Hollywood Avondale

Based on a graphic novel, this dazzling sapphic fable is a whimsical ode to the power of storytelling.

Titane director Julia Ducournau’s third feature tackles the late 20th-century AIDS crisis in France through her distinctively vivid and brutal lens, a fiery film as visceral as it is profound.

In the cold and conformist world of Japanese retail, convenience store clerk Sakai slowly awakens to the horrors of the system just as his orderly world of cheap consumerism begins to unravel with brutal consequences.

Rediscovered and resurrected into a Sundance-premiering doc by Tamra Davis, this is a raw 90s capsule of life on tour with The Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, Rancid, The Amps and Bikini Kill.

The stylish, sexy global sensation of the mid-1980s has had an hour of material added that has underlined the film’s artistic qualities without losing any of the elements that originally seduced a generation 40 years ago. 

Part gothic fantasia, part historical reverie, The Blood Countess finds Ulrike Ottinger at her most audacious, crafting a spellbinding celebration of imagination and cinematic freedom.

A neon-soaked plunge into Sydney's seductive queer underworld, Body Blow is an unashamedly camp genre-bending odyssey, on the cusp of bursting off-screen and into the audience.

Mining from hundreds of hours of footage, Buffet Infinity tracks a town's descent into chaos though local TV footage that slowly grows more unhinged in one of the most original films of the festival.

The Beanpole director's third feature — and first in English — confirms his extraordinary formal and sensory capabilities.

Palestinian-Syrian  director Abdallah Alkhatib’s Berlin Film Festival winner is an absurdist, inventive tapestry of tales from a besieged city, where the desires of its citizens become sparks of resistance against oblivion.

Kristen Stewart’s first feature, based on a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, packs great emotional power into its boldly original form. – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Bridging genres as it taps a real 70s scandal about a Benedictine monk’s memory-recording machine, this unique debut was a festival hit at Rotterdam, and is the year’s buzz title in eerie and stylish academia horror-noir.

A tender love story set against the most desolate backdrop imaginable, Coward is an inspirational tale about choosing one's own fate, against all odds.

Indie cinema’s long-time King of Cool Jim Jarmusch finds mystery and melancholy alike in this triptych of family short stories, each grappling with the weight of shared history.

A divisive talking point at Cannes even before it took its top award, Cristian Mungiu’s story of a conservative immigrant family under institutional suspicion is a barbed interrogation of liberal Nordic attitudes.

High priest of American buffoonery David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer) returns with his latest irresistibly silly slice of nonsense, a Wizard of Oz-aping Hollywood odyssey about a small-town girl with a very particular mission.

Indonesian genre maestro Joko Anwar returns with a wild mashup of martial arts, horror and comedy, set inside a corrupt prison system, where an evil entity is literally turning prisoners inside out.

When a picture-perfect middle-class family turns out to be dangerously twisted behind closed doors, Jan Komasa's darkly funny psychological thriller asks who really needs ‘fixing’... and how far is too far.

John Wilson gives his inimitably magpie-ish style of documentary-making the big screen treatment in this endlessly digressive investigation into a hilariously mundane topic.

In a small Italian village dubbed the nation’s happiest, a newly arrived teacher learns the ominous truth about a teenage saint with the power to emotionally heal others through his hugs, in Paolo Strippoli’s unnerving supernatural chiller.

Provocative and horny as ever, New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Araki’s first film in over a decade is a riotous antidote to the Gen Z sex recession.

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s spellbinding 1960s-set fairytale follows a teenage runaway who becomes infatuated with an alluring movie star filming a local adaptation of The Snow Queen.

In this dark and absurd found footage mockumentary, Morris Fubbins ventures deep into the New Zealand bush in search of his missing father, who he believes was kidnapped by a mythical creature.

Bold, colourful and irreverent, Jim Queen is the elevated campy animation you don't want your mother to watch – but that all your gay friends will die to see.

Rugby's first global superstar was also one of its most private — a shy, gentle giant caught between two worlds, whose story mirrors Aotearoa's own coming of age.

An actor, his partner and his new lover. Rami Malek delivers his most subtle performance in Ira Sachs' enveloping and sensuous chronicle set in the New York of the late 1980s.

Capturing the insanity behind the making of low budget creature features, Mockbuster is a unique, in-depth and hilarious glimpse into filmmaking at its most absurd, chaotic and unpredictable.

In the summer of 2002, a 17-year old must navigate the earnest pressures of teenage life – identity, family, and friendship – while burdened with the profound weight of grief.

On a remote Faroese island in 1862, a young fisherman is enamoured by a mysterious stranger. When disaster strikes, desire, grief, and superstition collide in this haunting, queer folk horror.

Danger, desire and an unlikely bond forged on the long roads of Mexico – David Pablos's award-winning thriller is drenched in heat and darkness, with tenderness at its core.

Dunedin’s Robert Sarkies ventured into weightier territory after Scarfies, reckoning with a defining tragedy of gun violence that rocked Aotearoa’s sense of security in his chilling but sensitively measured sophomore feature.

An ambitious fresco detailing the Palestinian revolt against the British Mandate, Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36 is a personal and powerful portrayal of a people's struggle through History. A film about the past that speaks to the present.

Marco Bellocchio's six-episode TV series is a majestic cinematic work investigating the fall from grace of Italy’s most beloved TV host.

Marco Bellocchio's six-episode TV series is a majestic cinematic work investigating the fall from grace of Italy’s most beloved TV host.

Sci-fi strangeness meets working-class struggle in Cornish director Mark Jenkin’s haunting vision, meticulously crafted with analogue methods, of a fishing boat lost decades ago that claims a new crew from the present.

A medical student creates a sinister diet drug to fight her own eating disorders in this witty, gory body-horror shocker.

Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s exquisitely crafted samurai murder mystery finds a Lord and his captured prisoner work together to solve a series of shadowy murders inside the palace compound as civil war rages around them. An elegant and probing portrait of power, violence and honour, which world premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

An Auckland man endures a gauntlet of disastrous flatting situations in this silent horror- comedy film for the rental generation.