Films — by Collection

Staff Picks: Bill Gosden

My list begins with eight I have seen – including one of my all-time favourite movies. The eight films that follow - seven of them from Cannes - are the ones I’m most excited about getting to see at NZIFF. Finally, Lost and Beautiful and All These Sleepless Nights have been among the year’s most particular, strange and unexpected cinematic pleasures. Both blur the lines between fiction and documentary. Both are about memory. I was mesmerised as I watched them and have not been able to shake them since.

Neon Bull

Boi neon

Gabriel Mascaro

The most erotically charged film of the year offers a wild, sensual look at life behind the scenes on a backcountry Brazilian rodeo circuit where the reality of human desire sidesteps gender stereotypes every time.

After the Storm

Umi yori mo mada fukaku

Kore-eda Hirokazu

A formerly successful novelist tries to reconnect with his ex-wife and young son in this affectionate, shrewdly observed drama of family life from Japan’s unassuming master, Kore-eda Hirokazu (Our Little Sister).

Elle

Paul Verhoeven

Genre subversive Paul Verhoeven, director of Basic Instinct and Black Book, teams up with the great Isabelle Huppert to craft this provocative, blackly comic thriller.

Paterson

Jim Jarmusch

Direct from Cannes, Jim Jarmusch’s beautifully calibrated ode to art and ordinariness stars Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver who writes poetry in his downtime and Golshifteh Farahani as his cupcake chef wife.