86

%

• Fantastic, unapologetically kiwi in its writing, characters and obviously location, being set in Dunedin. I was thoroughly entertained the whole way through. It really delved into the NZ uni experience of; move to a new city, find the cheapest accommodation, befriend your flatmates, fuck your flatmates, break up, find drugs, explore the local markets and festivities, trap a dealer in your basement, fear for your life, torture him, have a fight in the basement, escape and live, leave Dunedin.

• The film made me feel young again! The flat was a character in its own right – rough, secretive and a bit dangerous.

• Saw this on general release in 1999 but really didn’t remember it. A genuine thriller, with a lot of humour. Some of the acting seemed a little stagey at first, but I believed them all in the end – you know I’m caught up when I’m saying “no no nooo” to yet another disastrous decision! It was a treat to have the filmmakers there to talk about it beforehand, and slightly startling to see the star of The Brokenwood Mysteries in his youth – I had no idea who he was back then.

• I really enjoyed the characters and the quite simple set up of the storyline. On its face, this is just a fun thriller — but I think it also says something deeper about human self-interest and the flaws in our justice system. I liked it.

• Beautifully shot and tightly written.

76

%

• I can admire it for its innovative editing, its dedication to realism, its spectacular action… but that’s not the same as enjoying it. I’m starting to think I just don’t get the appeal of Westerns. Also, I couldn’t help but wince every time a the horse stunts got violent, and that was like 90% of the movie.

• A Peckinpah splatter-fest, with strong performances from Holden and Ryan. The climatic Mexican standoff one of the best things I have seen on the big screen.

• Visually beautiful, but an empty film for me. The train heist and bridge sequences were incredible, but there’s a lack of emotional investment with the characters. Much like the scorpion-torturing children, Peckinpah seems to enjoy watching things die.

• A terrific epic Panavision Western, with three huge stars (Holden, Ryan & Borgnine) at the helm. Holden the star of Sunset Boulevard and Ryan from Bad Day at Black Rock brought gravitas to Peckinpah’s best film. Exciting, great vistas and slow motion shoot-outs, what more could we ask for?

• my favourite line was, “pew pew pew pow pow pew pow pow”

79

%

• A film produced solely to test the boundaries of your comfort zone like the raptors in Jurassic Park test the fences. John Waters spends 80-odd minutes on lowering your core temperature. An assault on every sense and good decency. I will never watch again, and am actively reconsidering everything I’ve ever held dear. That said, 3 stars.

• To the person that said “poor Francine” halfway through: hard same. Such a delight to see with a crowd, and loved the bonus Odorama!

• Polyester truly engaged all my senses – sight, sound, and smell of course, but it also touched me inappropriately, and may have permanently affected my sense of taste. I haven’t laughed that much or that hard in ages.

• Not going to forget the Embassy smelling like fart and gas any time soon. A great time!

• I can’t believe a man who had a meet-cute at the scene of a fatal car crash turned out to be such a bad person. A wonderful send-up of the 1950s melodrama, and the Odorama was a great bait-and-switch with roses followed by the most repulsive nine smells imaginable. Haven’t laughed like this in ages.

77

%

• Great character writing and music makes this a super intense and horrifying depiction of the worst of the worst fucking awful, asshole, despicable men. The character writing was the standout here. That’s 2 WFS films in a row that are inadvertently horror films just by the nature of their content. RIP EO

• On the slow dusty drive into that outback town, I felt a deep sense of unease and anxiety settle in. Two young women, a bunch of drunk, hungry men. No one to trust and nowhere to run. Utterly Terrifying.

• Very tense. Great music & performances. My friend called it a “frighteningly accurate depiction of the hospo industry”.

• Successfully unsettling from scene-to-scene, but sadly unsuccessful in overall ideas. It’s simultaneously reaching for a potent message on power dynamics and cowering away from broader context – as if to say that rural Australia is all one big, dusty, over-mined nowhere full of sex offenders. I’d reach for Wake in Fright or the original documentary, Hotel Coolgardie, for a more interesting perspective on a complex setting.

• Deeply disturbing, brilliantly acted, scarier than a horror movie, especially when realising at the end it’s based on a doco. An important yet uncomfortable film. And btw, Hugo Weaving was at the top of his game in this!

72

%

• Pure movie magic. It’s films like this that I come to WFS for. One of the best of WFS 2025, one of the best of the decade. And that film score was exquisite. The whole picture was a delight.

• What a hard life for a little donkey. 5 stars for the movie, none for the ending which sent me home depressed.

• I did not expect to like this. But, I loved it! It was a delight! Some pretentious interludes, but overall, contemplating the relationship between ourselves and our non-human partners in life was a worthwhile way to spend time on a Monday evening.

• Give that donkey an Oscar! I want to see one gleaming in its soulful brown eyes. This movie starts out like a whimsical animal picaresque – even a play on Cambell’s hero’s journey – but focuses more and more on humans until it turns into a shaggy dog story with a mean ending. Last year’s documentary Cow made the same point about animal rights much more deftly and earnestly. I want to emphasise, though: the donkey did nothing wrong.

• I just really wanted this to have a happy ending, makes the whole film feel like too much of a downer in hindsight. And this is coming from a guy who liked Peppermint Candy!

70

%

• Given its title and the general concept, it felt a bit light on detail in the theoretical department. And as to what was actually happening, who knows? But it was very enjoyable for all that, and original, with a darkly mysterious, sometimes comical mood.

• this one is gonna get mixed reviews, i can tell. put me in for the weird-yes-please camp. which me walked out of the theatre??

• I had a great time with about 3/4 of this movie, and the sweep of 20th century filmmaking it evoked: the Hitchcockian suspense, the Kubrickian sharpness, and the Lynchian sense of unreality and unease all wove together to make something thrilling. Then it had to go and explain itself in the last 20 minutes with a voiceover. Like a fabulous dream, what seems heady and transformative in the moment collapses in the attempt to put it into words. I wish this film had had the confidence to keep us guessing until the credits rolled.

• As a Hitchcock stan, I lapped up this visual and aural delight. The Universal Theory is a stylish, tightly wound homage that spirals through paranoia, metaphysics, and murder with a wink and a violin screech.

• The scenery was stunning and the period setting felt convincing, but I found the protagonist hard to care about. He seemed so inert most of the time. The story was absorbing though, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on – I suspect people with some knowledge of theoretical physics might’ve got more out of it. I felt quite tense watching it as well, there was such a lot of foreboding – it felt like a horror film that had had its jump scares cut out.

69

%

• I really liked the narrative tool of the train carrying Kim Yongho backwards through his life. It also felt a little like we were opening up an incredibly tragic matryoshka doll revealing a new smaller miserable Kim Yongho underneath each time, as if hoping the next reveal might show that maybe at least once he had some bright part to his life.

• A beautifully-structured and beautifully-shot portrait of a man who just totally ruins the vibe of every room he’s in. As much as I hate to say it, being hit by a train is probably the best thing that can happen to him.

• Maybe I missed something, but I found Peppermint Candy hard to invest in emotionally. While the reverse structure was somewhat interesting, the story surrounding it felt flat and the protagonist was too boring to make me care about why he was such an asshole.

• I wasn’t going to do a review, but leaving on Monday I heard so many negative comments. I felt I had to defend this film. It was sad, and tough to watch in multiple scene, but that’s literally how the world can/has been in the past. I felt the story was amazingly crafted, moving backwards to the pivotal points in Yongho’s life, showing us where things went wrong for him. Towards the end of the film, you start to feel sorry for Yongho.

• Deft telling of the story of trauma, its destabilising aftermath and its impact on the lives of those connected to the traumatised. The backwards narrative and its revelations gave a rich and deep portrait of the psychology of the protagonist. A great film.

77

%

• A masterpiece, I’ve been waiting to see this one and it was fantastic to see it on the big screen. Expanding on the themes of of friendship and betrayal he explored in Ride the High Country, Peckinpah again uses a personal conflict to underscore the end of the old west. Gorgeous cinematography wrings every subtlety out of the dusty setting. The cast is a smorgasbord of craggy character actors. And the film is a feature length Bob Dylan music video to boot. A dusty delight.

• The biggest surprise of this film – excepting the close-up shots of real chickens getting their heads blown off – was that young Bob Dylan does, in fact, look remarkably like Timothee Chalamet. This film has much to recommend it: the soundtrack is good, James Coburn is the most glum and thoughtful man in black I’ve ever seen, and it seems like every hour is golden hour (the sun, after all, is setting on the Old West) – but I couldn’t help but feel a little relieved that they don’t really make ’em like this any more.

• Some of the reasons I didn’t enjoy Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: 1) I’m not very keen on films where the sole purpose of including most of the women in the cast seems to be to display their breasts; 2) Bob Dylan’s vocal style is like fingernails on a blackboard to my ears; 3) I could barely make out most of the dialogue and missed a lot of it – would’ve appreciated subtitles; 4) I couldn’t sympathise with any of the characters, most of them seemed like wastes of space; 5) the chicken shooting scene was nasty; 6) I couldn’t figure out the point of the prologue. Positives: I enjoyed Dylan’s character, Alias, he was refreshingly unexpected; and the landscapes were quite good.

• some of the shoots were beautiful but. who am i even rooting for here. do they need to shoot everyone they meet. alexa play knocking on heavens door.

• Borderline incomprehensible at times with the mumbly dialogue and meandering storytelling. Nevertheless Peckinpah crafts some absolutely incredible moments in this sad and brutal eulogy to the old West, which is on the verge of being violently tamed by the onwards march of capitalist civilisation. Great performances by the two leads, Coburn as the bitter, self loathing Garrett and Kristofferson as the magnetic and mercurial Billy. The Dylan soundtrack is hit and miss, but when it hits it really hits. His acting performance is kind of distracting though.

80

%

• Loved this. A coming of age drama shot like a horror film, because nothing is more terrifying than adolescence.

• I enjoyed this film very much, thank you for selecting it – hopefully one day we’ll see “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person”, also starring Sara Montpetit – brilliant film. I liked the way Falcon Lake let its characters’ faces tell a lot of the story and how the silences said as much as the conversations. The adults seemed so peripheral to their kids’ lives, but that makes sense for teens growing up safe in loving homes. Interactions with peers are everything, especially if they’re a little older and wilder. Felt very authentic. Oh, and I liked the music. It always felt right.

• Does a good job of capturing the holiday vibe and the uncomfortable in-betweenness of teenagehood, but only gets properly tense and mysterious in the last ten minutes, and the characters aren’t particularly likeable – I guess there was a consequence for it all, but did anyone really learn or grow from their misdeeds or was it all just an excuse for some classic French-film underage sex?

• This was a slow, beautiful burn for me. I really believed in and rooted for those awkward teens right up to the inevitable tragic end. The understatedness of the aftermath was just perfection.

• Although I enjoyed the coming of age bits, I found the spooky Gothic shots hackneyed and the ending both a deus ex machina and predictable (if that’s not a contradiction in terms). The similarities with the much earlier ‘Rain’ were notable – coming of age, directors’ first films, summer bach on a lake, drowning but I found ‘Rain’, shown last year, a truer and better film.

79

%

• Fantastic film, strangely it reminded me a lot of Wes Anderson’s work, although perhaps it is really the other way around. Also the leaf litter in Japan must be especially slippery as there was more falling over than I expected!

• The two Kurosawa pictures this year have given me less enjoyment than watching Man Utd come 15th in the Premier League. The acting style reminds me very unhappily of my own attempt to play Lady Macbeth in 5th form English ( I also laughed maniacally and/or rolled around the floor crying uncontrollably). Stilted and alienating.

• I wasn’t sure if I liked this one, but thinking about it afterwards it’s really grown on me. The way in which all the characters create stories that make themselves look good, and it’s only the woodcutter at the end who has to grapple with his cowardice and hypocrisy and makes a commitment to do something good. The actors are all brilliant, even when they’re doing thoroughly unlikeable things.

• Astonishing how inventive Kurosawa was relatively early in his career.

• A cinematic treasure trove of murder in a wooded Grove Culprits among those who rove But who then did the killing? Calling upon memory Lopsided testimony And iffy truth or honesty From those who were willing. Just as I recall the masterpiece Or is it? Yes I kid I tease ‘The film deserves another lease’ I heard from patrons milling.