Naked Childhood
Maurice Pialat/France/1968 | Out of the Past
THE ILLEGITIMATE love child of The 400 Blows, this is secretly the better film: its imprint of pre-teen adolescence certainly a more cosmic remembrance of childhood to Truffant’s very particular and personal memoir of embattled youth. It also feels encapsulated in time. The boy in Pialat’s film, 10-year-old Francois, is a little terror, and yet is capable of genuine tenderness, forging an affectionate bond with the plucky grandmother of his elderly (and stoic) foster parents. These, and other moments of mutual appreciation, are the film’s best and sincerest scenes. Pialat, in his first feature, observes with clarity. [Column]

No More Heroes**
Andrew Moore/NZ/2006 | That's Incredible Cinema
A THROWBACK to the halcyon days of skate hysteria in New Zealand. For those old enough to remember Leif Garrett and Robert Muldoon, this may very well induce a flood of Super 8 memories, from rubber jandals, to knee-high tube socks, to strains of Kiwiana punk rock. Moore was there when it first exploded, dissecting the rise and fall of the skateboarding scene via a vivid chronology: car parks and suburban streets became makeshift skateparks, backyards turned into homemade ramps, concrete bowls were erected, the holy grail of Skatetopia emerged. And then like so many cultural phenomena birthed in the seventies, it all came crashing down. [Column]

Offside**
Jafar Panahi/Iran/2006 | Worlds of Difference
PANAHI'S hot streak continues, and this is the closest he's got to a comedy yet. Filmed during the actual World Cup qualifier between Iran and Bahrain, the film exists in a semi-documentary state, resting comfortably on a host of (quintessentially Iranian) naturalistic performances from a cast of non-professionals. One of its great pleasures is witnessing its own structure emerge parallel to the football match, and its upbeat ending surely is evidence of some of the game's ecstasy dusted off onto Panahi's canvas. Absurdist, thrilling, and very moving.—MA [Column]

OilCrash**
Basil Gelpke, Ray McCormack/Switzerland/2006 | Framing Reality
IN ASSESSING the world's oil crisis, the film's defeatist talking heads do not exude confidence: Texas and the like are now graveyards for black gold; populations may have to be downsized; untamable economic growth means it's all downhill from here. Oil remains non-renewable, supply will never catch up to demand, even rocketing barrel prices aren’t yet a deterrent, so we’re still all screwed. There are no immediate solutions here – even hybrids and biofuels are more or less dismissed – just big fat bullet points reiterating the end is nigh. This is not an optimistic documentary at any point; more of a kick in the guts, a desperate plea to anyone watching with half a brain to come up with some alternative, some means of substituting one dwindling form of energy for another. [Column]

Once in a Lifetime*
Paul Crowder, John Dower/USA/2005 | Framing Reality
WHO PUT THE “c” in Cosmos? Capitalism, of course. Sketched from the same epileptic template of seventies hot-point documentaries like Inside Deep Throat and A Decade Under the Influence, this accounts for a similar cultural explosion in the star-studded New York Cosmos. Not surprisingly, the idea that money can buy success continues to reverberate in football circles today – only the Cosmos pioneered it long before Manchester United got a piece of the action. Flashing a breadth of archival footage as priceless as Pele’s signature on a contract, this is pure round ball heaven for fans still in the stratosphere of last month’s World Cup. Why it all evaporated says as much about America’s fickle attention span as it does the relativity of Newton’s laws.

Oxhide
Liu Jiayan/China/2005 | The Way Ahead
LIU'S film represents the borders between fiction and documentary at their most permeable. In itself, this is already the most celebrated Chinese debut since Jia Zhang-ke's Xiao Wu, though it differs in important ways. It is composed of exactly 23 static shots of the routine daily lives of the young director, her parents, and their cat in their cramped Beijing apartment; they quarrel endlessly, worry and lose sleep over their failing business of handmade leather handbags, yet come together in unexpected moments of warmth and humour, so intimate and realistically developed over lengthy single takes that the fictional nature of the film is prepensely thwarted in every scene.—MA [Column]

The Passenger**
Michelangelo Antonioni/Italy/France/Spain/1975 | Out of the Past
NATURALLY striking Antonioni gem – alternating between desolate sand dunes, cold urban modernism, and rural nothingness – that masquerades as an intercontinental thriller. That he manages to smuggle his "sensation" of cinema into a story of gun running, civil war and political mystery is what makes it poke out. On the big-screen, this is worth it for the last seven minutes alone. With a restrained Jack Nicholson in one of his better roles. [Column]

Police Beat
Robinson Devor/USA/2004 | The Way Ahead
CURIOUS and beguiling incision into American urban mystique by way of a Senegalese bicycle cop, whose police beat is a succession of bizarre, grotesque, tragic, and stupidifying call outs around Seattle’s inner-city byways and lush suburban greenbelt. Juxtaposed with a paranoid internal monologue (narrated hypnotically in native Wolof), the film is at its most surreal in these moments of strange world phenomena. While its Lynchian overtones are definitely warranted – the spectre of evil a lurking, disquieting force – it too has a sensual texture not unlike that of David Gordon Green's films.

Princess
Anders Morgenthaler/Denmark/Germany/2006 | That's Incredible Cinema
FEIGNING the animated cinema of Satoshi Kon, only does Morgenthaler's real motivation for the medium become clear when, in easily the film's most absurdly violent sequence, 5-year-old Mia drags a crowbar and hacks at the genitals of a bruised and beaten pornographer – all of which would be intolerable if it weren't so obviously a cartoon. He may have a knack for energetic montage and a Fincher-like craving for CG cut-scenes, but it's all hopelessly immature: an anti-porn film with an egregiously pro-violence message. This is a ghastly revenge picture, and really only interesting when backtracking to its home video footage; flashbacks which reveal a voyeuristic streak by the film's righteous Man of God, and an incestuous relationship with his pornstar-in-training sister.

Pulse
Kiyoshi Kurosawa/Japan/2001 | That's Incredible Cinema
FAR AND AWAY the best and most disconcerting film of the J-horror viral strain, Kurosawa's eerily pertinent tale of a supernatural internet pandemic is one of only two films by the Japanese master to have ever screened in this country: the rest, in a startling body of work that includes the be all and end all of serial killer movies, Cure, have failed to materialise. Genuinely creepy and without budget thrills, Kurosawa's recurring malaise of human alienation has never come to fruition better, with the proliferation of technology an ominous and soul-sapping harbinger of doom. Its ending, an alarmingly probable endnote of apocalypse, is extraordinary.

Return of the Poet
Harutyun Khachatryan/Armenia/2005 | Framing Reality
THIS MOODY, surreal Armenian piece carries an air of unspoken beauty and spirituality. It is in many ways this year's Delamu. Khachatryan's film begins with the conception of a sculpture, and then follows its pilgrimage cross-country – a journey imbued with moments of natural awe and feverish, Jodorowskian intensity. It is all entirely wordless, albeit for the lyrics of song, which articulate the voyage perfectly.

Regular Lovers
Phillippe Garrel/France/2005 | Worlds of Difference
GARREL – himself heavily involved in the 1968 student riots – recasts his eye on the promise of revolution. Initially concerned with a young man (played by Garrel’s son Louis) participating in the upheaval, the film later shifts its attention to his burgeoning relationship with a sculptor. It feels like a giant hangover: the giddiness of anarchy making way for stillness, placidity, and a languid pace where things seem uncertain and you never really know what happened the night before. Most tellingly, Garrel acknowledges his own place in film history in amongst the failure of idealism and a revolution that never materialises.—BG [Full Review]

The Road to Guantánamo**
Michael Winterbottom, Mat Whitecross/UK/2006 | Worlds of Difference
TRUE-LIFE extremism that puts torture wannabe Hostel to bed. Taking a leaf from Touching the Void's survival reconstruction book, Winterbottom and Whitecross' film puts the limits of human endurance through the wringer: real Guantánamo detainees Ruhel, Asif and Shafiq recall their nightmare to the camera, while actors reenact their every wrong turn in grueling detail. It is particularly unflinching in its portrait of dehumanisation. Like all good yarns though, embellishment is a hovering question mark (Void's tale a fishy "one that got away", in some eyes). While the extent of their ordeal is not for us to judge, the egregiousness of Gitmo speaks for itself. The filmmakers are visibly irate, and you'll be infuriated too.

Saratan**
Ernest Abdyshaparov/Kyrgyzstan/2004 | The Way Ahead
A REALITY-jolting view of life in Kyrgyzstan in the post-Soviet era. Far from being stark and bleak however, this is quirky and engaging and provides rare insight into the lives of rural Kyrgyz people. Part social(ist) realism, part comedy and part voyeurist drama, the film moves from comic adventure to deep reflection, and offers viewers cinescapes and actors of the likes they may never have come across before. Dark and tragic themes are explored openly. Life destroying alcoholism, fuelled by vodka and a lack of self-worth, is given its due part. Pervasive bureaucracy and corruption are features of all of the villager’s lives. And the oppression of women is a thread throughout; the most disturbing scene showing the use of rape as a tool of power.—MN [Column]

The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang
Tim Skousen/USA/2006 | That's Incredible Cinema
AS HARMLESS family entertainment goes, this is good rollick in a 1980s nerd-chic kind of way; its geek-out allure in its absurdist deadpan delivery, ala the phenomenon that was Napoleon Dynamite. The film’s fractured and time-warped plot – involving the search for a sasquatch, unpaid credit card bills, not so frightening bullies and an unrequited love triangle – feels a little tiresome in its delivery; however, the young cast does an excellent job of conveying nerd-teen-angst in all its glory (with Joey Kern a standout). And the 1980s hair-metal soundtrack is simply brilliant. —CS [Column]

A Scanner Darkly**
Richard Linklater/USA/2006 | Animation
CONSIDERING the film's threat – corporate-sponsored drug addiction – the “7 years from now” tag seems almost like a formality. Reeves plays a narcotics agent who gave up his family life, hoping to pursue the riotous uncertainty of addiction, and Linklater uses him as a blank canvas across which "D" (the drug) plunders the reality of identity like a swarm of ants. In turn, the use-affliction of warring brain halves becomes an obvious metaphor for a man torn between two ways of living, each being made increasingly unavailable. By rotoscoping the film, yet minimising any visual flourishes, Linklater draws out the headache underlying this 100-minute trip, savagely undoing the white-knuckle patriotism of ‘50s sci-fi in the process.—DL [Column A] [B]

The Science of Sleep**
Michel Gondry/France/2006 | World's of Difference
GONDRY returns to his native France with a romantic comedy that leaps from French to English as flippantly as it does between fantasy and reality. His world is that of Stephane's dream studio: cardboard boxes are stacked in the shape and form of cameras; egg cartons line the room simulating sound baffles; Stephane is imagining himself to be host of his own TV show. He falls in love with his neighbor Stephanie, but cannot express his longing for fear of rejection, a dynamic allowing for dialogue that is rich in its missing connections. Bizarre inventions and animations also populate his slumber: 3-D Glasses and make-believe time machines, to name a few. This is an imaginary vortex of the unpredictable; a film that plays with you on every level. Highly creative, it is a total original.—JM [Column] [Feature]

Shortbus**
John Cameron Mitchell/USA/2006 | Worlds of Difference
AT THE Shortbus, there’s Sofia, a sex therapist who’s never gotten off, and whose crisis becomes a metonym for the existential hand-wringing of 9/11; there’s also James and Jaime, a gay couple who don’t have penetrative sex, and Severin, a dominatrix unable to form lasting relationships. They all come together in an opening scene that directly quotes Amelie, in which the camera nimbly flits from bedscene to bedscene like a stray feather. Set to lite jazz, Mitchell’s New York is envisioned as a crayoned utopia, replete with cardboard tenements and a candy-coloured sky; “the last place people come to be fucked... and forgiven,” as a fossilized ex-mayor puts it.—DL [Column A] [B] [Feature A] [B]

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Park Chan-wook/Korea/2005 | That's Incredible Cinema
REVENGE-chic reaches its apex, and then comes tumbling down. Park sure has a wicked gift for dynamic, visual set-piece, and his shot designs are that of a mad scientist's. But with an avenging angel at his disposal, he does little with the reversal of gender except subvert Lee Young-ae's built-in halo and melodrama kinks (she is great though). This is all about the accessories: patisserie desserts, pink eye shadow, white tofu, designer hand guns. Emotionally grueling towards its end, this is also the most action-less film of the trilogy. Nevertheless, a genuine event movie and a big-screen must. [Feature] [Column]

A Tale of Cinema
Hong Sang-soo/Korea/France/2005 | Worlds of Difference
SLY, mischievous stuff from Korea's most interesting filmmaker. When a man emerges from a retrospective screening of shorts by a former film-school colleague, he spots the lead actress in the film that he – and we – have been watching for the last 40 minutes. What's more, he's adamant the film's mopey suicidal deadbeat is based on him, and that such life plagiarism has allowed said colleague to become the more successful filmmaker. This is life imitating art, imitating life, in a film within a film, and it's great.

Thank You For Smoking**
Jason Reitman/USA/2005 | The Way Ahead
AN EXCELLENT, pitch-perfect dark satire, with ace-in-the-hole Aaron Eckhart – a generally never-less-than-superb actor, who seems to revel in playing assholes. The film's other strength, beyond its main star, is its subject matter – and of course within that, the timing of the subject matter. Now that the world outside is a giant ashtray and smokers might as well change their surnames to Bin Laden, it is spot-on timing to have a black-comedy, a social satire poking a stick in that general direction. It’s a film not to be missed.—SS [Feature]

This Film is Not Yet Rated
Kirby Dick/USA/2006 | Framing Reality
DICK’s documentary picks away at a scab on the forehead of the American film industry, attempting to uncover the mystery surrounding the film rating process set up by the MPAA and their completely anonymous board comprised of “concerned parents of school age children” who, by their own admission, have no special interest in, or understanding of cinema. A farcical and hilarious journey full of irony, hypocrisy, corporate influence, and a thriller complex complete with lesbian PIs! Possibly the perfect companion piece to Shortbus.—JP [Full Review]

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada**
Tommy Lee Jones/USA/2005 | World's of Difference
JONES' first film as director may well be his second coming; for screenwriter Arriaga, it's clear on the evidence of Amores Perros and 21 Grams that he likes to do things in threes. Together, they've envisioned a robust Western for the 21st century, where cowboys are allowed the room to share, bond, and form strong lasting male relationships. Arriaga's script is typically layered and unusually sensitive; Jones, after years of hackneyed policier roles, has never been better as a ten-gallon warhorse with weatherboards for a face. On par with Brokeback Mountain, this signals a new direction for the genre: two films that have plenty to say when comes to rethinking long-standing masculine stereotypes. [Column]

Three Times
Hou Hsiao-hsien/Taiwan/2005 | Worlds of Difference
AN ACHINGLY romantic triangle of love affairs in the self-image of Hou. Indeed, those already infatuated with the Taiwanese director's great body of work will find much to love here, with Dust in the Wind, Flowers of Shanghai and Millennium Mambo all converging with a yearning, ephemeral beauty. The film's first third in particular is caressed with such poignancy and nostalgia, that when combined with the gorgeous Shu Qi, is nigh on irresistible. [Column]

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story**
Michael Winterbottom/UK/2005 | Worlds of Difference
FRAMED around a pair of teeth, this adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s 18th Century novel is bawdy. The cock of the subtitle is not a rooster; Brydon’s teeth and the male organ are a thematic duo. Overbrimming with the finest comedic talent Britain has to offer, actors play both themselves and the characters from the novel, sending up the film world with its egotistical rivalries, weeping wardrobe ladies, boredom and drinking, sour financial backers, intense assistants who like Fassbinder and Bresson, and sycophantic journalists. A “post modern classic before there was any modern to be post about,” just as the novel digresses to the point of never being written, so too does the film.—CB [Full Review]

The Valet**
Francis Veber/France/2005 | Worlds of Difference
VEBER paints by numbers – and that's just the way people seem to like it. Here, a noboby valet proposes marriage (to Virignie Ledoyen!?!), only to face rejection. It gets absurder: on the rebound, a supermodel moves in and they pose as a hot item, all at the request of a CEO attempting to somehow prevent divorce and retain his covert affair with said covergirl mistress. To have one's cake and eat it too means no less than a riot is on our hands, however Veber's bogus premise is farcical for all the wrong reasons; its out-clause neither elaborate, nor clever, just plain obvious. Plus as they snuggle and confide in bed, you begin to root for the valet and the supermodel – not the valet and Ledoyen, who as a Plain Jane bookshop owner, is fooling nobody.

Van Gogh
Maurice Pialat/France/1991 | Out of the Past
A LUCID glimpse into the enormously influential, and ultimately tortured Expressionist’s last days. Pialat illuminates the film with a lingering aura of incandescence, and like Van Gogh’s own masterworks, the colours present are pungent with strokes of turbulence fighting the surface. While they offer a keyhole into troubled genius, this is also the legend of Van Gogh at its most quietly matter-of-fact. Pialat simply allows the twilight to drift over us; only later, does its magnificence dawn on us. [Column] [Feature]

Waves**
Li Tao/NZ/China/2006 | Framing Reality
A REMINDER that the best documentaries aren't necessarily about big issues, humanitarian plight or hot-button current affairs, Li's rapport with her subjects is astonishing, a real testament to the power of people on film. And while somewhat crudely assembled, so thoughful, moving and sincere is her diary of Chinese students in New Zealand that any rough edges can easily be ignored. Its trump moment is a one-in-a-million: as Father's Day and birthday converge, Ken breaks down as he floods himself with memories of home via a family slideshow on his laptop. Completely oblivious to Li and her handicam's presence, it is the kind of distilled human capsule filmmakers pursue all their life, but rarely ever capture. A diamond amongst the rough of nagging leftist docos, this is also the most refreshing entry in the Framing Reality section.

The White Planet**
Thierry Ragobert, Thierry Piantanida/France/2006 | Framing Reality
SPECTACULAR IMAX-worthy imagery and a peculiar musical score underline this grandiose documentary of frozen tundra and thawing habitats on the edge of the world. No less than a big screen experience, the film's star is without doubt the polar bear: undisputed King of the Artic, and a creature of immense power and charisma when blown up large. Accompanied by breathtaking underwater footage (as alien as that of The Wild Blue Yonder), this is also a sobering affair; indeed, in a festival of inconvenient truths, that it'll all one day melt away makes it all more precious.

Who's Camus Anyway?
Yanagimachi Mitsu/Japan/2005 | Worlds of Difference
THIS zany and nimble comedy-of-filmmaking shrewdly unravels a student film-production over the course of a week, opening playfully with a six-minute tracking shot of film-quoting cine-dorks, J-pop styled crew members and freestyling Harajuku girls. Overseeing proceedings is a glum university professor, whose bizarre infatuation with an attractive young girl mirrors the precarious balance of his student's slippery grasp on production – where obsessed girlfriends and crew-related crushes threaten to undermine the film. It all gels on a pitch-perfect note of elation, recalling that giddy, natural high anyone who's ever collaborated on a film will have felt upon hearing the words "That's a Wrap". [Column A] [B]

The Wild Blue Yonder
Werner Herzog/Germany/UK/France/2005 | Framing Reality
HERZOG’s new “science fiction” film is not a documentary, but clearly has a message to pitch about global warming and manmade waste and neglect. His solution? Relocate the entire human race to another planet, allow the Earth to recuperate, and then return. Hopefully, he describes a team of astronauts’ successful mission to The Wild Blue Yonder, a hospitable otherworld discovered by way of a cosmic wormhole. Herzog indulges in this, and a generous helping of NASA space footage, lingering for extended periods to the narcotic sounds of Ernst Reijseger’s score. Always the dreamer, he marvels at how far we have come, no matter how impossible the final frontier might be. [Column]

The Wind That Shakes the Barley**
Ken Loach/Ireland/UK/etc./2006 | Worlds of Difference
ROUSING in an entirely non-Mel Gibson way, Loach's Cannes-conquering time capsule of Ireland's tumultuous twenties is a fiercely determined statement for which Iraq is really only a stone's throw away. Political propaganda or not, this isn't the pointed allegory of a childish Lars von Trier; rather, it is a stern reminder that history continues to repeat itself. In troubled times, it is little surprise that the festival's opening night films have for the past two years agitated and provoked. That pockets of the audience were seen scurrying to the exit is no less than a stamp of approval.

You’re Gonna Miss Me
Keven McAlester/USA/2005 | That's Incredible Cinema
ROKY ERIKSON is the cult singer/songwriter/guitarist behind The 13th Floor Elevators; one of the hip psychedelic bands of the late 1960s. He fried his brain and disappeared from the scene, made some sporadic forays back in to music with increasingly idiosyncratic releases, becoming a fringe artist for a pre-post-punk movement. This documentary takes in the fact that, not properly cared for, Erikson’s fragile state of mind cannot possibly improve. Moving, bizarre and occasionally downright intriguing, it’s beautiful too – covering the human spirit, the confusion of the human mind, the conflicts of an artistic person at a total loss to be able to create and with a total need to do exactly that; and so much more. Perfectly realised, immaculately conceived and ultimately as baffling as it is celebratory.—SS [Feature]

* Also screening in Christchurch
** Also screening in Christchurch and Dunedin