Our writers share their thoughts on this year’s Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival selections.
This year’s festival features plenty of gems – check out what we’re watching, and keep checking this page for the latest mini-reviews, updated throughout the festival.
All 2023 mini-reviews:
Latest reviews | A – E | F – L | M – R | S – Z
Pacifiction
As French diplomat De Roller sifts through Tahiti, attending official lunches, navigating local disputes, and frequenting the island’s bars, it seems like his supply of charm will never run dry. That becomes less certain as Pacifiction progresses, and it gets much harder to pin down what the film is about. The sense that something is wrong is omnipresent. But what, exactly? Haunted by the specter of nuclear testing, it’s wholly unique, with a central set piece that’s one of the most visually remarkable things I’ve witnessed on a movie screen. TONY STAMP
Phantom
Pure firecracker of a spectacle, lacquered in glistening big-screen gloss, augmenting old-fashioned locked-room/whodunit approach and spycraft with contemporarily savage, propulsive, female-centred action, and well-timed dashes of comic relief. As far as styled-to-the-hilt historical pulp goes, a tremendously satisfying time. AARON YAP
Kim’s Video
At first, a somewhat guileless first-person video diary from co-director David Redmon remembering Yongman Kim’s legendary New York video rental libraries. Until it isn’t. [small spoilers start here] With the business a casualty of the digital age, Kim’s unique collection finds its way to Sicily (!?) on promises of protection, digitisation, and a second lease of life—turning Redmon’s hyper-personal documentary into a kind of How To With John Wilson on asking questions of Very Dangerous Men. A strange film, with the strangeness perhaps apt for the truths it holds within it. SARAH THOMSON
La Chimera
“What to do with the past?” asks director Alice Rohrwacher, in their third film following such a rumination—after 2014’s The Wonders and 2018’s Happy as Lazzaro. The question is inescapable in Rohrwacher’s 1980s central Italy, a country slowly emerging from the Years of Lead into something resembling the corruption of present day. Beautiful and broken, our band of ‘tombaroli’ (gravediggers) led by a magnetic Josh O’Connor, raid the countryside’s past to provide for their present—both as the many headed beast and the impossible liminal dream of the film’s title. Stunning. SARAH THOMSON
The Grab
The biggest Cree proverb in the world of bumper stickers and t-shirts (“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.”) tends to gloss over one thing: the super-mega-rich do realise they can’t eat money. And they’re quietly doing terrible things with said money to secure their future access to such natural resources. Incredible (and dangerous) investigative journalism from a documentary that should rightfully be taught in secondary schools. SARAH THOMSON
Kim’s Video
Initially grating doco becomes increasingly fascinating—I wasn’t sold on the super-personal approach taken to showcasing the wonderful world of esoteric 80s/90s/00s NYC VHS rental chain Kim’s Video, until it kinda, sorta clicked in the second and third acts. Its myopic tone might be the flipside to the filmmaker’s obsessive persistence in tracking down the 55,000 tape collection after the stores’ closure, the extremely subjective approach feeling more relevant as the film captures casual streetside encounters with Sicilian mafioso and makes an accomplice of sorts out of founder Yongman Kim. STEVE NEWALL
Bad Behaviour
“Once, we were whole, but now we’re not; now we suffer from a sickness we struggle to grasp or name. Yet this wound provides our new identity, at once the thing that gives us the right to speak and the only thing we have left to say when we do. Underwritten by its literalism, our trauma is the guarantor of what we believe we are owed.” – Carr, Danielle (2023, July 31). Tell Me Why It Hurts. New York Magazine.
Jennifer Connelly crackles when centered within the first act of writer/director/performer Alice Englert’s tale of traumas—as does outstanding deadpan satire from Ben Whishaw and Dasha Nekrasova, characters nudging the pens of their sometime peers Jesse Armstrong and Chris Morris. Sadly, such highs do not last the film’s length. SARAH THOMSON
Monster
A master of modern empathy, director Kore-eda (Shoplifters, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House) turns their eye to the multiple perspectives of a Rashomon style narrative. The resulting journey gradually reveals as much about its own truths as it does about the film’s viewers’ prejudices, so arrive knowing as few spoilers as you can. Featuring some of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final score work as well as a suite of perfect performances, this one comes highly recommended. SARAH THOMSON
The Settlers
Felipe Gálvez’s first feature is a slow-build western set in Chile in the early 1900s. Shot in the academy format, Chile’s landscapes are bleak and unforgiving. Beautiful in its wild nature, terrifying for those who must survive against all the odds, elements, and settlers often devoid of morality and humanity. Those seeking a Chilean version of a Spaghetti Western will be disappointed, because this is a glacially-paced tale that takes its sweet time setting up a reckoning for Chile’s colonial past. Mesmerising and plodding by turns. Bold yet boring. But the experience and mood stayed with me long after the end credits rolled. ADAM FRESCO
The Circus
Accompanied by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, playing Charlie Chaplin’s 1969 score, this screening of one of the silent comedian’s masterpieces was a sheer delight to behold at Auckland’s sumptuous Civic Theatre. Hard to dismiss auteur theory when you realise Chaplin didn’t just compose the music, play the lead, and direct—he wrote, produced, and edited it too! The crisp black and white photography by Roland Totheroh stands the test of time, as does Chaplin’s humanity, warmth, and skill, both in front of and behind the lens. A magical visual and musical trip to the circus. ADAM FRESCO
May December
Todd Haynes does Tennessee Williams; Julianne Moore does Mommie Dearest; Charles Melton does mumblecore Brando; and Natalie Portman’s mimicry/doubling chills more than Black Swan. Full of instantly quotable one-liners, May December turns the problematic appeal of tabloid scandal and airport novel true-crime into a camp unravelling of ageing, sexuality, and control—complete with heavy symbolism, capital-A ‘Acting’, and a masterful reuse of Michel Legrand’s bombastic piano score for Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between. SARAH THOMSON
Little Richard: I Am Everything
‘Little’ Richard Penniman, musician of phenomenal influence and voracious live performer for over seven decades, didn’t do things by halves. Lisa Cortés documentary not only snaps along at pace, charting a life spent hurtling between extremes of vice and virtue; aesthetic and ascetic; success and squalor in just over 100 minutes, but also introduces academics, scholars and ethnomusicologists that place Penniman as a catalytic agent of Black and Queer culture and question the prevailing whiteness of the ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ canon. A necessary watch. SARAH THOMSON
Good Boy
This weird Scando comedy has a great deal of the quirky humour you expect from weird Scando comedies before sharply shifting about halfway through into something much, much darker. I didn’t know the handbrake turn into horror was coming, which meant it had a lot of oomph when it hit, but even then I couldn’t have guessed how pitch black awful the ending would be. I didn’t love it as a whole, but Good Boy is one of the odder, more interesting films on the programme, for sure—and easily one of the darkest. DANIEL RUTLEDGE
How to Have Sex
The review headlines I saw before watching this certainly played up the nasty unpleasantness of its third act more than the feel-good hilarity of much of what happens earlier, which I guess makes sense due to just how impactful the darker stuff is. But this is a stunning debut film for a lot of reasons, not all of them terrifying and dreadful. It’s a wildly impressive depiction of the exhaustingly relentless boozing and sweaty partying of horny youngsters as both a hedonistic fantasy and a grim, depressingly realistic nightmare. DANIEL RUTLEDGE
Phantom
With a 133 minute runtime and a slow burn start, this sumptuously stylish noir thriller took a while to hit its stride—but once it did I had a lot of fun. Set in Japanese-occupied 1930s Korea, and following five suspected spies imprisoned in an isolated seaside hotel until they reveal their true allegiances, Phantom pairs tried and true genre tropes with a girl-bossy, queer romance angle which, while a little contrived, proves undeniably enjoyable in execution. KATIE PARKER
Sanctuary
Centered on a soon-to-be CEO locked in a power struggle with his long-time dominatrix as he attempts to end their relationship for the sake of his high-stakes new role, I went into Sanctuary expecting something much darker and more fraught than the fun, sexy screwball comedy it turned out to be. The kind of single location, two person set-piece that could easily befit a stage play, it is thanks to dynamic and deeply entertaining performances from Margeret Qualley and Christopher Abbott that Sanctuary shines as a piece of sharp, saucy and surprisingly charming cinema. KATIE PARKER
L’immensita
L’Immensita is gorgeous and stifling. Penélope Cruz shines as a mother on the verge of leaving her controlling marriage while trying to manage her children’s experiences of their difficult father. The relationship between her and her eldest child Adri anchors the film as both characters navigate big personal shifts in the patriarchal context of their home. While the big moment of liberation feels often out of reach in the scope of this story, the honesty with which mother and child see each other feels extraordinarily hopeful. RACHEL ASHBY
How to Have Sex
This might be the film of the festival for me. Molly Manning Walker approaches the heavy subject of consent (and the lack of) in a way I have genuinely never seen on screen before, and certainly never handled with such empathy and power. Mia McKenna Bruce is incredible as Tara: subtle expressions shift across her face in the space of seconds—revealing the turbulence of her internal world better than any dialogue could. That being said, the script is excellent and the ensemble cast are all standouts. It’s rare to see teenage-hood explored so accurately in the cinema. Tread gently going into this film—its realism makes it a full-on watch—but it’s also generous, gentle and at times very funny. Truly extraordinary storytelling. RACHEL ASHBY
Fremont
Captivatingly droll mundanity in the Kaurismäki/Jamursch key, following the immigrant experience of an Afghan refugee (Anaita Wali Zada, a refugee herself). Gentle, understated magic unearthed in tiny details, regional specificity; a Vashti Bunyan karaoke session that’s one of the most unexpectedly transporting moments of the year. AARON YAP
Late Night with the Devil
Parapsychology, psychics and demonic pacts run amok on a flailing late-night talk show one Halloween in 1977. A fiendishly entertaining riff on found-footage and occult shockers, with delightfully authentic analog feel and smartly calibrated tension and tongue-in-cheek humour. An absolute joy to see David Dastmalchian inhabit a lead role with such aplomb, though Ian Bliss comes close to stealing the show as a blowhard skeptic. AARON YAP
The Circus
There was a child behind me cracking up at every minute of this nearly 100-year-old film. There’s nothing I could add about this live cinema Charlie Chaplin experience that could say more about the power of cinema. LIAM MAGUREN
The Tuba Thieves
This is adventurous, rebellious, exciting filmmaking. There’s a clear intent to disrupt the expected narrative framework—a motive driven by filmmaker Alison O’Daniel’s focus on LA’s deaf culture—with eccentric editing, knee-jerk flashbacks, and many thematic threads weaving together at an unhurried pace. I still don’t know why these thieves stole all these tubas, but despite my inability to “get” all of it, this is the kind of audacious experience I won’t soon forget. LIAM MAGUREN
Dounia and the Princess of Aleppo
While limited by its cookie-cutter storytelling, Dounia and the Princess of Aleppo at least knows that kids love cookies and should be commended for making the tough subject of refugee life palatable for movie lovers of all ages. Despite a heavy reliance on Captain Planet-style magic seeds that solve every problem, its simple story remains sweet thanks to its big-hearted characters—especially Dounia’s kuia and koro who are Grandparents of the Year material. LIAM MAGUREN
Detour
Maximum sad-sack noir, complete with a sad sax soundtrack and awesome idioms like “my goose was cooked.” Barrels down a comedy-of-errors trajectory with utter seriousness which, while unintentionally hilarious, suits the film like a felt fedora. Reportedly, Ann Savage detested lead actor Tom Neal’s inappropriate on-set behaviour and boy does it show in her fired-up, antagonistic, applause-worthy performance. LIAM MAGUREN
May December
Big, big recommend on multiple fronts for Todd Haynes’ latest, about an actor researching her subject (decades earlier, the focus of tabloids and courts for her relationship with an underage boy). His great-looking film expertly balances multiple elements. On one hand, it’s a character-driven drama, with powerhouse performances from Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman going up against each other at full thesp force; on another, it features unexpected moments of comedy (early on, I laughed at three gags in the space of about a minute); and it embraces OTT melodrama to the point where you’d almost expect to hear Moore wail “no more wire hangers!” Plenty to enjoy here: “Just don’t touch the bait”. STEVE NEWALL
Mars Express
Fans of the comics anthology magazine Heavy Metal (or more specifically its French predecessor Métal hurlant), will be in familiar (if less gratuitous) territory here: organic computers, dead people resurrected as robots, and hundreds of sci-fi knick knacks all rendered in surprisingly expressive line drawings. Throws a new idea at the screen every other minute, and most of them stick. TONY STAMP
Late Night With The Devil
Maybe the most fun I’ve had at the fest this year, following a 1970s talk show broadcast that goes awry in ways I won’t spoil. It’s a great showcase for David Dastmalchian, and gets more nerve-wracking as it goes until a gonzo finale. Reminded me of the classic BBC pseudo-documentary Ghostwatch, but much weirder and wilder. TONY STAMP
Past Lives
The consequences of our lives’ choices and the price paid for growing up are shown in deeply moving fashion in Celine Song’s staggeringly assured debut. Never overplaying its hand, this is a compelling tale of heartbreak over lost potential (and decades and continents). Count me in as one of the many, many criers at the sold-out Civic—that’s ok, it’s a good thing. We’re not babies anymore. STEVE NEWALL
Mars Express
Very cool hard-boiled sci-fi police procedural that has enough confidence in its animated world to not cheapen it with gratuitous gore or rampant nudity (take note, Love, Death & Robots). Plays its rote characters, mystery, and robotic themes too lightly to make its atypical finale truly wallop but this universe comes packed with nifty little details (Robo-cats with customisable skins? Yes, please!) that keep the whole experience engaging. LIAM MAGUREN
There are plenty of other 2023 mini-reviews below:
Latest reviews | A – E | F – L | M – R | S – Z
