It’s a film of ferocious political rage, railing against Russia’s corrupt masters, but it’s also mysterious and poetic, eventually opening out to metaphysical perspectives. And while it’s deeply contemplative, its narrative fairly barrels along. ...

Patient, probing, and poetic in both its affairs of the heart and its worries of the soul… a film of intricately layered artistry.” Sarah Ward, Goethe-Institut ...

When her lover dies suddenly, Marina falls under suspicion in this magic-realist Oscar-winner from the director of Gloria. ...

Get set for a truly extraordinary comic experience as a father acts out an escalating series of pranks designed to connect with his workaholic daughter. ​“A work of great beauty, great feeling and great cinema” – Manohla Dargis, NY Times ...

Jimmie Fails dreams of reclaiming the regal Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of gentrified San Francisco. “An indelibly beautiful story of love, family and loss in America” – NY Times ...

A transcendent love story replete with taut excitement and startling imagery, Spellbound is classic Hitchcock, featuring stunning performances, an Academy Award-winning score by Miklós Rózsa, and a captivating dream sequence by Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí.” Criterion.com ...

A tentative queer love story is set against the sobering realities of life as an immigrant in modern-day Germany in this debut feature from Faraz Shariat. ...

“A hit at Sundance… Pariah is the finest coming-of-age movie I’ve seen in years” – Ella Taylor, npr.com ...

If American Honey has a message it is that dreams are always out of reach. Within a glittering collage of soaring music, soft light and writhing bodies, this brilliant film draws the outline of a bleak economic landscape. ...

Catalan director Carla Simón’s feature debut is autobiographical. Her memory of childish schemes and dreams is acute and bracingly free of sentimentality ...

One of Bergman’s most enigmatic films, perhaps his underground masterpiece,one of the keys to his cinema...everything is there, everyone is there, but beneath... mystery rumbles ...

Joanna Hogg’s dream-like, visually splendid tale of first love stars Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton, and Tom Burke. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2019 ...

Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong/France 2000, 98 minutes “Casts a dreamy and melancholic spell that remains unbroken after the closing credits have rolled” ...

The full programme for The New Zealand International Film Festival 2022 in Wellington with the festival screening from 4-14 August ...

There is a decidedly modern sensibility to her films as she playfully discovers comic and dramatic potential in the social mores of gender and class ...

Kabuki poetry and the reality of present-day life in Japan’s wintry far north are drawn together in this beautiful documentary from one of world cinema’s most original artists ...

Robert Bresson’s brilliantly pared-down and powerfully austere study of a compulsive pickpocket Michel (Martin Lassalle), who achieves an unlikely redemption through the love of a sympathetic woman ...

The first Kenyan film to be selected for Cannes, Rafiki was banned in its home country last year – not for its lesbian content per se, but for its tone of hopefulness ...

Dorothy Arzner brings a subversive feminist sensibility to this juicily entertaining backstage melodrama. A behind-the-footlights look at friendship, jealousy, and ambition ...

Beautifully composed and boasting the kind of sensitivity to light sources and color tonalities usually ascribed to top photographers, the film lovingly depicts the remote east-central region of Sudan as a quasi-magical place ...

Set in contemporary France in an unidentified city that sometimes seems to be Paris but probably isn't, L'Argent is a serenely composed film that tells a ruthless tale of greed, corruption and murder without once raising its voice ...

One of the great classics of German expressionist cinema. This screening will be accompanied by a new score arranged and played by Te-Whanganui-a-Tara musicians, Erika Grant, Isaac Smith, Rosie Langabeer and Neil Feather ...

Louis Malle brings together a mesmerizing performance by Jeanne Moreau, evocative cinematography by Henri Decaë, and a now legendary jazz score by Miles Davis ...

Inspired by the works of Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien... Exquisitely photographed, the film builds a slow-burning portrait of a community in which modernity and tradition coexist ...

Superbly directed and written,the story of a sheltered young woman who discovers she has an inexplicable power that materializes when she feels desire for a female student at her university ...

In 2013, the "enhanced and restored" cut of the 1983 original won rave reviews at the Wellington opening night of the Film Festival ...

Robert Siodmak's noir is as good as it gets.... populated by slang-slinging tough guys with tilted fedoras and dangled cigarettes and gorgeous dames who are not to be trusted ...

Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall star as young lovers in this Depression-era tale of bank-robbing Mississippi convicts portrayed as innocents all at sea in an uncaring world ...

Burt Lancaster plays another in his late 40s line of doomed losers (cf Siodmak's The Killers, 1946), in this powerful thriller where illicit passion, greed, robbery and murder collide ...

George Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, performed here on a fantastic set, with a piano so big that it fits the full orchestra inside it ...

4K restoration of Robert Altman's 1975 masterpiece. "The narrative, seemingly as chaotic as reality, is supremely subtle and complex in its interweaving of events, relationships, themes and moods" ...