Crime

This year’s Palme d’Or winner launches our Festival with a profound and galvanising reflection on truth, facts and fiction, pivoting around another extraordinary central performance from Sandra Hüller—familiar to audiences for her work in Toni Erdmann (NZIFF 2016) and In the Aisles, among other terrific films.

A deep-dive into the audacious attempt by a trans-global criminal organisation to steal a billion dollars from the Bangladesh Central Bank, highlighting the vulnerability of even the world’s biggest corporations in cyberspace.

An appealingly twisted crime-thriller in which a poor rural family agree to a diabolical deal to shelter an Argentinian drug lord. This Brazilian debut feature delivers a wry, politically astute domestic psychodrama.

A low effort heist could mean freedom or ruination for two plebeian bank workers fed up with the daily grind in this dreamy, entertaining enigma from New Argentine Cinema director Rodrigo Moreno.

Noir doesn’t get much darker than this widely fêted B-movie classic in which a fatalistic cross-country road trip goes catastrophically awry. Screening in new 4K restoration.

A profoundly disturbing crime thriller about the so-called Spider Killer who terrorised sex workers in Iran and the lone journalist who strives for justice in a thoroughly misogynistic society.

Declining Kiwi backblocks set the stage for dirty deeds done with darkest humour as two brothers hatch a desperate plan to save their struggling butchery business by switching livestock for human lives.

A tense eco-thriller from US director Daniel Goldhaber questions just how far its young activist protagonists are willing to go in order to confront their nation’s complicity in the climate crisis.

Willem Dafoe plays a thief trapped alone inside a luxury Manhattan apartment with a hi-tech security system and an invaluable art collection in this ingenious and incredibly immersive survival thriller.

Direct from Cannes this visually rich costume drama rips the jaw-dropping true story of the abduction of a young Jewish boy by the Catholic church from the pages of history.

This stylish neo noir from upcoming Chinese director Wei Shujun finds a long-suffering detective questioning his methods and eventually his mind after a series of mysterious murders in a small rural town.

Anchored by a remarkable performance from Sydney Sweeney, Reality reconstructs the interrogation and arrest of American whistleblower Reality Winner in real-time, to disturbing, pulse-pounding effect.

Drawing on a tragic true event, this multi-awarded and mesmerising, stately courtroom drama upends notions of race, cultural heritage, class and female agency, and the mythologies and social prejudices underpinning received ideas.

A nineteen-year-old is sentenced to death for stabbing the man who tried to assault her—this footage, smuggled illegally out of Iran, follows the seven years she spent in prison and her family’s fight for justice.

Dreams, lack of means, and poodle schemes on the rez! Aided by their community, two young men push back against deprivation and systemic discrimination to forge their own paths.

In this haunting, grotesquely comedic thriller from Filipino art cinema hero Lav Diaz, violence, political unrest, and the dire state of a nation are the grand themes behind a tale of rival cops with a mutual death wish.