As his debut film Once Were Warriors showed, Lee Tamahori was a director of guts and flair

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Tamahori was the outstanding director of Along Came a Spider and Die Another Day – but his first film was his greatest work In 1994, the New Zealand film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and s...
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​​Streaming: where to watch the best 2023 Bafta contenders

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Ahead of this weekend’s awards ceremony, here’s our guide to the runners and riders – from All Quiet on the Western Front to The Quiet Girl – as well as the greatest best film winners of the past

The Baftas can seem like another stepping stone on the long road to the Oscars, but the UK industry’s highest honour can assert its own identity when it wants. Last year the British Academy of Film and Television Arts gave its best actress award to Joanna Scanlan for After Love, a film scarcely seen across the Atlantic, and for the seventh time in the past eight years chose differently from the US Academy in the best film race. (Bafta went for Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog while the Oscar went to the wispy Coda: a point to the Brits there.)

Tomorrow night we can hope for more bold choices. Netflix, hot off its victory last year, once more boasts the top nominee. Not many expected Edward Berger’s German-language All Quiet on the Western Front to lead the field with a whopping 14 nods – the most for any film at the Baftas since The King’s Speech 12 years ago. Rather quietly released to the streaming service last November, this robustly stirring, immaculately crafted adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic first world war novel is well worth catching up with – even if its harrowing battle scenes really demand a large screen.

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