Based on a graphic novel, this dazzling sapphic fable is a whimsical ode to the power of storytelling.

A gently funny exploration of family, faith and the tensions between Thailand’s spiritual and modernist dimensions.

Across two decades, a filmmaker and her teenage son share the camera to document his transition from female to male in this honest and compassionate family archive.

Joint Cannes Best Actress winners Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shine in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s most unexpected journey: a life-affirming ode to friendship at the edge of mortality.

Set against Tokyo’s quiet winter glow, a reserved proofreader finds an unexpected bond with a physics teacher in a delicate drama exploring isolation, desire, and the risks of emotional connection.

Titane director Julia Ducournau’s third feature tackles the late 20th-century AIDS crisis in France through her distinctively vivid and brutal lens, a fiery film as visceral as it is profound.

A groundbreaking documentary reexamines a decades-old film about the first contact made with the Korubo tribe in Brazil and the “white man’s gaze”.

In the cold and conformist world of Japanese retail, convenience store clerk Sakai slowly awakens to the horrors of the system just as his orderly world of cheap consumerism begins to unravel with brutal consequences.

Forbidden feelings surface when a stranger enters the life of a devoted widow in Hong Kong's original art house masterpiece, fully restored and resurrected for a new generation of cinephiles.

A hand-drawn wonder brimming with imagination and warmth, Arco is the kind of film that reminds you of the joy of discovery.

Winning awards at Sundance and the Berlinale, this vibrant, vital portrait of lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer explores her radical life, work and legacy.

Raised in 1980s Russell by Merry, an artist whose life became local folklore, filmmaker Gwen Isaac returns to her Far North hometown to untangle fact from family legend and confront the inheritance she carries into her own motherhood.

A ferocious Javier Bardem performance headlines Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s tense and unsettling family filmmaking drama, about the fraught relationship between a controversial filmmaker and his estranged actress daughter.

Winning the Camera D’or for best debut at Cannes, this powerful drama wrestles with truth, justice and forgiveness during community-based reconciliation proceedings eighteen years after the horrors of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

Rediscovered and resurrected into a Sundance-premiering doc by Tamra Davis, this is a raw 90s capsule of life on tour with The Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, Rancid, The Amps and Bikini Kill.

The stylish, sexy global sensation of the mid-1980s has had an hour of material added that has underlined the film’s artistic qualities without losing any of the elements that originally seduced a generation 40 years ago. 

Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Paloma Schneideman’s coming-of-age debut launches our festival with a tender portrait of 14-year-old Sid, as she tentatively traverses insecurity, identity and desire during the summer of 2006.

An intricate nesting doll structure provides Spain’s most iconic auteur a lens with which to reflect on his own creative foibles, in frequently scathing terms, in this lacerating self-portrait.

A queer epic spanning 85 years of Spanish history, inspired by an unfinished work by poet Federico García Lorca and brought to the screen with breathtaking ambition — The Black Ball left Cannes audiences on their feet for 16 minutes, and it's easy to understand why.

Shohei Imamura's appetite for the ugly, the brutal, the painful, is matched this time by a fully justifying subject — the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath.

Part gothic fantasia, part historical reverie, The Blood Countess finds Ulrike Ottinger at her most audacious, crafting a spellbinding celebration of imagination and cinematic freedom.

A profoundly personal, revelatory portrait of a family in crisis told through the perspective of a young child as she struggles to understand her older brother’s increasingly unsettling behaviour.

A neon-soaked plunge into Sydney's seductive queer underworld, Body Blow is an unashamedly camp genre-bending odyssey, on the cusp of bursting off-screen and into the audience.

This impressive first feature documentary from photographer Pete Muller has much to say about fractured modern masculinity, without explicitly saying much at all.

Mining from hundreds of hours of footage, Buffet Infinity tracks a town's descent into chaos though local TV footage that slowly grows more unhinged in one of the most original films of the festival.

The Beanpole director's third feature — and first in English — confirms his extraordinary formal and sensory capabilities.

An intimate and warm story of a life entwined with a deep-rooted sense of belonging, and the inconvenience of aging in a world that continues to move at pace.

Palestinian-Syrian  director Abdallah Alkhatib’s Berlin Film Festival winner is an absurdist, inventive tapestry of tales from a besieged city, where the desires of its citizens become sparks of resistance against oblivion.

Bridging genres as it taps a real 70s scandal about a Benedictine monk’s memory-recording machine, this unique debut was a festival hit at Rotterdam, and is the year’s buzz title in eerie and stylish academia horror-noir.

Drunk actors, cursed props, clashing egos and a Macbeth that refuses to come together… a gloriously chaotic love letter to theatre and everyone mad enough to make it.

A tender love story set against the most desolate backdrop imaginable, Coward is an inspirational tale about choosing one's own fate, against all odds.

A collaboration between Arts Laureate Pietra Brettkelly and Nigerian filmmaking collective The Critics, this Berlinale hit is a tribute to the power of imagination, storytelling and creative ingenuity.

While getting ready for her daughter’s wedding in Paris, Gloria reflects on the last time her extended family gathered in ritual, in Guinea-Bissau, to commemorate the loss of her father.

After a seven year hiatus, Gus Van Sant is back behind the camera with this star-studded true-crime thriller, earning an 11-minute standing ovation after its premiere in Venice.

A striking panorama of national collective memory told entirely through archive material in this playful, immersive journey through Lebanon’s history and culture.

A vanished man, a lawless frontier, and a woman who refuses to look away: Valeska Grisebach turns the margins of Europe into an epic of startling richness.

Alexandre Koberidze’s whimsical love letter to his homeland of Georgia, the romance of football and the resilience of art made from nothing, solidifies his reputation as one of the globe’s most inventive arthouse voices.

A missing daughter. A forbidden love. A community the world has never seen on screen – until now.

Grant Gee was awarded Best Director at the Berlinale for this intense, fragmentary and inventive portrait of Bill Evans, in an interval of the American jazz great’s career when he grappled with grief and opioid addiction.

A shattering portrait of grief that refuses to play by the rules. This year’s winner of the prestigious Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, Everytime is Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner's most precise and emotionally devastating work yet.

Told through two siblings’ contrasting viewpoints, this moving drama considers the fallout of a bitter breakup as childhood certainty fades and familial bonds are put to the test.

Indie cinema’s long-time King of Cool Jim Jarmusch finds mystery and melancholy alike in this triptych of family short stories, each grappling with the weight of shared history.

A pristine masterpiece from Polish Academy Award winner Paweł Pawlikowski, reflecting on history and its shadows on the present, as well as on the undying bond of family ties.

The cover-up of a worker’s death in West Africa and the arrival of the site manager’s young wife are lit matches to a tinderbox in this strange, sinewy thriller of alienation and exploitation.

A ruthless workplace cover-up by a powerful family throws a nun into existential crisis in this mysterious, meditative drama, beautifully lensed in island greenery and candlelight.

A divisive talking point at Cannes even before it took its top award, Cristian Mungiu’s story of a conservative immigrant family under institutional suspicion is a barbed interrogation of liberal Nordic attitudes.

A shape-shifting movie, exploring loneliness and desire among truck drivers, Pierre Le Gall's acclaimed debut Flesh and Fuel may prove the most unexpectedly romantic film you will see this year.

As a young boy searches for answers, he is aided by an unlikely individual in this modest and affectionate take on an intergenerational friendship, combining droll humour and neorealism.

40 years ago, New Zealand’s most loved cartoon strip was adapted into our first-ever animated feature and the result broke the box office and captured the hearts of a far more innocent nation.

Upon discovering his fiancée’s affair, Nick makes a deal with a trickster fox in this sly and quirky ‘she'll be right’ Aussie comedy about the lengths (and shortcuts) we'll go for love.

A young Afghan artist records her tough, clandestine journey out of Iran on her smartphone and imagines herself anew in this partly animated tale, the Best Film winner at the world’s largest documentary festival in Amsterdam.

A stunning debut from Maxence Voiseux, ten years in the making, Gabin follows a young boy into adulthood, crafting a tender and deeply affecting portrait of life in rural France.

High priest of American buffoonery David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer) returns with his latest irresistibly silly slice of nonsense, a Wizard of Oz-aping Hollywood odyssey about a small-town girl with a very particular mission.

Indonesian genre maestro Joko Anwar returns with a wild mashup of martial arts, horror and comedy, set inside a corrupt prison system, where an evil entity is literally turning prisoners inside out.

When a picture-perfect middle-class family turns out to be dangerously twisted behind closed doors, Jan Komasa's darkly funny psychological thriller asks who really needs ‘fixing’... and how far is too far.

A bullied 14-year-old sends farewell letters to his classmates and vanishes, but when a girl from his school spots him wandering the streets at night, the two begin to build a fragile, secret world of their own.

Beyond the confines of a factory farm, a heroic hen finds a new lease on life in a crumbling restaurant's courtyard. Feathers are ruffled and jokes are cracked in this egg-cellent adventure.

ohn Wilson gives his inimitably magpie-ish style of documentary-making the big screen treatment in this endlessly digressive investigation into a hilariously mundane topic.

In a small Italian village dubbed the nation’s happiest, a newly arrived teacher learns the ominous truth about a teenage saint with the power to emotionally heal others through his hugs, in Paolo Strippoli’s unnerving supernatural chiller.

Provocative and horny as ever, New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Araki’s first film in over a decade is a riotous antidote to the Gen Z sex recession.

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s spellbinding 1960s-set fairytale follows a teenage runaway who becomes infatuated with an alluring movie star filming a local adaptation of The Snow Queen.

A surreal and heartfelt portrait of a young boy caught between his own burgeoning artistic identity and his father's rigid expectations of masculinity, told with visual flair and deep empathy. 

In this dark and absurd found footage mockumentary, Morris Fubbins ventures deep into the New Zealand bush in search of his missing father, who he believes was kidnapped by a mythical creature.

Ian de la Rosa’s queer romance asks how much of yourself can you afford to give when survival is already a struggle, in this Teddy Award winning feature direct from Berlin.

Bold, colourful and irreverent, Jim Queen is the elevated campy animation you don't want your mother to watch – but that all your gay friends will die to see.

A filmmaker balances her outspoken father and a boundary-pushing teenager while working on her latest screenplay that only she believes in, in Sophie Hyde's heartfelt, queer family drama.

Now in her nineties, legendary actress Kim Novak sits down to discuss her storied career in Hollywood and her most famous role in Hitchcock’s Vertigo in Alexandre O. Philippe’s intimate and illuminating documentary.

A feisty dinosaur and a gentle elephant creature navigate big feelings and discover friendship in a beautifully handcrafted, musical adventure for kids and their grown-ups.

A stunning directorial debut that was a big winner at Cannes – a coming of age story set at the foot of Mount Vesuvius that announces the arrival of a major new talent of French cinema.

The arrival of a free-spirited stray dog transforms a lonely woman's life, exposing deeply held wounds and a longing for connection that is buried beneath the surface of her stoic exterior.

This radical, haunting documentary debut from legendary Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel interrogates questions of truth, power and justice following the 2009 killing of indigenous leader Javier Chocobar.

Gerd Pohlmann offers a timely doc tribute to politician Jim Anderton as a long-haul fighter for Labour’s welfare-based values, against a wave of neoliberal deregulation that fundamentally changed New Zealand politics.

A love letter to the villages and towns of the wine- and grappa-producing Veneto region around Venice, this comedy-drama has humour, a heart and a melancholic streak.

Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee bring heart and realness to this wistful, unromantic comedy about the fragility of creative ambition and a bygone, bohemian New York lost to a consumerist era of gentrification and influencers.

An historically meticulous period piece examining the philosophy of art and existence, from one of German film’s greatest living master craftsmen.

Amélie loves exploring everything her world has to offer, guided by her friend, Nishio-san, but everything changes when, on her third birthday, an event changes the course of her life forever.

Rugby's first global superstar was also one of its most private — a shy, gentle giant caught between two worlds, whose story mirrors Aotearoa's own coming of age.

Using non-professional child actors, Japanese director Akio Fujimoto offers an unflinching portrayal of the Rohingya crisis and the struggles of refugees without a nation to call their own.

When a musician's career implodes, she retreats home, takes a job at a high school and quietly pieces herself back together. A sweetly low-key Cannes gem about mental healing, second chances and the unexpected joy of starting over.

The infamous World Cup quarterfinal between England and Argentina — won, defined, and immortalised by Diego Maradona… and by the hand of God.

An evocative, cathartic and groundbreaking documentary hybrid that focuses on a childhood torn apart by war, and what it takes to mend the emotional trauma that comes with it.

A classic French psychosexual thriller about infidelity is expertly reimagined within a modern Russia of citizens feeding an inhuman war machine, in director-in-exile Andrei Zvyagintsev’s taut, chilling Cannes winner.

In the summer of 2002, a 17-year old must navigate the earnest pressures of teenage life – identity, family, and friendship – while burdened with the profound weight of grief.

Directing duo THUNDERLIPS add another comedy horror classic to the Kiwi film canon in this tale of an accelerated extraterrestrial pregnancy, packed with some outrageously off-kilter visual effects!

The 1988 hit single Sweet Lovers made Fonotī Pati Umaga a star, but a devastating fall in 2005 reshaped his life and purpose.

Newly restored, Gen-X icon Gregg Araki’s remarkable, aggressively over-censored coming of age classic grapples with the enduring spectre of child sexual abuse, presenting one of the auteur’s bleakest but most essential visions.

With his trademark sensitivity, Koji Fukada turns a delicate story of friendship into a moving meditation on resilience, freedom, and the courage to embrace change.

Sixty thousand hippies on a Waihī farm – Aotearoa's own Woodstock, restored and now on the big screen.

Marcelo Martinessi crafts a sultry, political thriller where private longing intersects with authoritarian power.

A bombshell medical diagnosis prompts a young man to reflect on life’s precious gifts in Nino, Pauline Loques’ delicately-handled debut feature which builds into a touching drama carried on a soulful, understated central performance from Théodore Pellerin. 

When Kabul's only female camerawoman is given a career opportunity by the last man she expected, she finds herself falling for someone in a city that is about to fall itself. A funny, warm and deeply political romance from one of the most exciting voices in world cinema.

On a remote Faroese island in 1862, a young fisherman is enamoured by a mysterious stranger. When disaster strikes, desire, grief, and superstition collide in this haunting, queer folk horror.

The lines between predator and prey begin to blur as a solitary polar bear journeys through a rapidly changing world.

Danger, desire and an unlikely bond forged on the long roads of Mexico – David Pablos's award-winning thriller is drenched in heat and darkness, with tenderness at its core.

Dunedin’s Robert Sarkies ventured into weightier territory after Scarfies, reckoning with a defining tragedy of gun violence that rocked Aotearoa’s sense of security in his chilling but sensitively measured sophomore feature.

Interweaving fiction and reality, Phantom Beirut's striking restoration refreshes a landmark of Lebanese cinema, bringing its vivid, haunting portrait of 1980s Lebanon to a new generation.

Marco Bellocchio's six-episode TV series is a majestic cinematic work investigating the fall from grace of Italy’s most beloved TV host.

Marco Bellocchio's six-episode TV series is a majestic cinematic work investigating the fall from grace of Italy’s most beloved TV host.

Faraz Shariat’s sleek, suspenseful crime drama about a racially targeted prosecutor won an Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival, and takes the temperature of a Germany that has not shaken off its Nazi-era maladies.

Renowned American documentarian Ross McElwee confronts the limits of the movie camera as a tool of the heart as he revisits family footage after the death of his son, and reflects on their relationship to and through cinema.

A heartrending, austere portrait of a physically and spiritually scarred woman returning to her postwar hometown in the 1600s, posing as a male soldier.

Sci-fi strangeness meets working-class struggle in Cornish director Mark Jenkin’s haunting vision, meticulously crafted with analogue methods, of a fishing boat lost decades ago that claims a new crew from the present.

A medical student creates a sinister diet drug to fight her own eating disorders in this witty, gory body-horror shocker.

Romantic and sharp, this is a story of two souls bound by fate, a country on the brink of collapse, and a love story that refuses to give up on either.

Winning awards in Berlinale's Generation section, this sensitive debut feature honours the power of female teenage friendship in the aftermath of a sexual assault at a New Year’s Eve party.

Led by a man consumed with envy and the need to prove himself, a land dispute ends in massacre. Emin Alper's Silver Bear-winning thriller is a chilling study of how ordinary people find their way to extraordinary violence.

Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s exquisitely crafted samurai murder mystery finds a Lord and his captured prisoner work together to solve a series of shadowy murders inside the palace compound as civil war rages around them. An elegant and probing portrait of power, violence and honour, which world premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

South Korea’s brief but traumatic 2024 martial law declaration by disgraced former President Yoon Suk-yeol is the subject of this thrilling documentary, combining wild on-the-ground reportage with important historical context on Korea’s authoritarian-scarred past.

Kore-eda's nuanced exploration of how grief manifests is distinctly Japanese yet universally resonant, in this empathetic consideration of how technology may serve as a vehicle for healing.

The plant world lights up alongside Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Léa Seydoux in this playful, eccentric love letter to scientific experimentation and the beauty of noticing life in all things.

Guillermo Galoe’s feature adaptation of his own award-winning short film is a vivid depiction of the maligned, frequently misrepresented Roma shanty-towns on the fringes of Madrid.

In this film seeped in sunshine with rhythmic hints of fleeting childhood fantasy, Jaume Claret Muxart's debut is a sensitive, poetic and intuitive exploration of adolescent awakening.

Coming off a win for Best Film at the San Sebastián Film Festival, Sundays is a coming-of-age drama with the fragility of family and faith at its forefront.

When everyone he loves moves on, one man stays, and finds unexpected solace in the most unlikely of companions. Tender, majestic and deeply humane, it's a film about what we risk losing when the world moves too fast.

As a maven of pop-culture detritus, American director Jane Schoenbrun’s campground of twisted delights is a heady, horny headtrip of the highest order.

As Iceland's ancient glaciers start to vanish, one family's extensive archive becomes a portrait of a disappearing landscape through the passage of a century.

As irresistible as it is offbeat, Sarah Arnold's Europa Cinemas Label-winning debut pits farmers against hunters in a fiercely entertaining thriller bursting with humour, suspense and surprises.

Mystery swirls around Hein's return to his native island – is it really him? The villagers hold a trial, while director Kai Stänicke builds a Dogville-like set to stage a tense tale of empowerment.

Set against the backdrop of a Kiwi summer, Uncle is a tender and deeply human story about caregiving, connection and the people who show up when they're needed most.

An Auckland man endures a gauntlet of disastrous flatting situations in this silent horror- comedy film for the rental generation.

With the last words of a five-year-old girl, Kaouther Ben Hania's devastating documentary puts a single, unbearable human story at the heart of an ongoing catastrophe.

Inspiring a new generation of filmmakers

School bullying and adolescent identity crises are in the spotlight in Kohei Kadowaki’s extraordinary anime feature, We Are Aliens, direct from this year’s Cannes Director’s Fortnight.

The poetry in the everyday abounds in this novelistic drama set in modern Singapore, chronicling the daily lives of a father and son and their parallel romantic relationships.

Blending stunning wildlife footage with generational storytelling, Whispers in the Woods invites the audience to be immersed in an untouched world shrouded in mist, where nature reigns supreme.

The competitive world of musical whistling takes centre stage in this humorous documentary that showcases the weird and wonderful lives that have devoted themselves to the art.

In rediscovered 2001 camcorder footage, acclaimed Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari goes in search of a man he once met when they were prisoners, in a heartfelt tribute to the lost of Gaza, and the life that persists.

Actors Jude Law and Paul Dano star as Putin and his propagandist in an epic political thriller by Olivier Assayas, that shows how brutal repression in Russia is puppet-mastered behind a veil of manufactured illusion.

Three youths head into the punishing Australian desert to escape menacing outlaws on their trail in Warwick Thornton’s tough and uncompromising western-thriller.

When a confident high school student refuses to add her name to a petition against a sex offender, questions mount over why in this superb and psychologically complex drama exploring trauma responses to abuse in modern Korea.  

A celebrated Turkish theatre couple are suddenly targeted by the state and stripped of their livelihoods, leading to their marriage, their ideals and their sense of self being pushed to breaking point. Winner of the Golden Bear (the Berlin Film Festival's top prize), this is a riveting and urgently relevant political drama.

A truck in flames, a woman gone, and two sisters left to pay the price... Shot without a script using a real Bedouin family in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, this lyrical debut is a film about what women must sacrifice to survive.