For Aucklanders it’s all over, but that doesn’t rule out awesome cinema experiences for festival-goers around the country. After clocking up hundreds of cinema visits, our writers have pooled their picks of the fest and we’ve used the wonderful tool of maths to rank them in a top ten to aid your ticket purchasing or future movie watching once these head into general release or home video… Since the countdown is a time-honoured tradition, we’re gonna do this backwards from number ten, with Flicks writers chiming in with a mini review of each film (check them all out here).
Lovely, zen-like super-minimalism from the people behind last year’s awesome Leviathan. 11 cable car rides in real time, to and from a Nepalese temple. A study of minutae, reminded me of 2010’s Le quattro volte in its blissed-out, subtly funny mundanity. The kind of film where a chicken’s head popping into the frame unexpectedly will cause a jolt of excitement.
AARON YAP
This gorgeous Brazilian animated coming-of-age wonder dances in the dream-logic that Walt Disney exemplified in Fantasia and Dumbo’s classic pink elephant sequence. The world – in the boy’s eyes – is exaggerated and colour-soaked, as if his wondrous curiosity is our own. We also share in his horror as contemporary urban ugliness takes hideous forms. I would have declared The Boy and the World flawless had it not been for one ostentatious moment that uses real footage to fling us into ‘Yeah, we get it’ territory.
LIAM MAGUREN
My first take-a-punt film of the festival delivered in spades, with canine performances more than deserving of the Palm Dog award the film scored at Cannes (alongside the more prestigious Prize Un Certain Regard). This tale of a young girl forcibly separated from her four-legged friend proved eminently watchable from start to finish, except for those who couldn’t handle the (blissfully short, clearly staged) spot of animal cruelty in the middle and in slinking out of the cinema missed out on a thrilling doggie rebellion. Don’t be put off, it’s crucial to what follows, and what follows is pretty awesome.
STEVE NEWALL
Housebound has come tearing out of Braindead’s womb to deliver a slam-dunk New Zealand horror-comedy film (although the director told us not to call it that). Combining idiosyncratic Kiwi references (nothing like hearing 2000 people snort at a “wet and forget” infomercial) with a genre that has global late night popcorn appeal, Housebound feels like a film that is about to explode all over everyone’s living room walls. I left the cinema with sore sides from laughing and sore ears from the lady next to me screaming. It’s bloody. It’s hilarious. It’s bloody hilarious.
ALEX CASEY
Best laughs I’ve had in a cinema in ages. Sion Sono’s valentine to the movies packs celluloid fetishism, toothpaste commercials, Bruce Lee worship, yakuza film crews and gallons of arterial spray into a delightfully goofy, wildly entertaining two hours that’ll leave you equally exasperated and elated. Go see it.
AARON YAP
This Iranian mesmeriser not only requires your patience, it deserves it as well. All done in one unbroken 134-minute shot, Fish & Cat gathers numerous subplots that happen at the same time, placed in one location and tied to a horrifying situation (based on a real-life case). Though the slow pace can dip into tedium when cemented on a character simply walking for ages, it’s essential to the astonishing narrative trick that does not treat time as a flat circle – rather, it’s a pile of conjoined ampersands. A mind-expanding experience.
LIAM MAGUREN
Exhibiting exactly the sort of off-kilter sensibility you’d expect from Florian Habicht and partnering it with more of the same in the form of Jarvis Cocker and his Pulp cohorts, this onscreen marriage of simpatico souls had me grinning from its opening minutes and still beaming long after the film ended. Effortlessly seguing between concert footage, chats with the band and Sheffield’s citizens, and the odd staged sequence, Habicht’s film does what so many Pulp songs do themselves – capture an ordinary life through a different lens, finding something special among the mundanity. One of those great music films that only come around now and then, this is an instant classic. And yeah, I saw it twice – high praise when time’s of the essence during the festival.
STEVE NEWALL
Dreamy, tremendously creepy and immaculately lensed, David Robert Mitchell’s film might be the hidden gem of the fest. Disarmingly simple premise mixes suburban teenage ennui and a nebulous internal logic that informs the best cinematic nightmares. You’ll see flashes of Carpenter/Lynch/DePalma, and its synth/industrial-strong score took me back to Michael Laughlin’s Dead Kids, but It Follows is its own sublimely executed, sharp-eyed thing, and I can’t wait to see again.
AARON YAP
Richard Linklater charts the trajectory of one boy’s life over the course of 12 years, and the results are, even with such an ambitious premise, more than the sum of their parts. Wisely opting to mostly avoid any milestones in Mason’s life, the film hones in on moments that are eminently relatable, making the film a mirror on viewer’s lives as it ambles to its finish. A few too many evil stepdad clichés can’t stop this from being an incredible piece of cinema that will be talked about for decades to come.
TONY STAMP
Staggeringly beautiful from the visage of its lead, who’s never looked more alluring, to the rugged Scottish Highlands and coastline, some strange trans-dimensional seduction/reprocessing zone and perplexing cosmic effects sequences, the visual component of the brilliant Under the Skin alone makes it worth seeing. It burrows in further, as the title suggests, thanks to director Jonathan Glazer’s arsenal of offputting audio, frequent improvisation by non-actors, and measured pacing. A top-notch sci-fi art flick that will take some topping for me in the fest this year.
STEVE NEWALL
