124 mins | Kleber Mendoça Filho | Brazil | 2012 | M sex scenes, offensive language & drug use

A history of violence and oppression threatens to engulf the residents of an affluent seaside community in Neighboring Sounds, a thrilling debut from filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho. A palpable sense of unease hangs over a single city block in the coastal town of Recife, Brazil. Home to prosperous families and the servants who work for them, the area is ruled by an aging patriarch and his sons.

When a private security firm is reluctantly brought in to protect the residents from a recent spate of petty crime, it unleashes the fears, anxieties and resentments of a divided society still haunted by its troubled past.

“The mastery of pacing, theme and stylistic eccentricity throughout… is so assured as to be breathtaking.” – Film Comment

Crystal Moselle | USA | 2015 | 84 mins | M offensive language

The winner of the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Crystal Moselle’s film delves into the bizarrely sheltered lives of six brothers whose father has confined them (and their sister) since birth to the tiny rooms of their Lower East Side apartment. What these boys know about social interaction they’ve learned from watching movies – thousands of them – and filming ingenious, homemade re-creations of their favourites. (Reservoir Dogs looms large: it offers each of them a major role.)

Moselle draws on a vast video archive of their housebound lives to delight and disturb us in equal measure, but her portrait is a gently hopeful one, capturing them at a moment when the tyrannical grip of their father is faltering and they are making tentative forays into the world outside.
— Bill Gosden, NZIFF 2015

The Wolfpack indeed has much to say about fandom, the reciprocal bonds between consumption and production, the nightmarish consequences of unchecked patriarchy, and, especially, the pathological evils of insularity (it may be one of the greatest films ever made on this theme).
— Blake Williams, Cinema Scope

Joanna Hogg | UK/USA | 2019 | 120 mins

Joanna Hogg’s dream-like, visually splendid tale of first love stars Honor Swinton Byrne (in a breakout performance) alongside her mother, Tilda Swinton, and Tom Burke. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. Based on elements from Hogg’s own life, The Souvenir centres around Julie (Swinton Byrne), a 1980s film student from a privileged background who wishes to make films depicting the harsh social realities of Thatcherite Britain.

Into her life comes Anthony (Tom Burke), who’s older and charismatic and expresses serious interest in, and ideas about, the films Julie wishes to make. Following a chance meeting, the two embark on a tempestuous love affair. The dapper and sophisticated Anthony says he works for the Foreign Office, and hints at daring, secretive missions. While Julie’s mother (Swinton) and her friends express some apprehension, Julie remains devoted, borrowing increasingly large sums of money from her parents to hand over to Anthony.

Hogg says: ‘Making the film, I’m allowing parts of my own biography to be reimagined and expanded upon and changed. I want it to become something else.’ The result is a film of great power and unforgettable imagery, perfectly capturing the social milieu, and all the euphoria of first love and its accompanying harsh realisations.
— Sydney Film Festival 2019

94 mins | Sally Potter | UK | 1992 | PG sexual references

Tilda Swinton strides through four centuries of history, switching genders as she goes, in Sally Potter’s gorgeous, playful subversion of British Heritage cinema. With Billy Zane, and Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I.

“The fine, stylised performances from an idiosyncratic international cast are admirably headed by Tilda Swinton’s magnificent Orlando, who acts as the film’s complicitous eyes and ears… It’s a critical work, in that it comments wryly on such things as representations of English history, sexuality/androgyny and class – but made in the spirit of a love-poem to both Woolf and the England that made us. It’s wonderful.” — Wally Hammond, Time Out

Sébastien Marnier | France | 2018 | 104 mins

In his Venice-selected sophomore thriller, Sébastien Marnier sets his sights on a chilly class of gifted and talented students in the French countryside. After their teacher commits suicide during an exam, Pierre Hoffman (Laurent Lafitte) is called in as a long-term substitute. Expecting a class collectively reeling from this traumatic shock, Pierre is surprised to encounter a group of seemingly affectless mid-teens, mostly concerned with accelerating at an appropriate pace through their advanced-level courses.

His sense that something is askew only grows more acute when he notices a strange turn-the-other-cheek approach to physical violence—both from the students and his fellow faculty members. As Pierre spirals further into a wormhole that references both J.G. Ballard and Patti Smith, Marnier maintains a sense of creeping unease that expands into a chilling capitalist critique.
— Film Society at Lincoln Centre

School’s Out refuses to be pigeonholed into any cliché thriller framework. Instead, it defies every audience assumption by extending its narrative far beyond the walls of the prestigious private school, ultimately becoming a broader existential meditation on contemporary society. An exercise in slow, intentional build-up of philosophical dread, School’s Out is impossible to tear your eyes from and equally impossible to predict.
— Logan Taylor, Fantastic Fest 2018

Ali Abbasi | Sweden | 2018 | 108 mins | R16 sex scenes, nudity, violence, sexual abuse themes & content that may disturb

Based on a short story from Let the Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist, this genre-defying supernatural romantic thriller draws us into the mysterious life of a gifted outsider. Iranian-born Swedish filmmaker Ali Abbasi has adapted and expanded Lindqvist’s cunning tale with assistance from the author himself.

Stout and ruddy with a puffed-up face and a pronounced overbite, customs officer Tina is used to being ignored, but her unique talent for literally sniffing out illegal contraband makes her an invaluable team member at the ferry port she works. She lives with a boyfriend who is more interested in his growling show dogs than spending any time with her. Tina only feels truly at home in the verdant woods surrounding her home, bonding with the wild animals that live there

One day a strange man passes through the port that sends Tina’s senses tingling, but a search for contraband comes up empty. The man, Vore, shares a similar appearance to Tina and she soon becomes obsessed with finding more about him, but in doing so uncovers a dark secret about herself.

— Michael McDonnell, NZIFF 2018.

“An exciting, intelligent mix of romance, Nordic noir, social realism and supernatural horror that defies and subverts genre conventions.

— Alissa Simon, Variety

Heperi Mita | New Zealand | 2018 | 95 mins

By the time the pioneering indigenous filmmaker and activist Merata Mita died suddenly in 2010, she had packed an extraordinary amount of action into her 68 years. If her youngest son Heperi Mita became a film archivist and a filmmaker in order to discover the stories she did not live to tell him, then we in Aotearoa have something new to thank her for.

His first film is a remarkable accomplishment, a compelling Great Woman portrait that speaks intimately from personal experience. He has an abundant archive of film and TV appearances to draw on, beginning with his mother’s mesmerising testimony as a Māori woman bringing up children alone in the 1977 TV documentary Māori Women in a Pākehā World.

By 1979 she was making landmark documentaries herself, most notably Bastion Point: Day 507 (1980) and Patu! (1983) which rattled Kiwi complacency by so clearly identifying the violation of Māori rights – the latter film explicitly tying New Zealand’s record to apartheid in South Africa. In 1988 her film Mauri, deftly quoted in this one, was the first feature written and directed by a Māori woman.

— Bill Gosden, NZIFF 2018

Cristina Gellego & Ciro Guerra | Colombia | 2018 | 125 mins | M violence, offensive language & sex scenes

“A vibrant Colombian indigenous culture that’s survived centuries of colonisation takes on the 1970s drug trade in our visually and aurally astounding opener.

Directors Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego shake off the clichés of crime-war and imperialism and imbue their saga with surreal beauty and the elemental power of ancient proverb. The film’s formidable matriarch knows full well that the young chancer who has courted her daughter could only have paid the outrageous dowry she demanded by selling dope to the gringos. But the seed is sown: insisting traditional honour codes be observed in enrichening her clan, she bends her shamanistic authority to building an empire in the desert.” — Bill Gosden, NZIFF 2018

“This is an absolutely extraordinary film… You do not have to have Wayuu ancestry, or any connection to the region to understand the broader implications of this epic story of haunted druglords and ruthless power grabs that are partly predicated on traditional beliefs and shibboleths.

Guerra and Gallego’s film is no dusty period piece, it is wildly alive, yet it reminds us that no matter how modern we are, there are ancient songs our forebears knew whose melodies still rush in our blood.” — Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

Spike Lee | USA | 1989 | 120 mins | M offensive language

“Spike Lee’s tale of the complexities of race exacerbated by the police, those enforcers of state-sanctioned white supremacy, may now be considered a classic, almost thirty years after its initial release, but that status has not dulled the film’s cathartic anger nor its controversial edge. The film follows the goings-on on a single block in Brooklyn over the course of a single, sweltering summer day, from a morning of simmering tensions, focusing on a white-owned pizzeria, to a night of violence. Do the Right Thing teems with life, thanks to an extraordinary ensemble cast and a soundtrack that brings together hip hop, jazz and R&B.” — Harvard Film Archive

“Effortlessly moving from comedy to serious social comment, eliciting excellent performances from a large and perfectly selected cast, and making superb use of music both to create mood and comment on the action, Lee contrives to see both sides of each conflict without falling prey to simplistic sentimentality. Best of all, the film – at once stylised and realistic – buzzes throughout with the sheer, edgy bravado that comes from living one's life on the streets. It looks, sounds, and feels right: sure proof that Lee's virtuoso technique and righteous anger are tempered by real humanity.” — Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Alexandra Dean | USA | 2017 | 104 mins | M nudity

In the heyday of the Hollywood studios the popular joke about Hedy Lamarr was that she was so gorgeous that she need not concern herself with acting. Though the young Austrian émigré successfully parlayed her looks into Hollywood star power, she came to see her beauty as a ‘curse’, something that blinded onlookers to a far more vital attribute: a brilliant mind for mechanics. Who knew that she had invented a ‘frequency hopping’ system to conceal allied torpedoes from Nazi locater systems? (The science anticipated the technology that underlies WiFi and Bluetooth.)

Her international career began in scandal: she performed naked and was directed in such a way as to appear to be experiencing an orgasm in the Czech film Ecstasy. She was 19. In her later years her plastic surgery provided further fodder for tabloid gossip. Alexandra Dean’s timely documentary draws extensively on a previously unpublished audio interview from 1990 to highlight Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler’s multiple lives and unsung accomplishments. This fully rounded portrait challenges the reductive notions about beauty vs. brains that she, like so many other shimmering screen sirens, have been forced to endure. — Sandra Reid, NZIFF 2018

104 mins | Kogonada | USA | 2017 | M offensive language & drug references

In this charming debut a young librarian and an out-of-town visitor bond in Columbus, Indiana, via conversations about life, relationships and the city’s exceptional modern architecture.

“Allow writer and director Kogonada to take you on a bizarrely fascinating, visually stunning, and subtly sensual tour of Columbus, Indiana’s modernist architecture. Besides churches by Eero and Eliel Saarinen, libraries by I.M. Pei, and Will Miller’s enviable living room interior by Alexander Girard, the film centers on intersecting stories of familial responsibility.

Elisha Christian’s cinematography and Kogonada’s story reveal the deep relationship between architecture and people that many might miss.”— Rich Smith, The Stranger