JACOB POWELL’s annual pilgrimage to the 24 Hour Movie Marathon – this year in its tenth edition – yielded 14 cult films. He recounts the midnight madness in diary format.

Thirty years of Vanguard Films – from the politically radical (A Century of Struggle) to excursions into dramatic fiction (Taking the Waewae Express) – screen in retrospect at The Film Archive this September. Founding member Russell Campbell talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about three decades of headstrong filmmaking.

Joel Stern, co-founder of Brisbane-based arts collective OtherFilm, talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about bringing the avant-garde collection Isolationist Eye Openers: Historic Australian Film Art 1962-1998 to the Film Archive in Wellington.

The following Campaign for Censorship Reform has been revised and updated (April 30, 2010). Please visit the new Campaign Forum to register your support, or learn more about the amendments being sought to the Films, Videos, and Publications Act.

The following Campaign for Censorship Reform has been revised and updated (April 30, 2010). Please visit the new Campaign Forum to register your support, or learn more about the amendments being sought to the Films, Videos, and Publications Act.

Filmmaker in residence, Lech Majewski, talks painting, Basquiat, and art through oppression with BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM, ahead of a series of Film Society screenings nationwide.

Wellington-based filmmaker Edward Lynden-Bell talks candidly to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about making The Last Great Snail Chase, screening at Auckland’s Academy Cinema until March 28.

The Lumière Reader’s film editors and contributors select the movies that mattered in 2008. Lists by TIM WONG, DAVID LEVINSON, ALEXANDER BISLEY, BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM, JACOB POWELL, LYNDON BARROIS, ALISTAIR KWUN and STEVE GARDEN.

TIM WONG looks back on the major film festival of the year, the New Zealand International Film Festivals, a programme where quiet achievers shone in lieu of bombast and audacity.

STEVE GARDEN highlights some of the best unreleased films to screen at the New Zealand International Film Festivals this year, including Lance Hammer’s Ballast, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Banishment, and José Luis Torres Leiva’s The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain.

STEVE GARDEN offers an enthusiastic overview of a once-in-a-lifetime retrospective, Edward Yang’s Taipei Stories, screened as part of the New Zealand International Film Festivals in July.

Adam McKay’s new comedy Step Brothers, and the man-child odysseys of Judd Apatow, don’t see eye-to-eye, according to DAVID LEVINSON.

Taika Waititi is shooting The Volcano, a full-length redux of Two Cars, One Night, in March. The setting: beautiful Waihau Bay, where Taika grew up and Tama Poata/Barry Barclay’s awesome Ngati was shot. ALEXANDER BISLEY asked Taika five quick questions.

With the long overdue release of Seasons Three and Four to DVD, HBO’s extraordinary The Wire continues on its rightful format. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM extols the show’s progress to date. (contains spoilers)

Operation Filmmaker is a disquieting, and blackly humorous portrayal, screening at the World Cinema Showcase, of good intentions and its far-reaching consequences. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks to director Nina Davenport about the Iraq War, liberal guilt, and the personal nightmare into which she was sucked.

Annie Goldson’s An Island Calling is a sobering documentary looking at the murder of John Scott and Greg Scrivener in Suva in 2001. Drawing in complex issues such as postcolonial identity, evangelicism, and ethnic conflicts, it’s one of the more thought-provoking documentaries at this year’s World Cinema Showcase. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM had a chat with Goldson about the film.

Sarah Watt’s Look Both Ways – a delicate, melancholy debut exploring the lives (and deaths) of a cluster of interrelated characters in suburban Australia – scooped the AFI Awards in 2005, including Best Picture and Director. CATHERINE BISLEY caught up with Watt in Melbourne during preproduction of her forthcoming feature, My Year Without Sex.

Dismayed to learn membership numbers were down from previous years, The Lumière Reader knows what Film Societies are up against: the disillusionment of movie-going, the convenience of DVD, the instantaneity of the internet. As another season’s programme is unveiled, the tendency is, invariably, to check off the films that can be accessed by other means. We implore you to join anyway. Long-time members will vouch for the pleasures of communal viewing, and there’s nothing quite like indulging in big screen cinema – whether it be classic, marginal, or grossly underseen – in the company of a regular, appreciative, mobilized audience. If music fans can extol the virtues of witnessing a band live over listening to their albums, cinephiles should argue that watching a film at home on a television screen (or worse, on a computer monitor) cannot compare to absorbing it in a theatre alongside other people. Film Society 2008 offers plenty of opportunities to experience this: its annual silent cinema presentation always a highlight (Harold Lloyd’s immortal Safety Last! screens), forgotten festival fixtures are afforded a second life (this year, German features Requiem and Longing), while films you won’t have heard of or seen make for discoveries to look forward too (Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels, or the Charles Burnett retrospective instances that are especially hard to come by in this country).

Though individual Societies vary in screenings between regions, the overarching New Zealand Film Society promises an excellent nationwide programme. TIM WONG (with additional words from Brannavan Gnanalingam) appraises the five films you should at least consider joining for.

Flight of the Conchords: not quite world famous, but much more than New Zealand’s 4th most popular folk parody duo. Tailing Bret and Jemaine to a secret in-store signing and performance at Wellington’s Aro Video (to coincide with the local release of FOTC on DVD), BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM witnessed their escalating cult firsthand.

Lumière Editor TIM WONG recaps a year’s worth of highlights, frustrations, and small triumphs in the world of film, with Top Ten lists from DAVID LEVINSON, ALEXANDER BISLEY, PHILIP MATTHEWS, JACOB POWELL, and DARREN BEVAN.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM responds to Californication’s agitation of Family First, “newly self-appointed moral guardians of New Zealand” who this week called for the boycott of companies prepared to advertise during the show’s commercial breaks.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM examines the racial landscape traversed by Spike Lee, from Do The Right Thing through to When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, screening as part of this year’s DOCNZ Documentary Film Festival.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM essays the current obsession with Britney Spears, a symptom of a wider schadenfreude and malaise linked to mass media, audiences and celebrity, eerily prophesied by Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network.

ALEXANDER BISLEY talks to Noland Walker about promise, monuments versus movements, honouring Jonestown’s ghosts and what Martin Luther King means today. Illustration by LYNDON BARROIS.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM comments on the current seismic shifts in the New Media landscape – from TiVo, to YouTube, to cellphone proliferation – discussed in depth at Script to Screen’s most recent seminar, part of a monthly series of talks and debates on hot topics in screenwriting.

MATT RUSSELL discovers irony is far from obsolete, and is that it has “debased the most powerful instrument we had for highlighting irony in the first place: political satire.” He looks at whether The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and other purveyors of entertaining satire have been compromised.

In a New Zealand exclusive, ALEXANDER BISLEY talks to Juliet Binoche about Haneke, Hou and being Tom Cruise’s chick. Illustration by LYNDON BARROIS.

In his only New Zealand interview, Seth Rogen talks to ALEXANDER BISLEY about getting Knocked Up, Judd Apatow’s riotous follow-up to the The 40 Year Old Virgin. Illustration by LYNDON BARROIS.

KIM CHOE wonders what makes the University of Auckland Film Production Group tick, a lively – and so far, productive – collaborative of film students, whose feature film Be Sharp, See Flat is a current resume highlight.

Star, producer, director: Helena Ignez is synonymous with Brazilian Cinema. A beacon of the Cinema Novo, she talked to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM during her recent invitation to New Zealand for the Film Society’s Brazilian season.

With the release of Squeegee Bandit, JACOB POWELL tracked down cultural enigma Sándor Lau, one of New Zealand’s unique new cinematic voices to examine his views on cinema and life as a filmmaker in in Aotearoa.

Spellbound, on the American tradition of the National Spelling Bee, is one of the great documentaries. In a 2004 New Zealand exclusive, Lumière Associate Editor ALEXANDER BISLEY interviewed the film’s director Jeff Blitz.

If you can stomach yet another set of top ten lists – not to mention ones that appear terribly out-of-sync with the rest of the movie world (that’s New Zealand’s geographical isolation for you) – a handful of Lumière’s regular film contributors present their year in film.

As red carpets roll out, gold statuettes are buffed up, and potential Oscar nominations roll in, ‘tis the season for giving... awards. From Bae Doona to Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi, from Michael Haneke to Michael K. Williams, TIM WONG salutes the (alternative) faces behind the year’s best in film and television.

As you trawl the foyer of your local theatre, the posters that line its walls aren’t mere decoration, but invitations, while the great one-sheets aren’t just memorabilia, but monuments to the allure of cinema. Surveying the year that was, TIM WONG selects the ten best poster designs of 2006.

For those who still mourn the passing of cult movie institution The Incredible Film Festival, and remain indifferent to its festivalized reincarnate That’s Incredible Cinema, the V 24 Hour Movie Marathon stands as a last bastion for midnight movie disciples in New Zealand. In its sixth installment, it is effectively an entire week’s programme spooled together as one, reeled out continuously from dawn to dusk (to dawn again). This year’s marathon promised a return to the underground of the Incredibly Strange, a trawl through the wasteland of B-pictures, obscure Zombie movies, 80s memorabilia, and Jodorowsky shitting in a bowl. JACOB POWELL donned pajamas to file this report.

Gaylene Preston – New Zealand’s filmmaker laureate – is admired both for her films (the touchstone War Stories, the underrated Perfect Strangers) and her generosity towards other artists. In the context of Perfect Strangers’ March 2004 release, Lumiere Associate Editor ALEXANDER BISLEY and Preston discussed turangawaewae, complexity, why filmmaking is addictive, and critics.

ALEXANDER BISLEY warms to Laurie David, global warming activist with Hollywood pull, and the impetus behind Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. She talks about documentary filmmaking, saving the world, and reeling in husband Larry.

The best thing on television, TOM FITZSIMONS professes his admiration for The West Wing, its eerie prescience, and its fictional President Jed Bartlet.

Having screened at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Veialu Aila-Unsworth’s short animation Blue Willow is stirring interest around the world, writes RON HANSON.