Something you probably can't watch tonight: Tuesday 17 December

This is a bit of an intel­lec­tu­al (and stat­ist­ic­al) exer­cise, so please indulge me.

Every year I write a ‘year in review’ or ‘top ten’ piece and every year I read in the inter­na­tion­al media about the great films that I haven’t seen. For one reas­on or anoth­er – risk aver­sion, hop­ing for fest­iv­al place­ment, NZ being too darn small – we con­tin­ue to miss out on a lot of stuff and the stream­ing ser­vices aren’t really filling the gap.

Here’s a list of films that I have read about in the “Best of” lists from the likes of New York Times and The Guardian that either only played NZIFF and don’t look like com­ing back, or haven’t shown up at all. I’ve got a pretty com­pre­hens­ive guide to for­ward releases here in Aotearoa (cour­tesy of Hadyn at Readings) so if it appears in that sched­ule, I assume it is com­ing and haven’t lis­ted it.

(Also, dif­fer­ent pub­lic­a­tions have dif­fer­ent formats. New York Times is top ten by two crit­ics, Esquire is a top 60. I say we cast the net wide.)

It’s a big list and took me a lot longer than I thought to pre­pare. What have we learnt? One thing, is that you shouldn’t sleep on the pro­gramme at the New Zealand International Film Festival. Every year they pro­gramme films that haven’t yet built repu­ta­tions but go on to become pretty big deals – 2024 was no different.

NZIFF Only

Good One (Washington Post, NY Times, Indiewire, Slate, Esquire, The Guardian) – Debut drama from India Donaldson (daugh­ter of Roger) about a teen­ager tramp­ing with her unhappy father

Hollywoodgate (Washington Post, The Guardian) – doc­u­ment­ary about the American pul­lout from Afghanistan and what became of the US$7b of hard­ware that was left behind

Cuckoo (Washington Post) – “riot­ous” and “off­beat” sci-fi horror

No Other Land (Vulture, Indiewire, New Yorker, RogerEbert.com, Slate, Esquire, The Guardian) – doc­u­ment­ary about the Israeli occu­pa­tion of the West Bank and the “attempts to extin­guish the West Bank vil­lage of Masafer Yatta” made by a col­lect­ive of Israeli and Palestinian film­makers has picked up numer­ous awards but appears to be undis­trib­ut­able commercially

Green Border (Vulture, NY Times, Time, RogerEbert.com, Esquire, The Guardian) –”Epic” about the mis­treat­ment of refugees shuttled back and forth between Belarus and Poland

Sleep (Vulture, The Guardian) – thrill­er about a young wife whose hus­band starts say­ing dis­turb­ing things in his sleep

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (Vulture, Esquire) – posthum­ous gift of a final con­cert from the great Japanese composer

Pictures of Ghosts (Vulture, NY Times, Esquire) – doc­u­ment­ary love let­ter to his home town of Recife by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau)

Eno (NY Times, Slate) – ground­break­ing doc­u­ment­ary about the musi­cian, pro­du­cer and philo­soph­er that, thanks to digit­al tech­no­logy, is a dif­fer­ent film every time it screens

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (NY Times, The Guardian) – “furi­ous, bril­liant” doc­u­ment­ary inspired by the CIA-backed assas­sin­a­tion of President Patrice Lumumba of Democratic Republic of Congo in 1960

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Indiewire, New Yorker, Time, Slate) – yet anoth­er ‘shot in secret in Iran’ film, this is described as “an anguished cry from the heart of Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian film­maker who recently fled his home coun­try for Europe after receiv­ing an eight-year pris­on sen­tence from the Islamic Republic”

Black Box Diaries (Slate, The Guardian) – doc­u­ment­ary about a Japanese journ­al­ist invest­ig­at­ing her own sexu­al assault and reveal­ing some pro­found and uncom­fort­able truths about Japanese judi­cial and social norms

The Settlers (Esquire, The Guardian) – Brutal revi­sion­ist Western reveal­ing the truth behind Chile’s colo­ni­al foundations

Tótem (Esquire) – “Taking place over the course of a single day, Tótem is the story of a fam­ily nav­ig­at­ing immense grief told from the per­spect­ive of seven-year-old Sol. While the mat­ri­archs fret and fight over pre­par­a­tions for that evening’s party, Sol simply wants to see her fath­er, Tona.”

Omen aka Augure (The Guardian) – Belgian-Congolese man takes his wife home to meet the fam­ily in this “com­plex, risky and bold” drama

The Delinquents (The Guardian) – “Argentinian dir­ect­or Rodrigo Moreno’s beguil­ingly sur­real slow-motion heist movie makes for a mean­der­ingly long crime caper”

Samsara (The Guardian) – teen­age monks accom­pany a soul in trans­it towards reincarnation

Crossing (The Guardian) – “… a Georgian woman and her young sidekick head to Istanbul in search of her estranged trans niece.”

No Shows

Piece by Piece (Washington Post) – innov­at­ive doc­u­ment­ary about Pharrell Williams told with Lego

Look Into My Eyes (Washington Post) – doc­u­ment­ary about New York psychics

Between the Temples (Washington Post, Vulture, Indiewire, New Yorker, Esquire) – Jason Schwartzman as a can­tor who has a crisis of faith

National Anthem (Washington Post) – Gentle coming-of-age story about a young labour­er who goes to work at a ranch pop­u­lated by gender-fluid rodeo riders

June Zero (Washington Post) – doc­u­ment­ary by Jake Patrow about the mor­al ques­tions behind the exe­cu­tion of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1960.

Flipside (Washington Post) – doc­u­ment­ary about the New Jersey record store that dir­ect­or Chris Wilcha worked in as a teen and the quix­ot­ic attempts to save it

Backspot (Washington Post) – drama set in the world of com­pet­it­ive cheer­lead­ing star­ing Evan Rachel Wood

The Sixth (Washington Post) – “chilling” doc­u­ment­ary about the January 6 Washington DC insurrection

They Shot the Piano Player (Washington Post) – anim­ated doc­u­ment­ary about a tal­en­ted Bossa nova pian­ist who dis­ap­pears mys­ter­i­ously while on tour in Argentina in 1976

Sometimes I Think About Dying (Washington Post) – Daisy Ridley stars in an “uncon­ven­tion­al love story”

Girls Will Be Girls (Vulture) – coming-of-age story set in an élite Indian girls board­ing school

Universal Language (Vulture) – “goofy” cul­tur­al blend about a young man return­ing home to an ima­gin­ary Winnipeg where every­one speaks Farsi and his moth­er thinks someone else is her son

Nickel Boys (Vulture, NY Times, Indiewire, New Yorker, The Atlantic, RogerEbert.com, Esquire) – adapt­a­tion of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning nov­el by RaMell Ross (Hale County, This Morning, This Evening), I can’t ima­gine this not arriv­ing at some point next year as it is pick­ing up crit­ics’ awards left, right and centre

Close Your Eyes (Vulture, Indiewire, Slate, The Guardian) – the first film in over thirty years from the Spanish legend Victor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive)

Red Rooms (Vulture, Esquire) – a psy­cho­lo­gic­al thrill­er about a woman who becomes obsessed with the tri­al of a seri­al killer

Union (Vulture, NY Times, Esquire) – doc­u­ment­ary about the form­a­tion of the first trade uni­on of Amazon workers

Rumours (Vulture) – comedy-horror dir­ec­ted by Canadian Guy Maddin about the G7 lead­ers get­ting lost in the woods

Matt and Mara (Vulture) – low budget romantic drama about a writ­ing pro­fess­or in an unhappy mar­riage who rekindles a rela­tion­ship with an author she once worked with 

The Killer (Vulture) – after 35 years, John Woo finally (sort of) deliv­ers an American remake of his smash hit thriller

Alam (Vulture) – “mar­vel­lous, mes­mer­ising” coming-of-age film about a young Palestinian girl who lives and goes to school in Israel

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Vulture, New Yorker, The Guardian) – “unclas­si­fi­able dead­pan com­edy” about a New York woman who just can’t seem to be taken ser­i­ously by any­one in her life

In Flames (Vulture) – Pakistan’s sub­mis­sion for the 2024 International Oscar, about a woman whose life falls apart after the death of her father

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Vulture, Esquire, The Guardian) – “After a Vietnamese woman dies in a car crash in Saigon, her brother-in-law and her young son trans­port her body back to the former’s homet­own in rur­al Vietnam, where they plan to give her a funeral.”

Here (NY Times, Esquire) – not the Zemeckis/Hanks/Wright reunion, a chance meet­ing in a park between a bot­an­ist and a con­struc­tion work­er res­ults in a medi­ation on imper­man­ence and transcendence

The Breaking Ice (Indiewire) – “sweet and shim­mer­ingly beau­ti­ful” film about a love tri­angle that devel­ops between young people in the freez­ing city of Yanji

Oh, Canada (New Yorker) – Richard Gere reunites with dir­ect­or Paul Schrader for the first time since American Gigolo (1980) for a film about age­ing and mortality

It’s Not Me (New Yorker, Esquire) – auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al new film from Leos Carax, the vis­ion­ary behind Holy Motors

The Featherweight (New Yorker) – mock­u­ment­ary set in 1964 fol­low­ing a retired box­er on the comeback trail

Winner (New Yorker) – Susanna Fogel’s comedy-drama about the whis­tleblower Reality Winner

Rap World (Esquire) – “In 2009, four friends attempt to record a rap album over the course of one event­ful night”

The Front Room (Esquire) – a night­mare mother-in-law movie from Max and Sam Eggers (broth­ers of Nosferatu’s Robert Eggers)

The Fire Inside (Esquire) – from a script by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, the film is the true story of the first American woman to win an Olympic golds medal in boxing

Exhibiting Forgiveness (Esquire, The Guardian) – André Holland stars as a suc­cess­ful paint­er strug­gling to over­come the trauma of his childhood

Family Portrait (Esquire) – Debut fea­ture from Lucy Kerry about a dys­func­tion­al Texan fam­ily reunion

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (The Guardian*) – doc­u­ment­ary by Mark Cousins about the paint­er Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

The Dead Don’t Hurt (The Guardian) – Western writ­ten, dir­ec­ted by and star­ring Viggo Mortensen with Vicki Krieps

Opponent (The Guardian) – after a dev­ast­at­ing accus­a­tion an Iranian wrest­ling cham­pi­on attempts to start a new life with his fam­ily as refugees in Sweden

Hoard (The Guardian) – a young woman is asked to con­form a trau­mat­ic child­hood in order to heal

The Goldman Case (The Guardian) – this may have shown up in anoth­er fest­iv­al (the French?) but I can’t find it – grip­ping courtroom drama about antisemitism

Small Things Like These (The Guardian) – Cillian Murphy fol­lows up Oppenheimer with a film about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries

Baltimore (The Guardian) – Imogen Poots plays Rose Dugdale, a former débutante who joins the IRA at the height of the Troubles

The Commandant’s Shadow (The Guardian) – doc­u­ment­ary about the fam­ily at the centre of The Zone of Interest

*The Guardian top five for the UK hasn’t been pos­ted yet

The Girl With the Needle (The Guardian) – Danish drama about a young woman dragged into a back­street adop­tion business