The Big Screen with Michelle Langstone

Karl Puschmann's July TV picks

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his monthly picks. He calls Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Happiness, the new Larry David sketch series on HBO Max, a disappointing misfire despite a cast that includes Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Hader and Barack Obama in an intro sequence. He recommends Elle, the Legally Blonde prequel on Amazon Prime, for fans of the original. And he gives a strong early endorsement to Westies on Neon, an 80s mob thriller with J.K. Simmons as an Irish-American gang leader holding territory against the Italian mob in Hell's Kitchen, describing it as confident, brutal and very good.

Warwick Freeman: fifty years of jewelry and a show that finally maps it all

Warwick Freeman came to jewelry through a school friend who claimed he knew how to make it, an overland trip from Europe to Australia, and a 40 percent import tax that meant there was very little competition when he joined Fingers gallery in Auckland in 1978. His solo exhibition Hook Hand Heart Star has toured from Die Neue Sammlung in Munich to Objectspace in Auckland, and opens at The Dowse in Lower Hutt on 25 July. He joins Culture 101 to discuss a career that has resisted chronology, and why his earliest work holds up beside the newest.

Cian Elyse White: 550 drones over Lake Rotorua for Matariki

Aronui Indigenous Arts Festival Artistic Director Cian Elyse White says this year's fleet of 550 is the largest they've ever flown. The show runs from 9 to 11 July, starting at 8pm each night over the lake, accompanied by a soundscape composed to resonate physically through the crowd before they even see the drones. Last year 36,000 people attended across the three nights. She joins Culture 101 to explain how you go from script to sky, and why the show aims to make you feel it before you hear it.

Andrew Hinton on how his documentary constructed buildings

Andrew Hinton's 2014 documentary Tashi and the Monk followed a Buddhist monk running a refuge for abandoned children in the remote foothills of the Indian Himalayas. The film won 27 awards, ended up on HBO after a chance encounter in a festival shuttle bus, and raised enough money to fund two new buildings at the community. Twelve years later, Hinton has returned. Tashi is now a teenager and a big sister to a young boy named Karma. He joins Culture 101 to discuss Loving Karma, what he found when he went back, and the monk's definition of love, which he has since tried to apply to his own parenting: patience plus attention.

Sam Brooks brings three forgotten queer plays back to life at Basement Theatre

Sam Brooks curates Firing the Cannon, a Basement Theatre series of free play readings drawing on New Zealand's theatrical history. This year's season leaned into a queer theme almost by accident: Robert Lord's Joyful and Triumphant, Renée's Setting the Table, and Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu's The Black, a play about depression that takes the form of a stalking horse. Brooks talks about why reviving work that doesn't get performed often matters, and what it's like watching actors bring entirely new interpretations to text that's never been heard out loud before.