Anxious architecture graduate Millie is about to fly from Wellington to New York for a prestigious internship but has a panic attack before departure and gets off the plane. Unable to afford another flight, she hides out in her hometown, posting fake Big Apple updates to Instagram while trying to raise the money for a replacement ticket.
Mexican director, Guillermo Del Toro, does not follow Hollywood's traditional approach to nature's abnormalites. Fear is suggested, rather than flung at the screen.
Scientists step in to track a
monster - with a good line in
camouflage - that is picking off
kids for lunch.
It’s aided by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s highly evocative score, which locates it in time and space as well as providing a dramatic undercurrent to the action.
New York, 1971. Eugene Smith, once a highly sought-after photographer, now lives as a recluse. But then an unexpected trip to the Japanese city of Minamata, where an unscrupulous corporation has been releasing untreated wastewater into the bay, brings new meaning to his life.
The idea of a younger family member gradually forming a connection with an older one is a constant in cinema but it has a purity here that is shorn of unnecessary sentiment.
David, a seven-year-old Korean-American boy, gets his life turned upside down when his father decides to move their family to rural Arkansas and start a farm in the mid-1980s, in this charming and unexpected take on the American Dream.
Few artists are ever willing to let their audiences get this close to their unrevised selves.
Three young men bond together to escape volatile families in their Rust Belt hometown. As they face adult responsibilities, unexpected revelations threaten their decade-long friendship.
A beautifully observed portrait of a couple in crisis.
A disillusioned office clerk who lives in a dysfunctional relationship with her slovenly partner is surprised to find herself on the cusp of a none-too-secret affair.
Flashy future technology and architecture has been cleverly interwoven with the familiar, even the old-fashioned, to create a world which we can believe is not too far away from our own.
Sci-fi thriller about cops who predict murder before it happens with the use of psychics.
What marks it out is Sridharan's mastery of an incredibly difficult acting task.
Attempting to surpass his father's legacy, a reclusive neuroscientist becomes entangled in his own experiment, pitting ten fragments of his consciousness against each other.
Instead of dialogue, the insects speak in kazoo and beeps, making this easy to follow for even the youngest of audiences but there's no dumbing down in terms of storytelling.
With winter approaching in the valley, reserves for the cold season are of utmost importance. When a small ladybird gets trapped inside a shipment heading for the Caribbean, however, their father must set off on a heroic overseas journey to rescue his beloved offspring.
With a moody jazz score full of languorous clarinets, this is a long cool drink before the unseen war.
New York in the 1980s. Seventeen-year-old David, who is tentatively beginning to express his homosexuality in the East Village gay scene, gradually starts to question the strict rules of his Jewish community.
With impressive cinematography at every stage, the film hinges on two magnificent slow, circular sequences, one in the middle and one at the end, each of which resets the narrative.
Divided into two chapters, Miracol follows a young novice as she sneaks out of an isolated convent to attend to an urgent matter. The second part deals with a determined police detective trying to understand what happened to her.
Has an interesting script by Murray Watts, a wonderful sense of place and an imaginative use of flashbacks, where a painterly technique emulates memory.
Makes an important contribution to the conversation around sexual violence.
The story of the young woman caught in the middle when her rapist was released due to police failings in the case which led to the creation of Miranda rights.
The arc of the film isn't particularly defined, but this is a positive in some ways as the filmmakers aren't trying to 'force' any sort of triumph in adversity narrative.
Documentary about the lives of a group of acid attack survivors.
As is true of many a tale, not all motivations are on the table right away, and finding rescue and respite with strangers can only last a mere while.
On a weekend trip to the countryside, Laura miraculously survives a car crash. Physically unhurt but deeply shaken, she is taken in by a local woman who witnessed the accident and now cares for Laura with motherly devotion. When her husband and adult son also give up their initial resistance to Laura's presence, the four of them slowly build up some family-like routine. But soon they can no longer ignore their past...
I was won over by the whole approach of this confident sophomore feature pretty early on, from the witty, frank but also very tender script to the great casting and performances.
1993: after being caught having sex with the prom queen, a girl is forced into a gay conversion therapy center.
Once again, Guiraudie proves himself the master of setting up a mystery by the means of perfect script economy that functions strictly on “need to know” basis.
A stranger’s appearance exposes the weird behaviour and the secret desires of a village's residents.
In a world where we are, not without reason, encouraged to "believe victims" this film acts as a cautionary tale that while sympathy is natural and good, at least a little light scepticism can go a long way.
A woman's Holocaust memoir takes the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher-turned-detective reveals her story as an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.
Ly wanted the people who have lived in these schemes to have the chance to tell their own stories, which gives Les Misérables an unerring sense of authenticity.
A man joins an anti-crime brigade and rapidly discovers the tensions between the various neighbourhood groups.
Against this troubling backdrop, the killer seems less a disruptive influence and more an expression of widespread despair.
Following the death of his wife, Santoshi has sunk into depression and debt, much to the consternation of his daughter, high school student Kaede. To ease their debt, Santoshi tells Kaede he will track down a serial killer and collect the reward, but Santoshi disappears and Kaede must find out what happened to him.
Layering together past and present, Van Tassel weaves a rich tapestry which illustrates the multiple elements of complicity in Mary Ellen’s disappearance.
The case of Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, a Native American woman who disappeared in 2020, exposing how hundreds of indigenous women continue to go missing in the US, perpetuating trans-generational trauma on Indian reservations.
To their credit, there’s no direct interrogation or intervention from Molomot and Bemiss at any point.
Just 70 miles north of the Mexican-US border is a land haunted by ghosts. Brooks County, Texas is a barren landscape designed as a deterrent to illegal crossings, but people continue to attempt to cross, and many die trying.
Abrams combines kinetic action sequences with internal logic-fuelled storytelling to give us an impossible mission head, shoulders and a rabbit's foot above the previous two instalments.
The Ethan Hunt franchise gets personal, while chasing a psychopathic arms dealer half way round the globe.
Naranjo never lets the tension slip and finds ways to make the situation worse for his hapless heroine while still keeping the narrative firmly in the realms of fact not fantasy.
An aspiring beauty queen finds herself mixed up with a drug lord.
News and features
News & Features
Going ape
Antonin Niclass on character creation, empathy and animated short Into The Forest
Freeform
Will Niava on grief, new immigrant experiences and Jazz Infernal
In silence
Emir Kumova on child marriage in Türkiye, moral challenges and making The Witness
