him, but as conceived by the Riddells, it is; the remainder is serenely simple-minded - real cinema du Gump - and blessed with rather too much divine intervention where the narrative intelligence would usually go.