Comedy

A genial café owner is puzzled when he receives a message on his TV from himself two minutes into the future. Director Junta Yamaguchi takes that simple concept, ups the ante and ends up with an instant classic.

From Spanish creator Amalia Ulman, the darkly comedic El Planeta explores the relationship between a mother and daughter pair on the edge of financial ruin.

Jessica Chastain shines in this biopic centred on the trials, tribulations and televangelical legacy of the larger-than-life Tammy Faye Bakker.

Wes Anderson brings his signature style to this delightful comedic anthology, paying homage to French New Wave and The New Yorker’s golden age journalists of the 50s and 60s.

Debut director Panah Panahi’s stunning Iranian road movie wowed critics at Cannes with its rich emotional nuance and sly political critique.

An archaeologist reluctantly agrees to test-run a humanoid love robot programmed to fulfil her desires in this poignant comedy starring Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens.

Melancholic, atmospheric and heartfelt, Ben Sharrock’s feature exploring immigrants awaiting asylum eschews conventional approaches to stories of the modern refugee crisis to create something profound and surprising.

Two amateur criminals discover a monstrous fly in the trunk of a stolen car. Their plan? Train the fly and make a fortune in this joyously absurd buddy-fly bromance.

After missing her flight to a prestigious internship, an anxiety-ridden architecture grad fakes being in New York while lying low in her home town scrounging for another ticket.

The Mother Schmuckers are two nutzoid Belgium brothers who accidentally lose January Jack, their mum’s prized pooch in this gross-out anti-comedy.

Based on the 2014 memoir, My Salinger Year is The Devil Wears Prada for the literary world, a young woman’s coming of age as she balances her writing ambitions with her new job at a major New York City literary agency.

A young cartoonist is forced to grow up faster than she’d like when an unplanned pregnancy threatens to upset her party-heavy lifestyle in this subversive Norwegian comedy.

A refreshingly original, genre-hopping exploration of where our developing technologies might take us, that fuses offbeat humour anda lo-fi meets hi-tech vision of the world with moments of wry Herzogian philosophy.

Recently widowed and grieving, army officer Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) proves vengeance is a dish best served bold in this dark — and comic — take on the revenge thriller from Oscar-winning Dane, Anders Thomas Jensen.

A tonic for the nerves, Rosa’s Wedding is an uplifting and spirited ode to loving thyself, drenched in the dreamy seaside sunshine of the Costa del Azahar.

Dizzying and captivating, Emma Seligman’s feature-length debut stars Rachel Sennott as a young woman who cannot escape her sugar daddy, her ex-girlfriend or her own lies at a family wake.

Bill Gosden championed countless New Zealand films during his tenure as Festival Director, and not all the obvious ones, either. Maybe it was its lust for Americana, the protagonist’s escape from southern parochialism (Bill grew up in Dunedin), or Gillian Ashurst’s darkly cartoonish take on Goodbye Pork Pie’s road movie legacy, that made him regard Snakeskin with such fondness.

Fascinated, he wrote, “I wouldn’t be surprised if, played backwards, it turns out to contain the solutions to every unsolved murder in the South Island”.

An absurdist chase across rural Kazakhstan, this offbeat gangster comedy follows a movie-obsessed ex-con with mobsters on his tail and a girl on his arm as he strives to realise his dream: building a cinema in the mountains.

“Y'all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It's kind of long but full of suspense.” — @_zolarmoon