Tinā review – a feelgood choir drama that follows a winning formula

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A huge hit in Aotearoa New Zealand, this film follows a teacher who transforms an elite private school with music, played beautifully by Anapela Polataivao Ah yes: the inspirational high school movie! This formula is an oldie but a goodie: a thinking-outside-the-box teacher profoundly inspires their students while restoring something broken inside themselves. Such narratives view education as a “school of life” in which everybody – irrespective of age and circumstance – is always in a state of learning and growing. The teacher’s unconventional methods are inevitably questioned; various triumphs and tragedies ensue. And in musically themed productions such as the Aotearoa New Zealand drama Tinā, momentum builds towards a rousing final performance. Tonally, Miki Magasiva’s film is less School of Rock than Mr Holland’s Opus: middle-of-the-road stylistically and not so much tugging the heartstrings as giving them a right royal yank. There’s no ambiguity in his script, which puts its emot...
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Christspiracy: The Spirituality Secret review – Jesus was a vegetarian and other entertaining tosh

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Unsupported assertions and gormless naivety drive this mishmash of pseudoscience and manipulated religious doctrine

Clearly scheduled to give vegetarians and vegans ammunition to shame carnivorous family members around the Easter and Passover dinner table, this passionate but unpersuasive documentary argues that Jesus was probably a vegetarian. Ultimately, the theory gets largely traced back to the apocryphal Gospel of the Ebionites, a text that’s been around since the second century; director Kip Andersen, however, makes a whole song and dance out of “discovering” this notion in a roundabout way, making for an entertainingly barmy quest. By the end, we’re informed that scientists have found the supposedly “happiest human on Earth”: a vegan Buddhist monk named Mateo Richard who spends most of his time meditating on compassion and has “high-amplitude gamma activity” in his brain which means it “fires on the highest levels”.

This particular mishmash of pseudoscientific buzz words is delivered via a montage of rostrum shots showing visually highlighted bits of text while an awestruck voiceover from Andersen himself synthesises the ideas. Before we can even absorb this information, the film skittishly moves on to the next notion that all the greatest thinkers in history were vegetarian. Leonardo da Vinci supposedly bought up all the chickens in his local market and then released them into the woods, which would have made the local foxes happy if no one else.

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