Life’s natural humour and the most profound thoughts and feelings captured in small, still moments and quiet exchanges are hallmarks of director Kore-eda Hirokazu, deftly shown in this story of a divorced father, scraping by as a private detective, who ends up stuck at his mother’s house along with his son and ex-wife as they sit out a typhoon.
Reimagined history with Vicki Krieps (The Phantom Thread) magnetic as the rebellious Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who must decide over the course of an imagined year how long she can bear life in a gilded cage. Carefully deployed anachronisms remind us these 18th Century lives are not so distant after all.
An Oscar-winning documentary as brilliant and blistering as writer James Baldwin, around whom it is built, this tells the story of race in America, from the nation’s beginning to now. It contains a wealth of sharply chosen archival and recent footage, and Samuel L. Jackson narrates.
A fascinating and beautifully shot backstage view of the unexpected challenges for both creators and performers when Czech dance stars Jiří and Otto Bubeníček are invited by the Royal New Zealand ballet to turn their short work based on the film The Piano into a full-length ballet.
On a WA wheat farm in 1968, Ed (Xavier Samuel) and Paddy (Clarence Ryan) are best mates despite steep social inequalities, but new laws change their world. Roger Mason’s dreamlike score complements visuals that pay homage to Terrence Malick.
Banned from making movies in his home country, acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon) responded by mounting cameras within a taxicab and driving around Tehran for a day picking up passengers, supposedly at random. The result is both a love-letter to cinema and a revealing look at the country and its people.
Meditative, dreamlike, fantastical and mysterious, slyly funny and philosophical, surreal and free of plot as we know it, this film shows us the interior life of a calmly dying man visited by visions of his past, and past lives, and spirits from the beyond.
