There is a decidedly modern sensibility to her films as she playfully discovers comic and dramatic potential in the social mores of gender and class ...

Kabuki poetry and the reality of present-day life in Japan’s wintry far north are drawn together in this beautiful documentary from one of world cinema’s most original artists ...

Robert Bresson’s brilliantly pared-down and powerfully austere study of a compulsive pickpocket Michel (Martin Lassalle), who achieves an unlikely redemption through the love of a sympathetic woman ...

The first Kenyan film to be selected for Cannes, Rafiki was banned in its home country last year – not for its lesbian content per se, but for its tone of hopefulness ...

Dorothy Arzner brings a subversive feminist sensibility to this juicily entertaining backstage melodrama. A behind-the-footlights look at friendship, jealousy, and ambition ...

Beautifully composed and boasting the kind of sensitivity to light sources and color tonalities usually ascribed to top photographers, the film lovingly depicts the remote east-central region of Sudan as a quasi-magical place ...

Set in contemporary France in an unidentified city that sometimes seems to be Paris but probably isn't, L'Argent is a serenely composed film that tells a ruthless tale of greed, corruption and murder without once raising its voice ...

One of the great classics of German expressionist cinema. This screening will be accompanied by a new score arranged and played by Te-Whanganui-a-Tara musicians, Erika Grant, Isaac Smith, Rosie Langabeer and Neil Feather ...

Louis Malle brings together a mesmerizing performance by Jeanne Moreau, evocative cinematography by Henri Decaë, and a now legendary jazz score by Miles Davis ...

Inspired by the works of Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien... Exquisitely photographed, the film builds a slow-burning portrait of a community in which modernity and tradition coexist ...

Superbly directed and written,the story of a sheltered young woman who discovers she has an inexplicable power that materializes when she feels desire for a female student at her university ...

In 2013, the "enhanced and restored" cut of the 1983 original won rave reviews at the Wellington opening night of the Film Festival ...

Robert Siodmak's noir is as good as it gets.... populated by slang-slinging tough guys with tilted fedoras and dangled cigarettes and gorgeous dames who are not to be trusted ...

Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall star as young lovers in this Depression-era tale of bank-robbing Mississippi convicts portrayed as innocents all at sea in an uncaring world ...

Burt Lancaster plays another in his late 40s line of doomed losers (cf Siodmak's The Killers, 1946), in this powerful thriller where illicit passion, greed, robbery and murder collide ...

George Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, performed here on a fantastic set, with a piano so big that it fits the full orchestra inside it ...

4K restoration of Robert Altman's 1975 masterpiece. "The narrative, seemingly as chaotic as reality, is supremely subtle and complex in its interweaving of events, relationships, themes and moods" ...