NZIFF July is still a while away, and programming is still underway, but we encourage you to start booking out your diary now for those winter weeks at the movies.

Heart of a Dog
An enchanted cinematic essay by legendary performance artist Laurie Anderson. Centring on Anderson's beloved rat terrier Lolabelle, who died in 2011, Heart of a Dog is a self-narrated punk meditation on love and death; exquisitely crafted and effortlessly profound.

High-Rise
In Ben Wheatley's ambitious, wildly disorienting adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel, tenants of a high-tech skyscraper slip into a literal class war. Starring Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, and Elisabeth Moss.

Midnight Special
Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver, Kirsten Dunst and newcomer Jaeden Lieberher star in this dazzling, genre-defying sci-fi/chase movie from the director of Mud and Take Shelter.

Nuts!
Loaded with wry humour and surprising rug-pulls, Penny Lane’s supremely strange biography of 1920s impotence-cure mogul J.R. Brinkley is the documentary oddity every festival watch-list needs at least one of.

Tanna
Australian documentary filmmakers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler collaborated with villagers in the Vanuatu highlands who’d never seen a movie to create this ravishing cinematic expression of traditional culture and forbidden love.

The full NZIFF programme will be available from Tuesday 21 June for Auckland, and Friday 24 June for Wellington. NZIFF starts in Auckland on 14 July and in Wellington from 22 July in 2016.