Stephen Chow delivers warm fuzzies in his extra-terrestrial new film. By JOE SHEPPARD.

IT’S A SHAME that kids generally don’t dig reading subtitles, otherwise the latest ingenious romp from Hong Kong jester Stephen Chow – complete with free stuffed toy! – would have been just the ticket to enliven a dreary Saturday morning. To be sure there were children at the Paramount, but I’ll wager the majority of the audience paid the full ticket price, and I caught a few of them wiping their eyes after enjoying a very funny and clever little tale with a surprisingly touching final act.

Steve McQueen’s devastating depiction of martyrdom. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

I REELED when I clambered onto the sunlit Wellington streets after watching Steve McQueen’s version of the Bobby Sands’ hunger strike. It’s rare to see a film so visceral or gruelling, it felt like the film had wrung me dry. Hunger was immersive filmmaking, a piece of formal brilliance: the hypnotic sound design, the sets which veered from staid to horrifying, the camerawork, everything. The astonishing thing was such an assured piece of work was done by a first time director, although McQueen has a Turner Prize and a feted art career already behind him.

Warning: may cause female audience members to leave with a dangerous sense of empowerment. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

IF THERE’s one lesson to be learned from Mitchell Lichtenstein’s black-comedy-horror Teeth, it’s that deep down all men are pigs. If evolution, toxin-induced mutation, or indeed intelligent design were to equip a girl with the means to combat this unfortunate fact of life, then, like the rattle snake, she should be able to take the advantage and run with it. Set in the kind of all-American town that censors the vagina page (but not the penis page) of high school anatomy textbooks, this is a squirmy coming-of-age fable from feminist heaven (or hell, if you’re not into the whole cautionary castration thing).

Dany Boon reconciles the North/South divide in this French box-office success. By KATE BLACKHURST.

SOMETIMES the short film that precedes the main feature can give you a clue what to expect. Noise Control is a charming animated documentary based upon the true story of a rooster at Raumati South kindergarten who fell foul (sorry!) of his neighbours due to the noise he made. It is a light-hearted look at how we could all just get along better if we recognised our differences, told through cartoon characters and ending with a song: ‘Rock-a-doodle-do’.

The 37th Wellington Film Festival began with a bang last Friday and the first day took no prisoners. By JOE SHEPPARD.

HAVING won the coveted Oscar for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film, The Counterfeiters was the first of the heavy hitters at the Festival and certainly did not disappoint. The opening scenes of heady decadence in 1930s Berlin and outrageous affluence at Monte Carlo contrast sharply with the dark backdrop looming heavily over the film’s story: the famine and filth of the concentration camps and the attempted annihilation of Europe’s Jews. When war breaks out, convicted Jewish forger Salamon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch manages to walk a middle path, first as unofficial camp portraitist and propaganda artist, and then as the ringleader of the largest counterfeiting operation ever. (Apparently Himmler very nearly pulled off this radical plan to flood the Allied economies into collapse.)

One part comedy, two parts horror as Nicky Hager’s controversial expose takes to the big screen. By NINA FOWLER.

BLENDING an astonishing array of archived footage with excerpts from leaked emails and reports, The Hollow Men follows Don Brash and his campaign team as they seduce and are in turn seduced by big business, big money and big political marketing guns from Australia and the US. Viewers who have developed an allergy to the political documentary genre in recent years need not fear: veteran documentary maker Alister Barry (Someone Else’s Country, In a Land of Plenty) has created a visually stimulating adaptation of Hager’s book without lapsing into sensationalism a la Michael Moore. Less happily, the political deception uncovered in the film is not safely ensconced in Washington but lurking around the corridors of our very own Beehive.

An epic contest between good and evil. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

I DOUBT IF there has ever been a more electric group gathered at a Festival documentary. The potpourri of freaks and geeks, scene kids, television people and curious others were congregated to watch arcade game exposé The King of Kong. The premise might sound bewildering, but as the torrents of laughter and applause would attest, this crowd-pleasing film has universal appeal.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks cough medicine and making movies for thousands with Adam Wingard, the resourceful, sure-to-be-prolific director of Pop Skull.

Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze, on two young cruise staff recruits in the shadow of the Three Gorges Dam, humanises an ever-expanding sub-genre on the effects of China’s industrial and commercial growth. He discusses with BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM the cost of change, river metaphors, and Renoir’s Rules of the Game.

A sack of presents for the eye, covering a wide range of techniques and narrative structures. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

HAND-MADE animation is the purest form of cinema when it comes to the auteur. When you make things frame by frame without any dilution from actors, crew, or production executives, the result can be astonishingly, remarkably, and sometimes disturbingly unique. Innovation within a traditional framework is alive and well in this year’s selection, with everything from blue painted blobs to an extraordinary live action/puppet hybrid used to sublime effect in this year’s Oscar-nominated finale piece, Madame Tutli-Putli.

History and hilarity in Guy Maddin’s tales from ‘The Peg’. By DAVID LEVINSON.

RIFFING phantasmic in My Winnipeg – a delirious paean to his lifelong place-of-residence, commissioned by The Documentary Channel – Guy Maddin ponders: “What’s a city without its ghosts?” The answer arrives when – after two reels spent subsumed in a flickering underworld – the film jolts into the near-present, allowing Maddin to commiserate the loss of a lost totem of his youth, the Winnipeg Arena. As it turns out though, even the garish stratum of archival footage isn’t enough to vanquish the film of Maddin’s catalogue of hang-ups, by now firmly secured across the body of his work; in the case of the hockey rink, Maddin boldly – and creepily – asserts that, growing up, it was “like a father to him”. His biological father, meanwhile, takes shape as a mound of dirt – stranded in a mock-up of his family living room, and granted physiognomy by an adorning rug – constituting the one demand made by his mother (played by B-movie hangover, Ann Savage) in return for her appearance in reconstructed scenes from his childhood. More than mere pomo chicanery, the movie draws its sense-of-purpose from Maddin’s untiring love affair with the genre tropes of yesteryear: Conjuring the arch hysteria of early melodrama, he turns Winnepeg into a shadowy limbo, whose triumvirate of keepers (a forked-river, the bison population, and the female lap...) exert an indefinable hold over him. Meanwhile, Maddin himself appears as a hostage on a train – forever falling victim to the city’s blanket spell of narcolepsy (as he dubiously attests, Winnipeg is home to the world’s highest sleepwalking rate), while offering a hilarious, literate commentary that dances between paranoiac ranting, autobiographical reminisce, and the frank unearthing of historical skeletons. In creating a world where fact freely colludes with folklore, and time itself seems like a distant entity, Maddin confirms that home is – in the most meaningful way possible – a state-of-mind.

Engaging and poetic observations about the effect of progress on human lives. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

GIVEN the Great Wall and the more recent Olympics, it’s hard not to see that China likes to deal in superlatives. The Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydro-electric project in the world, designed to harness the unpredictable Yangtze River for the good of the estimated 440 million people who live on its banks. The forced relocation of 2 million people seems a small price to pay for such progress, especially as the government is committed to compensating them with payouts and shiny-new accommodation – according to the government sanctioned tourist guides, anyway.

Steve McQueen directs a prison movie far from escapist. By DAVID LEVINSON.

LENDING a savage intimacy to the spirit of Bobby Sands – the IRA radical who spearheaded the Irish prison-strikes of 1981 – Hunger is a no-holds-barred immersion in human suffering. Directed by Steve McQueen, and winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the film confines itself to the Maze prison in County Down, where Sands (Michael Fassbender) is being held for the possession of firearms; upon greeting a newly-appointed cellmate, he bitterly reveals that he’s been sentenced to 12 years imprisonment. But any recourse to the comfort of time (no matter how slight) is cut short by the permanence of the two men’s surroundings – a sterile, baby-yellow lockup, the walls of which have been smeared in shit. Even the panacea of religion offers no comfort, as seen during a scene where Sands meets with a visiting priest (played by Liam Cunningham), who engages him in a theological debate over the merits of a proposed hunger-strike; curtly rejecting the priest’s qualms, Sands confirms that McQueen’s aim – beyond political and religious descant – is to restore to the abstract tide of history a physical sense of suffering. Thus, as openly fetishistic as any Cremaster movie, Hunger exploits the body as a medium: Prisoners spill urine into the hallway in protest, watching as lone puddles magnetically seep together; men outfitted in riot gear violently bear down on naked flesh; food, abandoned for days, writhes with maggots.

The vampire movie comes out of the dark. By JACOB POWELL. (contains spoilers)

COULD THIS be the best vampire movie since Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987) or Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of the classic Noseferatu? Directed by Sweden’s Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In defies simple genre description, combing vampire horror with strong elements of social realist drama, coming-of-age romance, and psychological thriller to create a film that is complex, layered, and broader in range than its “vampire movie” trappings might at first suggest.

Extolling her punk highness, the ferocious Patti Smith. By THOMASIN SLEIGH.

THIS DOCUMENTARY is refreshingly un-documentary like. In the first couple of minutes Patti Smith recites all of the standard biographical detail of her life – where and when she was born, where she lived, who she married, how many kids she had – all of the information that is supposed to describe and explain a person’s life. After this narrative, Patti Smith: Dream of Life drifts off into a non-linear collection of moments, relationships and footage of Smith’s performances. This eclectic assemblage of events gradually reveals more about Smith’s life and music than a usual chronological portrayal often does.

Recalling Philippe Petit’s outrageous, death-defying ‘heist’. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

WELLINGTON’s opening night film, Man on Wire, got the gala treatment the night before, and it’s easy to see why the story would be a crowd-pleasing one: an eccentric Frenchman decides to pull the middle finger at a conformist and regulated society and walk across a wire. Four hundred metres above the ground, suspended between the obviously now gone Twin Towers in New York. Without telling the authorities. With a slack cable. If you’ve got a fear of heights, this is probably not the film for you.

Mardi Gras meets apartheid in Mobile, Alabama. By JOE SHEPPARD.

FOLLOWING the excellent documentary on Nashville minstrel Townes van Zandt (Be Here To Love Me), US filmmaker Margaret Brown headed further south to her ancestral home in Mobile, Alabama, for the 2007 Mardi Gras. Established in 1703 – before the city of New Orleans was even founded – Mobile’s fortnight of spectacular rituals differs from her more famous Louisiana counterpart in one key way: all the parades, debutante balls, and ‘Mystic Societies’ are racially segregated, culminating in dual carnivals and twin coronations. (The sole integrated society, the Conde Explorers, has only one white member.) Brown manages to capture an historic moment when the white regents get down and party at the Comrades’ Ball for the first time ever.

Thirty-six auteurs add their two cents. By JACOB POWELL.

AS YOU WOULD expect from a film made up of discrete three minute shorts by more than 30 different directors, To Each His Own Cinema makes you, in its turn, laugh, muse, shake your head, cringe, nod knowingly, reminisce, tear up, and laugh again. What I did not expect, is how moving the overall experience would be. There is something deeply stirring in this series of very different reflections on the cinematic experience which is difficult for me to explain. I’m not sure why I didn’t think that it would be so affecting considering the weight of talent, intellect, and craft brought to bear on the project; perhaps it was because I felt it would be overtly manufactured. The idea of the Cannes governing body (??) asking a bunch of their favourite auteurs to make short films about movie going just didn’t strike me as likely to produce anything cohesive or as inspired as these directors would generate from their own creative impulses. Luckily for me, I was proved very wrong. Although it isn’t all top notch work, the overall viewing experience is so rich that I think any movie watcher would likely get a high level of satisfaction from watching this film.

A compelling exercise in humiliation-comedy. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

WHEN OUT OF WORK independent filmmaker Chris Waitt is dumped with no explanation, he decides to track down and interview his cavalcade of former girlfriends to learn why his romantic-life is so spectacularly unsuccessful. More importantly, he’d like to discover why it’s been several years since his last erection. This supposed documentary is too staged to ring entirely true; yet Waitt is such an endearingly self-effacing character it ultimately doesn't matter.

Alex Holdridge’s disarming, low-fi romance. By JACOB POWELL.

A ROMANTIC COMEDY light on production gloss and heavy on naturalistic dialogue, writer/director Alex Holdridge’s third feature, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, pushes most of the right buttons. First we meet Wilson (Scoot McNairy), a regular late 20s guy; he’s lonely and had a bad year of it, in terms of work, and a bad half decade of it, in terms of his love life. We are introduced to him as a video store employee who is in synch with his clientele; preferring to mull over some morose romantic movie than actually venture out into the wild and seek it off-screen. The amusing (just post) opening scene finds him caught in a compromising situation when his flatmates return unexpectedly from a trip and from this we learn about the unfortunate stage of life he is in and the friendships he has with these flatmates, Jacob & Min (Brian McGuire & Kathleen Luong) – the apparent picture of a happy couple with – whom he lives.

Out of Switzerland, a stop-motion delight. By DARREN BEVAN.

ANIMATION these days is sometimes overlooked if it doesn’t offer the smart, slick feel of the majority of output from the Pixar fold. Max & Co is a simple tale, aimed squarely at children, and is solid musical fun from beginning to end. It’s the tale of Max, a stop-motion animated fox (voiced by Lorent Deutsch) who sets out to find his father, a famous troubador by the name of Jonny Bigoude (bad pun) and winds up in Saint Hilare, a town which is renowned for creating and manufacturing fly swatters. However, Bzzz & Co (run by the frog playboy industrialist Rodolfo) is losing money hand over fly swatter, and despite the chairman’s pleas to liquidate it, an audit takes place. A manic wheelbound scientist by the name of Martin has other ideas on how to turn it around and put the profit back into it. As ever, his diabolical and fiendish scheming only spells trouble for the town, and Max and his new band of friends (including a sizzling turn by Virginie Efira as the cat cabaret crooner, who rivals Jessica Rabbit for sexiness) set out to save the day. Max & Co won’t win awards for its unoriginal storyline, but it has won audience accolades in Belgium for its enthusiastic and infectious humour, music, as well as the inventive quality of its animation. In fact, in a very short time, you come to care about all the animal characters – the majority of whom have been laid off – which is truly a coup d’etat from these relatively new filmmakers. Directors Frederic and Samuel Guillaume (who’ve previously only released an eight minute short) have really brought this fable of greed and identity alive with the puppetry of all the main characters – there is a Gothic feel to this and at times, it truly is stunning to watch – while the details of the background are intricate and beautifully capture the raison d’etre of so many French towns and villages.

Son of a Lion looks beyond the hostilities of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, giving voice to the region’s unfairly maligned people. Its visiting director, Benjamin Gilmour, speaks of his guerrilla filmmaking experience to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

A cinematic tour of the City of Lights. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

A SORT OF cinematic tourist brochure, Cédric Klapisch’s Paris is the film the uneven Paris, je t’aime should have been. The director of The Spanish Apartment crafts a heart-warming exploration of the lives, loves and neighbourhoods of the City of Lights. Or, more appropriately, that romantic Paris of our imagination. Opening with a head-spinning montage of its main players, we meet Romain Duris in the role of a cabaret dancer awaiting heart surgery. Juliette Binoche is his social-worker sister who moves in to care for him. There is the ageing and cynical history professor, played by Fabrice Luchini, who falls in love with a tempestuous student, and an assortment of working-class Parisians falling in and out of amour.

An old master picks up the pace. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

The Duchess of Langeais (Don’t Touch the Axe) is much more accessible Rivette, which isn’t necessarily as bad as it sounds. His adaptation of a Balzac novella has a simple set-up: man pursues woman, she rejects him and then decides to pursue him. It’s also a theatrical script, the largely interior visuals (with the exception of the film’s bookends) and intimate mise-en-scène forcing the two lead actors to carry the film. And they do superbly. This is a film with a rare intensity in the acting – particularly Jeanne Balibar as the seductive, vulnerable Antoinette – and the two leads compellingly draw you into their little game of deception, love and psychological warfare.

Observations in three sectors of China’s garment industry offers an open-ended musing on consumerism. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

CHINA’s industrialisation-on-steroids throws up such a rich and complex tangle of issues that it could fill an entire festival of documentaries and still not be done. At the New Zealand International Film Festivals alone, 2006’s China Blue left audiences despondent with its intimate portrait on life in a South Chinese jeans factory. In 2007, the epic and perversely beautiful Manufacturing Landscapes made art of China’s ecological disasters and put into striking relief the sheer scale of ‘progress’. This year’s Useless continues in that vein, with fly-on-the-wall observations of three varied corners of China’s garment industry: workers in a large-scale production line factory; a designer who rallies against the mass-machine-production of clothes and has created the eponymous hand-made collection called ‘Useless’ (Wuyong) for Paris Fashion Week; and finally the simple life of increasingly out-of-work tailors in small town Fengdang.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Soviet revolution.

SERGI PARADJANOV’s The Colour of Pomegranates is one of the most formally and politically revolutionary films ever made, so it’s of no surprise that some his other work will be infused with the ‘dissident’ qualities that saw him languishing in jail for a considerable time. After all, he eschewed the montage, socialist realism and cautionary tales of collectivism that had been the staple of Soviet cinema since the heydays of early Eisenstein. Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors was also provocative in quite a different way to The Colour of Pomegranates – stylistically it was a hotpotch of camerawork with formal icon-like shots (paving the way for the latter film), shaky handheld shots, and some of the more inventive camera shots in film history (I’m talking specifically about the two deaths that punctuate the opening section of the film). But it’s not simply the camerawork that assaults – sounds (e.g. the giant trumpets or the swish of the grass), tastes (you could feel an apple being eaten), and touches. Paradjanov doesn’t hold back in his visual flourishes either – colour dissolves to black and white, impossible camera frames jump out without warning, images appear all in red – yet they all service the story. We feel Ivanko’s pain and solitude. Consequently this is a film to be felt, it’s cinema at its most sensual and elemental.

Two genre-bending final fantasies by way of Japan. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

CINEMA provocateur Miike Takashi’s previous Festival offerings have attracted praise, derision and outrage in equal measure. The maverick director’s latest entry, the genre-bending Sukiyaki Western Django, might easily be his most accessible to date (although not necessarily his best); not least of which because it features a delightfully unconvincing cameo by Quentin Tarantino, and a Japanese cast delivering lines in phonetically pronounced (although mostly unintelligible) English.

A roundup of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Get Smart, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Second-Hand Wedding, Charlie Bartlett (Film); Outrageous Fortune: Series Three (DVD).

Kathy Dudding’s ode to Wellington, The Return, discovers and celebrates the city’s micro-histories; the small stories and details that people too easily forget and ignore. She talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM ahead the film’s premiere at the New Zealand International Film Festivals.

In José Luis Guerín’s fantasy cityscape, love is on the run. By DAVID LEVINSON.

MAPPED on the droll urban odysseys of latter-day de Oliviera, José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia is a portrait of the artist as a young stalker, in which a dreary-eyed bohemian (known only as “him”) pursues a beautiful woman through the unmarked streets of Sylvia. A fantasy Euro-locale – all sun-glinted cobblestone and historic facades – Sylvia forms the perfect medium for its hero’s desire, and while hardly the first to twin the creative impulse with the libidinous one, there’s a method to Guerín’s horniness that rises above hat-tipping the ‘gaze’ in order to scope out girls: Striking an impossible balance between irony and wonder, he transmutes the raw base of his lead’s quest into a meditation on the act of creation.