“Alice Rohrwacher’s new film is a beguiling fantasy-comedy of lost love: garrulous, uproarious and celebratory in her absolutely distinctive style. It’s a movie bustling and teeming with life, with characters fighting, singing, thieving and breaking the fourth wall to address us directly…

The setting is Riparbella in Tuscany in the 1980s, and Josh O’Connor is tremendous as Arthur, a dishevelled Englishman in a grubby white suit sporting six-day stubble and a perennial cigarette. He is a former archaeological scholar who has assumed the morose, slouching gait and coiled style of a gangster… Using a dowsing rod, Arthur can tell where invaluable Etruscan antiquities are buried and has teamed up with a bizarre homeless gang of grave-robbers to dig them out under cover of darkness.”

– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

IMDB: 7.3 / RT: 95%
Alice Rohrwacher, Italy / France / Switzerland / Germany
2023 Comedy / Drama / Romance / Adventure, M
131 mins

“Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make his sole foray into feature-film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind. The Talking Heads front man plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness.

As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyperrealistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings. In True Stories, Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show—all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience.”

– Criterion

IMDB: 7.2 / RT: 83%
David Byrne, USA
1986 Comedy / Music, PG
89 mins

“Something like the Gone with the Wind of Soviet Russia—a sensation both at home and abroad that pointed the way toward a post-Stalin thaw in filmic expression—this shattering tale of wartime resilience from Mikhail Kalatozov follows the saga of Veronika (the radiant Tatiana Samoilova) who endures heartache and uncertainty when her lover is lost on the front lines of World War II.

Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, the movie is a marvel of dazzling black-and-white cinematography, mixing passages of exhilarating handheld camerawork with striking deep-focus compositions worthy of Henri Cartier-Bresson.”

– Film Society Lincoln Centre

IMDB: 8.3 / RT: 96%
Mikhail Kalatazov, Soviet Union
1957 War / Drama / Romance, PG
95 mins

“Set in a small rural village a short drive from Tokyo, Evil Does Not Exist follows taciturn woodsman Takumi (a splendid debut by Hitoshi Omika) as he is inadvertently embroiled in plans to bring a high-end glamping retreat to the isolated idyll. Not only is the single father’s placid daily life of wood-chopping and child-rearing set to be upended, but the entire village’s delicate subsistence is threatened by this urban intrusion.

Explored in long, languorous shots, Harasawa seems to be a town outside of time, its residents living in gentle symbiosis with their environment. Beautifully lensed and deliberately paced, Evil Does Not Exist starts as a gentle stroll through a world of flawed heroes, complicit victims, and vacillating villains, before pitching towards a startling crescendo.”

– Adrian Hatwell, Whānau Mārama NZIFF 2024

IMDB: 7 / RT: 91%
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan
2023 Coming of Age / Drama, PG
106 mins

Cinemagician Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) returns to his native France to direct his own original screenplay, delving deep, with his own sweet brand of uninhibited delight, into the subconscious lives of two people in love.

“This one is set in the far reaches of inner space, namely the surreal, fanciful dream world of one shy guy... Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) moves back in with his French mom after the death of his father. Distraught and trying to find himself, he starts a job as a graphic designer that is more photocopying than creation. Overwhelmed by his ‘reality’ world, his dreams sharpen and intensify: soon, his soaring dream life intercedes with his everyday world. As the addled protagonist, García Bernal is an energized elfin delight, while Gainsbourg is manically marvelous as the girl who somehow connects with his silly sensibilities…”

– Duane Byrge, Hollywood Reporter

IMDB: 7.2 / RT: 81%
Michel Gondry, France / Italy
2006 Fantasy / Comedy / Drama, M
105 mins

In the picturesque small coastal town of Ushimado in Japan’s Okayama Prefecture, a Shinto shrine has become home to an ever-growing colony of stray cats. Enter Japanese documentarian Kazuhiro Soda, renowned for his self-imposed ‘10 Commandments of Observational Documentary,’ which include doing no prior research, having no pre-set themes or goals, and shooting long takes without scripts, narration, or superimposed titles—all while filming everything himself.

In his tenth documentary, Soda casts a calm and meditative eye over the shrine, its feline inhabitants, and their human neighbours. Set over the course of a year, he captures the lives of the cats as they adapt to the seasons, steal fish from local fishermen and interact with local residents, some of whom see the cats as a nuisance, while others view them as a potential tourist attraction for the town.

The result is a charming and thoughtful portrait of the delicate balance between cats and humans in an ever-evolving world set over the backdrop of a little explored region of Japan.

IMDB: 7.2
Kazuhiro Soda, Japan
2024 Documentary
119 mins

“A young priest travels from Denmark to Iceland in the late 19th century, where his mission is mocked by nature and by the corruptibility of his faith in Hlynur Pálmason’s striking elemental epic… In Godland, man’s ambitions, even in relation to matters as seemingly pure as faith and spirituality, are revealed to be fragile, small, and helpless against the omnipotent forces of an unforgiving natural world.

This knockout drama represents a considerable leap in maturity and ambition that merits commensurate attention.”

– David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

IMDB: 7.1 / RT: 92%
Hlynur Palmason, Iceland / Denmark / France / Sweden
2022 Drama / Period, M
143 mins

“The tumultuous, hotly contested 2012 French presidential election, pitting right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy against socialist Francois Hollande, provides the larger maelstrom against which a couple’s custody battle unfolds in French writer-director Justine Triet’s frantic farce Age of Panic.

The exes’ skill at sweeping lovers, friends, colleagues, babysitters and total strangers into their emotional vortex adds greatly to the absurdity wending its way through the streets, packed to bursting with masses of warring party enthusiasts. Placing a couple’s inability to mediate visiting rights within the context of extreme political polarization, this whirlwind comedy might prove particularly timely…”

– Ronnie Schieb, Variety

IMDB: 6.5 / RT: 100%
Justine Triet, France
2013 Comedy / Drama
102 mins

“The best of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films achieve a rare quality: a sublime everydayness, in which simple matters of life take on breathtaking, poetic shape.

His new film, Monster, initially seems to be a simple, issue-driven movie designed to yank at heartstrings. Sakura Ando, so memorable in Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, plays Saori, a dry cleaner in a small Japanese city whose son, tweenage Minato (Soya Kurokawa), is having some mental health difficulties. He’s quiet and moody at home, he’s acting out at school, and in one frightening instance he seems to have a propensity for self-harm.

The film is essentially concerned with how a secret, closely held by private fear and societal demand, can affect far more people than just the one keeping it… The film, at once warmly exuberant and carefully restrained, is… built with the compassion and inventiveness so signature to its creator.”

– Richard Lawson, Vanity

IMDB: 7 / RT: 97%
Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan
2023 Drama / Mystery / Thriller, M
127 mins

“An artful, surprising and thrillingly intelligent story about a few women trying to make a difference, forging bonds of solidarity in quiet defiance of the repressive, small-minded men in their rural village… 3 Faces may be modest and low-key on the surface, but its surprises are worth preserving, its insights casually profound. At the heart of the story is a mystery: What happened to Marziyeh (Marziyeh Rezaei), a teenage girl and aspiring actress from Iran’s Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan region, who has suddenly gone missing?

Much of this subtly, bracingly pleasurable movie is spent following Panahi and Jafari as they drop in on the villagers and make inquiries… They drive slowly around the hilly, rocky countryside, along winding mountain roads that are often too narrow to accommodate two cars passing each other in opposite directions – a situation that Panahi turns into an ingenious metaphor for a society mired in tradition for tradition's sake, unable to see past the end of its patriarchal nose.”

– Justin Chang, LA Times

IMDB: 7 / RT: 98%
Jafar Panahi, Iran
2018 Drama, M
100 mins

“The evocative debut feature of acclaimed Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay is a lyrical portrait of growing up poor and a hushed, haunting meditation on trauma.

Set in and around a squalid tenement block during a garbage strike in Glasgow in the mid-1970s, Ratcatcher centres on a solemn 12-year-old boy (William Eadie) tormented by his role in the accidental death of a friend by drowning. When the body is found, he says nothing of his involvement. Withdrawing from his family and into himself, he finds unexpected solace in the tender companionship of an outcast girl, abused by neighbourhood ruffians.

Writer-director Ramsay, a photographer and maker of award-winning shorts, crafts a sobering work of British urban realism that, despite its kitchen-sink trappings, possesses astonishing moments of pure visual poetry and a bold willingness to portray the inner life of its child protagonist. A brilliant and distinctive first feature.”

– The Cinematheque

IMDB: 7.5 / RT: 85%
Lynne Ramsey, UK
1999 Drama, M
93 mins