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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‘You can’t always win in this industry’: Theo James

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The actor found fame as the cocky finance bro in The White Lotus. Now, as he stars in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, he talks to Tim Lewis about being ‘irritatingly competitive’, giving up music for acting – and whether James Bond really is on the horizon...

When Theo James read the script for the second season of The White Lotus, the British actor wasn’t immediately sure what he could bring to the part of Cameron. The character was “another finance bro”: cocky, suave and superficial. “Interesting,” he recalls, “but we’ve seen it a hundred times.”

At the audition, though, the 39-year-old James was won over by Mike White, who writes and directs the hit HBO series, a comic psychodrama revolving around the employees and hyper-wealthy guests of the fictional White Lotus hotel resort. The first season was set on Maui. The second, with a mostly new cast, relocated to Sicily and was more explicitly carnal and lascivious. Cameron was part of a foursome, with his wife (played by Meghann Fahy) and another couple (Will Sharpe and Aubrey Plaza) whom Cameron appears to want to dominate physically and sexually.

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