But now are guttersnipes. A Maori family in the urban squalor of present-day New Zealand. A life of boozing, bar fights, wife-beating (hideous post-beating makeup: one eye an inch lower than the other), gang initiations, reform school, rape, suicide, etc. The opening image is a striking, if unsubtle, shot of a paradisaical mountain landscape that's revealed to be a mere billboard over a busy freeway. And the roasted, sizzling color (Stuart Dryburgh, cinematographer) continues in general to be striking. The two principal faces and performances are striking too: Rena Owen, sort of a cross between Jeanne Moreau and Sonia Braga, with a high flat forehead maximally shown off by a dark curtain of sideswept hair; and Temuera Morrison, a Golem-like hulk who attains an almost mythically monsterish awesomeness and majesty. Both of them, at peak intensity, seem to vibrate at a level perilously close to spontaneous disintegration. The arrangement of narrative events, meanwhile, is striking exclusively in the way of a smack in the face. Directed by Lee Tamahori. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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