Director Kelly Reichardt shows that simplicity is not to be feared. First Cow gets to the root of human behaviour, all the while reaffirming our innate connection with nature. It refuses to get lost in plot, choosing instead to send us into a daze by letting the sounds and colours of the environment wash over us.

In the present day, a woman and her dog stumble upon two skeletons buried in a forest in Oregon. We return in the early 19^th century, where Otis ‘Cookie’ Figowitz (John Magaro) meets Chinese immigrant King-Lu (Orion Lee) and aids him back to health. They soon reunite at a nearby village, where its richest resident, Chief Factor (Toby Jones), has just acquired the territory’s first cow. When Lu discovers that Otis can bake incredible cakes, he sees an opportunity for prosperity. All they need is some milk.

First Cow is unafraid of silence, or rather, it embraces the symphony of nature. Reichardt’s focus is connecting us with these characters, while in a way, the characters and their tale merely connect us with the Earth; Otis’ wardrobe, for example, seamlessly blends with his woodland surroundings. Decisions to shoot in a 4:3 aspect ratio and to allow branches or shrubbery to intrude in the frame show the director’s confidence and give the film its trance-like feel.

The story is meditative in a way few films this past year were, with the possible exception of Best Picture-winner Nomadland. The camera takes time to appreciate time-consuming tasks, until the home stretch when a sense of dread inevitably seeps in.

While part of me wishes the script allowed Magaro and Lee to grit their teeth a little more, the actors mine gold from the quiet bond between their characters. Jones delivers a standout performance as the wickedly snobbish Chief Factor. Watching our heroes screw him over time and time again never gets old.

First Cow is clear in its intentions, and whether you connect with them will be down to your own movie-going preferences. While it may seem light at first, it will weave its way into your mind and stick around for days.

The NZ International Comedy Festival kicked off to a full house on Sunday night as roars of laughter and tubs of mayo filled The Opera House at the Best Foods Comedy Gala.

Introducing some of the best comedians in the country, MC Justine Smith keeps the three-hour show cracking along with whizbang jokes of her own. Her sense of comedic timing makes her the perfect ringmaster, while her humour – grubby, stroppy, yet somehow still charming – sets her up as a consistent audience favourite.

“I feel like I did not make the best use of my allotted time”, Ben Hurley says at the end of his set. It’s one of the funniest moments of the night, as is Nick Rado’s aggressive imitation of kids jacked up on Raro. Guy Montgomery’s takedown of the 6 o’clock news is my gala highlight. I’ve always been a huge fan of his absurdly clever, cleverly absurd comedy.

Rhys Darby and Cori Gonzalez-Macuer are both standouts, Darby for re-enacting his anything-but-calm audition for the Calm app, and Gonzalez-Macuer for his understated but hard-hitting set on anxiety. James Nokise has us chuckling with the political, while Angella Dravid has us blushing with the overtly sexual. Spouting absolute filth while looking like a deer in headlights is a whole mood, and I’m here for it.

Musically we’re spoiled with a few treats, especially from Paul Williams on keys. That voice! His song about the dangers of walking home at night echoes Laura Davis’ wicked set, which disarms the audience by entwining serious issues with laughter. Fresh from Broadway, Jonno Roberts dazzles with a ditty on the difficulties of raising children (to put it mildly), but creeps me out by lusting after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Closing the show is Two Hearts, Laura Daniel and Joseph Moore, with Tummy Rosé. A Kiwi take on The Lonely Island, this musical comedy duo always delivers a banging finale with high production values.

What an outstanding night of standout stand-up.

Things I Know to be True is a poignant story of family, of loss, and of love. The play follows the Price family through the ups and downs of life over the course of a year, broaching problems and situations universally known to every family, to every human. The Price children (played by Heather O’Carroll, Jthan Morgan, Daniel Watterson, and Caitlin Rivers) have grown up and started their own lives, often fiercely independent from their parents, but seem to find themselves more often than not circling back to their childhood home, for advice, help, approval, rebellion, truth, and the comfort that only family can provide.

Things I Know to be True is exquisitely crafted. Each one of the actors portrays genuine, deep, relatable, and very real characters. Lara Macgregor delivers a phenomenal performance as Fran Price, flitting between anger, joy, pride, longing, fear, and devastation as she desperately tries to make the world right for her children. As her counterpart Bob Price, Stephen Lovatt delivers a much more subtle character, enacting a stoic yet utterly tender performance of a devout father and husband.

As the backdrop for the lives of the Price family, set designer Andrew Foster creates the garden world in which the story unfolds. Four rosebushes mark the passing of time and the seasons, changing in size, shape, and foliage throughout the play as we transition between summer and fall, or from one character’s story to the next. Leaves fall from the ceiling as well as real rainwater, making the play alive and dynamic.

Though heart-wrenching, Things I Know to be True is also heart-warming. Life is not perfect for the Price family but it is real. In their lives we see our own, raw and difficult, delicate and utterly beautiful. Through their story we find comfort in knowing that though all of us share heartbreak, we also share resilience and compassion in overcoming it; and this I know to be true.

Fleur Adcock’s poetry left me simply wanting more. The Mermaid’s Purse is imbued with a sense of magical realism. As the reader winds their way through the twists and turns of Adcock’s mind we encounter her memories; meet old friends, attend shows, dinner parties, travel to distant lands while bats and birds fly overhead. The Mermaid’s Purse focuses on memory, tinged with a hint of nostalgia as death, and the predestiny of ageing, dance along the fringes of her poems.

Adcock’s poetry feels like a moment in time, as if she has pulled back the veil shrouding a distant remembrance, and captures the impression of a bygone moment. The Little Theatre Club and In the Cupboard address how a moment is in fact remembered. The latter uses items to evoke a story, the former directly inquires: “how will you remember, my young dears?” Adcock in this particular instance remembers the moment simply through a pair of apple-green tights. Her poems are transient, each one feels like a memory in and of itself.

Many of Adcock’s poems seem to be more about the feeling they evoke rather than the actual subject. Giza for example is not truly about her dress, rather about the memory the dress conjures. Similarly, Porridge tackles grief at the loss of our poet’s friend, using his Pyrex dish as a metonymy for his memory. Perhaps my favourite poem in The Mermaid’s Purse is House, which paints a home through memory, sunsets, kauri flooring, a pōhutukawa planted over the daughter’s umbilical cord, only to conclusively “melt” the house into mere money as the children sell it. Endings seem both a choice and inevitable.

This kind of worldbuilding is almost always reduced to an anticlimax in many of Adcock’s poems, making her collection transformative, circular, and self-aware. Perhaps this tactic is intended to mimic the burden of ageing, something Adcock seems to be reckoning with in her poetry as her words gracefully and rawly wrestle with the inevitable expiration date that is death.

Families are complicated and that is exactly what Jessica Dettmann exposes in her latest novel, This Has Been Absolutely Lovely. The story centres around a large extended family and their struggles surrounding the death of the grandfather. The family events and celebrations that follow are the perfect set-up for serious themes that include heartache, motherhood, unfulfilled dreams, and mental health. It’s not all doom and gloom, as Dettmann does an incredible job of pulling these serious themes together with some witty humour.

The protagonist, Annie, battles endlessly to balance her desire for music stardom with her never-ending duties as a mother. Despite not being a mother, I found the concept of turmoil between one’s pursuit of their dreams and the obligations that come with relationships extremely relatable. Dettmann writes in a poetic way that pulls you tightly into her characters’ psyches.

“She would close her eyes and step off the cliff. Her body hummed with the thrill of the decision. How it would affect her kids, she still didn’t know, but they’d survive. She felt the force of her mother’s unlived dreams behind her, and her daughters’ and her grandparents’ unrealised futures.”

Having said this – and apologies in advance – the characters were absolutely not that lovely for me. With the exception of one or two, I found most of them incredibly irritating and unlikeable. I believe this is what held me back from truly enjoying this book. Selfishness and self-centredness are repeated attributes and felt so turned up at times that they even came off a little unrealistic.

Overall, this book has achieved what it set out to: exposing the complexities and seriousness of family life in an easy-to-read and engaging way. Although I was not fully charmed by the plot, I am certain that this book will tickle many who love dramas and are looking for an easy book to finish and discuss later with friends.

Man Alone tells the story of the main protagonist Johnson who, in the aftermath of World War I, tries to make a new life for himself in New Zealand. We see him drifting from place to place, never staying put for too long and as he calls it, only living for the good times. Unfortunately, the good times soon come to an end, and it isn’t long before Johnson’s way of life is under threat. 

Before you even open the book, your mind is going to be flooded with images of the late, great Barry Crump and the clichéd picture of the southern mountain man: stoic, silent, and individualistic. Johnson exemplifies all of these qualities, minus Crump’s charm and old-fashioned good manners. While I definitely admire him as a character, I just couldn’t get behind him. 

Early on, Johnson is involved in a scuffle during a workers’ protest where he winds up assaulting a policeman, and while making his escape, he steals a hat and scarf from a sleeping vagrant. It is examples like these that made it hard to like him and kept me from seeing him as anything more than a one-dimensional character. Whether that was by design or not, we’ll never know, since Mulgan took his own life in 1945.

Still, I have to acknowledge that Johnson is a product of his time, living in a New Zealand far removed from the one you and I would recognise. Life was harder back then – no internet, no lattes, and if you wanted to fly, you had to have wings! (Domestic travel didn’t become common until the 1950s.)

Ironically, Man Alone’s biggest downfall isn’t in the book itself but its back cover. It essentially gives away the story’s major plot points and unforgivably spoils what could have been a shock ending. 

However, if you can overlook this, then Man Alone is a good example of the literature of its time (1939) and is definitely worth
a look.

For someone who has always been diametrically opposed to science fiction, fantasy, and anything remotely masquerading as such, Monsters in the Garden, with its eclectic mix of short stories and excerpts, was an excellent way to dive right in.

I love that there are names I recognised of well-established New Zealand authors who I have read on occasion, the likes of Margaret Mahy and Witi Ihimaera included. Mahy’s Misrule in Diamond from her unpublished manuscript was everything I never knew I needed: fantasy, princes, court jesters, treacherous siblings, and what could have been a hint of romance that unfortunately may never be explored. I long for what is left of Mahy’s unpublished manuscript and the hidden possibilities within.

Maurice Gee, Keri Hulme, the list goes on. You will find previously unpublished authors sharing their wares here as well. I love the feel of these stories. Phillip Mann flips the lid on iconic characters in The Gospel According to Mickey Mouse, where Mickey Mouse turns dictator and Sherlock Holmes is not as we know him. Editors David Larsen and Elizabeth Knox seem to have no particular rhyme or rhythm to their selection. There’s the weird, the wonderful, and the unsettling in between, all vying for your attention. There’s knitted dolls, and worried sheep. The stories all seem miscellaneous, and perhaps this is what science fiction is all about – strange, weird, assorted, and a challenge to the impossible.

Emma Martin’s In the Forest with Ludmila, about two sisters raised by a disturbed mother and grandmother, felt disconcerting in its violence and unsettling.

I wouldn’t say I am now a convert to all things sci-fi but rather, I’m open to a world where speculative fiction not only lives but thrives; all the better with a uniquely Kiwi feel too. Knox accepts this anthology doesn’t represent all genres, writing “It’s an anthology among anthologies and a good place to start.” For the uninitiated like me, it has been just that.

In a quite extraordinary book about regained fragments of childhood memories, Debora Harding has composed a simply beautiful book about a horrific crime committed against her when she was 14 years old. Her salad days destroyed.

Told in diary form, Harding takes us on a trip of remembered events. This tool is a clever methodology of drawing the reader in. I won’t spoil the reason behind the title of the book other than to say it’s pivotal in Harding’s grasp of who, at the time of the crisis, became her rock.

As horrific as the crime was, and this aspect should never be understated, Harding suffers from self-inflicted victim persecution when told years later that the event never happened. It is Harding’s mother who planted the seeds of doubt in her daughter’s mind as regards the abduction and rape. This might come as a shock as the reader is drawn into a long dark tunnel of her mother’s deteriorating mental health battles. Her father, a man who seems never to lose his temper and has a unique approach to sorting out life’s problems, is quite the opposite. Though later in life he also is diagnosed with bi-polar disorder.

Eventually, this manifests itself in Harding’s mind as she battles melancholy, depression, seizures, and episodes of collapsing. Harding has to question herself, is she following in her mother’s footsteps with this debilitating anxiety?

Years later, a newly married Harding confronts her past. In piecing together the known facts, Harding and her husband Tom delve into old FBI records and eventually, she plucks up the courage to visit her abductor and rapist who is about to be released after serving a jail sentence of 25 years.

She looks at Charles Goodwin and practises what she is going to say to him. In facts she reveals, and I quote, “They say with severe crimes there’s no avoiding the aftermath. What they don’t say is how post-traumatic stress can become a disorder because of your childhood family, the one you’re trying to survive”. A wonderful cathartic book.

“throw your words on the floor, you don’t need them
forget your real name
forget how old you are
your name is denatured, unfit to drink
your words are poison, unfit to eat
assume everyone is watching”.

In the afterword to her first book, How to Take off Your Clothes, Hadassah Grace writes, “I don’t really like a lot of poetry but here I am writing a book of it.” A contradiction characteristic of her debut poetry collection, Grace’s poems juxtapose a diverse range of her experiences. Darting from being raised by Christian folk-singing celebrities to working as a sex worker, these works illustrate that many things, in simultaneity, can be true for one person.

“I don’t do forever
why keep feeding a campfire when you’re not cold anymore
even emails with attachments make me nervous”.

Although contemporary poetry is synonymous with the autobiographical, the heights Grace’s introspection reaches in her poems separates them from anything I have ever read. The result? A peculiar and bold lucidity.

“we are ruined women, and we are here to ruin you

we’ve always been here
the witches you burned because you knew we were magic
swapping our vacuum cleaner for broomsticks
and cackling about castration under the light of the full moon
we’re the girls you said were begging for it, too horny to be forced”.

Grace’s poems remind me of the clarity that strikes while mulling over an argument; here are the words you wish you had thought and dared to say. No ums or aahs.