Andrew -- or A.N. Dyer, as he is known to the world -- is a famous novelist whose first novel became an instant classic and created a cult following around its elusive author. One morning, Dyer wakes up convinced he must mend the broken relationships in his life and summons his sons to be with him. It has been nearly 20 years since an incident tore apart the family. When the sons arrive, each burdened with their own struggles, Andrew reveals something so astonishing it couldn’t possibly be true -- or could it?

When a charming house guest (Galitzine) arrives at a remote castle, the delicate dynamic between a neglectful husband, his innocent bride Cherry (Monroe), and their devoted maid Hero (Corrin), is thrown into chaos.

In 2075, a girl witnesses a mysterious boy in a rainbow suit fall from the sky. He comes from an idyllic far future where time travel is possible. She shelters him and will do whatever it takes to help him return to his time.

It’s the summer school holidays of 2006 and stormy 14-year-old Sid (Ani Palmer) is desperate to reinvent herself. She lives with her dad (Noah Taylor) and older sister (Tara Canton) in a rural town near Ōmaha, the usually-sleepy beach destination that, during the summer, brings an influx of holidaymakers — a fresh audience for Sid’s performance of her ideal self. Not a girl, not yet a woman, she’s aching to be recognised as a grown up by her family, by boys, by the bewitching older girls who seem so impossibly at ease in themselves and their bodies, namely her older sister’s friend Freya (Rain Spencer). Playing out during the era of dial-up internet, dubstep and MSN, Big Girls Don’t Cry is a raw, lingering reflection on the clumsy bravado that is growing up, exploring queer adolescence, female shame and burgeoning sexuality. From the casual cruelty of teenagers to the indignity of being caught in a white lie told to seem cool, Sid’s search for approval is excruciatingly recognisable for anyone who has ever felt confused, isolated, desperate to fit in or terrified to be found out. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival, where it was a finalist for the World Cinema Dramatic Award. With echoes ofRain (dir. Christine Jeffs, NZIFF 2001) in its sensual, intimate rendering of girlhood, the film belongs to a rare lineage of New Zealand cinema; emotionally raw, psychologically observant works unafraid of vulnerability, longing, awkwardness, and the heightened emotional world of youth. Having had numerous short films programmed at NZIFF (Gate Crash NZIFF 2023, Memory Foam NZIFF 2019, Mine NZIFF 2014), we are honoured to present Paloma Schneideman’s debut feature as our 2026 Opening Night film in its Aotearoa premiere.

n 2004, an ad director faces a turbulent Christmas weekend. In 2026, a filmmaker turns her story into a screenplay, blurring the lines between reality, fiction, and the people closest to him.e.

Set in Tangier, the story centers on an aging Spanish woman who has lived in the same apartment for decades - in Calle Málaga (Malaga Street). The titular street feels like a character in this story – every beautiful shot an intimate exploration of long-established lives, loves, and connections with the residents and the buildings themselves. Touzani captivates all senses in this deliberately paced, lush love letter to her home city. Life-long Tangier resident María Ángeles-Muñoz (played with a blend of fiery defiance, charm, and intimacy by an exquisite Carmen Maura) has her world turned upside down when her daughter arrives and gives her the choice of moving to Madrid with her, or being moved into a senior care facility. Maria soon finds herself out of place in a world that isn’t hers. Full of defiance, she finds her way back, only to find an empty apartment and her lifetime of precious keepsakes sold to a local antiques dealer. As she finds ways to earn money to buy her belongings back, María leans on old friendships (including an amusing silent performance from María Alfonsa Rosso as Sister Josefa), and discovers unexpected new bonds that change the path ahead.

Paris, 1835. Renowned composer Frédéric Chopin navigates high society, performing concerts, teaching for income while battling illness. He composes masterpieces, attends parties, pursues romance amid aristocratic and royal circles.

Filmed at the prestigious Comédie-Française theatre and using actual members of the troupe, the feature got its original start as an attempted series of skits during the pandemic era. We’re taken behind the scenes to experience the journey of Nina (Pauline Clément), an experienced actress who is taking a turn in the director's chair to stage a performance of Macbeth. Unfortunately for Nina, the play is cursed from the outset and everything that could go wrong, does. Malfunctioning props, intoxicated actors, infidelity, clashing egos, absent cast members, overzealous security staff and even parental mishaps all clash in the frantic three hours before the play begins. But as the old saying goes "the show must go on" and Nina must battle fate and hold everything together in order to deliver a performance that is still worthy of the famed theatre institute. The title directly translates to "French Comedy" and the film certainly lives up to its moniker. An uproarious, gag-filled farce that is a gleeful parody of theatre antics and a much needed piece of joyous escapism. -Jordan Saloman

During the First World War, the soldiers behind the front line try to keep their spirits up. Stirred by the rhetoric of war, they each search for their own way to cope.

- OFFICIAL SELECTION: Festival de Cannes (Out of Competition) – Direct from the world premiere in France comes De Gaulle: Tilting Iron. June 1940. France collapses and signs the Armistice. In the midst of the chaos, one man, Charles de Gaulle, refuses to give up. Taking the ultimate gamble he flees to London and seeks to convince the world that the battle for France is neither over or lost. What follows next is a triumphant story of faith, audacity and an unshakeable quest for freedom. Antonin Baudry has crafted a powerful and dramatic view of a man at the very centre of a turning point in history, on his path to becoming a 20th century leader and cultural icon. The reality of intense politics, family struggles and the impact of war are deftly drawn in this geopolitical thriller, which has been more than five years in the making. Simon Abkarian commands the screen as the titular General, leading a stand-out ensemble cast including Benoît Magimel, Mathieu Kassovitz, Francois Darlan, Niels Schneider and the César-winner Anamaria Vartolomei (The Count of Monte Cristo). The talented Simon Russell Beale (The Choral) rounds out the cast as Winston Churchill, with the film exploring the complex relationship between De Gaulle and the British Bulldog. Sure to be a talking point of the Festival, don’t miss out on seeing this keenly anticipated film.

After a tragedy, John Ingram and his wife Rae are spending some time isolated at sea, when they come across a stranger who has abandoned a sinking ship.

On February 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis, entered the office of Richard Hall, president of the Meridian Mortgage Company, and took him hostage with a sawed-off shotgun wired with a "dead man's wire" from the trigger to Tony's own neck.

A Sam Neill classic, with an outstanding cast, rarely seen on the big screen. Carl Fitzgerald is down-on-his-luck until he meets Sophie, a beautiful Greek girl. He gets a job as a cook, but accidentally kills a fellow worker. He turns to his unscrupulous best friend for help and they attempt to dispose of the body.

Jim Jarmusch’s quiet, unvarnished trio of short stories represents a return to the auteur’s grounded, small-scale wheelhouse, triumphing at the Venice Film Festival after the perceived failure of his caustic and deeply divisive satire The Dead Don’t Die in 2019. Jarmusch channels his beloved Yasujirō Ozu through stories of family members struggling to make sense of each other and their shared history; two siblings (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) pay a tense visit to their seemingly destitute father (Tom Waits); a prim, proper mother (Charlotte Rampling) hosts tea with her two ideologically dissimilar daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps); a pair of twins (Indya Moore and Luka Sabat) sift through the detritus of their recently deceased parents’ lives. Like any good short story, each segment functions as a tiny abstract of larger lives, filled with ellipses and ambiguities. The first two segments leave a bitter aftertaste, the third — crucially shifting focus to younger characters — serving as a cathartic, sweet tonic. What is unsaid and unshown is vital: everywhere there are remnants of disagreements, traumas, lies and rescues that we are invited to colour with our own familial experiences. It makes for some of the most stripped-back work Jarmusch has ever put to screen — but, like Ozu, within the seeming simplicity there lies multitudes. – Tom Augustine

At the height of the Cold War, Fatherland centers on the relationship between the writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika—actress, writer and rally driver—as they embark on a road trip in a black Buick cruiser across a Germany in ruins.

Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, a Romanian-Norwegian Pentecostal couple, move with their five children from Romania to Norway after Mihai’s parents die, seeking closeness to Lisbet’s family, who share their faith. Settling in an isolated coastal village, they form a bond with their neighbors, the Halbergs. When their daughter Elia appears at school with bruises, suspicions arise about the family's strict religious upbringing. Fjord explores clashing worldviews, conformity, tolerance, and the boundaries of freedom and intimacy.

Olga (Teresa Sánchez, Tótem) enjoys her life of solitude in an apartment block in Mexico City. When she runs into financial hardship, she reluctantly rents her spare room to an out-of-towner who wants to be close to his wife who is undergoing chemotherapy. Unbeknownst to Olga, Tulio (Hugo Ramírez) is sneaking his son into the flat, a well-meaning yet naive nine-year-old, Cristian (Bastián Escobar). Despite her initial reservations, Olga forms a bond with the boy when their lives intersect in a surprising and meaningful way. Director Fernando Eimbcke combines a nostalgic black-and-white aesthetic with the immediacy of youth in Flies, which largely assumes Cristian's innocent point-of-view as he tries to make sense of his mother's illness. Often dismissed as a nuisance, he finds solace in imagination and play. Whereas Olga enjoys the predictability and slow pace of Sudoku, Cristian manages his rising anxiety by combatting monsters in a two-bit arcade game reminiscent of Space Invaders. Olga and Cristian's friendship proves age is but a number - Flies is a testament to finding solace in life's tedium and triumphs through genuine human connection. - Madison Marshall

Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale is a self-contained chapter in the life and times of Wal Footrot and his dog, Dog. We witness Wal's herculean struggle to impress the All Black selector – and Dog's strenuous efforts to come between Wal and Cheeky Hobson, and heated attempts to get in behind the sultry Jess.

For master of American humour David Wain, creator of some of the most enduring comedies of the 21st Century (Wet Hot American Summer, They Came Together), stupidity is the highest form of sophistication. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass continues that grand tradition, following small-towner Gail (Zoey Deutch), whose blissful engagement crashes down when her high school sweetheart sleeps with his ‘celebrity sex pass’, prompting Gail to travel to LA to do the same. Her chosen celebrity: Mad Men star Jon Hamm. Along the way, Gail amasses a merry troupe of Wizard of Oz-like followers, each with a Hamm-bone to pick, including one-time co-star John Slattery (in a hilariously self-deprecating turn). Irreverent and light-as-a-feather from start to finish, Gail Daughtry follows in the footsteps of last year’s Naked Gun reboot, nobly attempting to extract as many laughs from its audience as possible within a short frame of time. Along the way, Wain captures an LA of tacky surfaces and maps to the stars, and there’s just a dash of the eeriness David Lynch brought to Mulholland Drive, for those who look closely. – Tom Augustine

After skipping school and setting his pet rodent free in the woods outside his town of Lisieux, Normandy, Otto jumps from a high bridge into the river below. The backpack that was presumably meant to help him drown is quickly separated from him, and instead of continuing with his death wish, the poor, drenched lad gets back up at the rocky shore, contemplating his next move. While walking her dog, Lena spots Otto on one of his nightly bin raids for food, tracking him to the abandoned house with barely working facilities. This friendship between two lonely youngsters gradually blossoms into a romance; their plan to hide out inevitably turns into one in which they both escape across the country, never revealing the truth behind Otto’s disappearance. Goodbye Cruel World is a remarkably assured debut feature overall, ending on an especially beautiful note both visually and aurally — composer Arnaud Toulo’s melodies are a consistent highlight of the film’s texture. Director Felix de Givry shows great promise as a maker of intimate, humanist works, where troubled souls are swept along by the currents of time as they try to make sense of themselves and their world. – Josh Slater-Williams, IndieWire

After losing her beloved father, Helen finds herself saved by an unlikely friendship with a stubborn hawk named Mabel. Through the bond, Helen rediscovers the beauty of being alive.

What if the chicken left an industrial farm, hitched a ride on a truck, evaded the jaws of a hungry fox, and then crossed the road? What would happen next? György Pálfi's Hen answers this age-old question, giving his feathered leading lady the chance to tell her side of the story. Co-written with frequent collaborator Zsófia Ruttkay, this heartfelt, often humorous adventure of a resilient hen is entwined with a darker story, as our heroine finds that the pecking order applies not only to chickens, but to humans too. Navigating a Greek seaside village amidst the migrant crisis and investigating various instances of ‘fowl’ play, she encounters the cruelty and kindness that humans extend to other animals, and to each other. The film succeeds due to Pálfi's genuine connection to his plucky protagonist - played by eight real-life chickens. Hen uses no CGI, AI, or special effects to construct the chicken's point-of-view, providing an unexpectedly intimate look at interspecies connection. The egg may come first in Hen, but it raises another important question: is any creature truly free to live on their own terms, unbridled by the events around them? – Madison Marshall

From the director of `Boy` and `What We Do In the Shadows`, Taika Waititi’s new film is a hilarious and heartfelt adventure based on Barry Crump`s novel, ‘Wild Pork & Watercress`. Ricky (Julian Dennison) is a defiant young city kid who finds himself on the run with his grumpy foster uncle (Sam Neill). A national manhunt ensues and the two are forced to work together to survive.

At once a slapstick kink comedy and rousing provocation for the goon generation, I Want Your Sex embraces the tangled complications of desire and the transcendent power of risk. Broke 23-year-old people-pleaser Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) has just landed a degrading assistant gig for hacky artist-cum-provocateur Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). As professional lines cross and boundaries blur, Elliot is drawn into all-consuming sexual submission, finding liberation in humiliation until it goes too far and he finds himself being questioned for murder. Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Charli XCX and Daveed Diggs fill out the glossy Los Angeles art world, with comedians Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville playing it straight as the interrogating officers. Co-written by Karley Sciortino of Vice’s Slutever fame, this rowdy romp contends with the neurotic puritanical morality of a post Covid, post #MeToo, chronically online, porn-addicted generation who, by all reports, are having less sex than ever. With a wink, Araki reckons with thorny issues of consent, exploitation and cancel culture, all the while making a case for the insightful self-knowledge that comes from foolish decisions driven by lust and hedonistic fantasy. You know, if that’s what you’re into.

Hannah, a mother takes her trans non-binary teenager Frances to Amsterdam to visit their gay grandfather Jimpa. But Frances’ desire to stay with Jimpa for a year abroad means Hannah is forced to reconsider her beliefs about parenting and finally confront old stories about the past.

During a preview tour, a theme park suffers a major power breakdown that allows its cloned dinosaur exhibits to run amok.

Jim Anderton has said he did not leave the Labour Party, rather, all of his colleagues did. The left-wing politician was a successful candidate for Sydenham in Christchurch, before his lone opposition to the Fourth Labour Government’s free-market reforms led him to resign in 1989, and lead Alliance, a merger of four smaller parties. Through a wide lens on the era, we see how a more viciously competitive political environment began to emerge in New Zealand in the ‘90s along with the electoral system transition to MMP, as smaller parties including New Zealand First and ACT jostled for influence — a more pressurised climate that, in the wake of a family tragedy, prompted Anderton to temporarily step back from politics and hand the party reins to Sandra Lee, also featured prominently. This is an essential span of Anderton’s time in politics, from the weaponised scandal of 1976’s Moyle Affair, to 9/11, when he was Acting Prime Minister, and the Christchurch earthquake, which upended his 2011 mayoral run. – Carmen Gray

Turn-of-the-century Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler’s sharp, psychological novellas of desire and delusion have barely aged a day. Stanley Kubrick adapted one for Eyes Wide Shut, and now another has been updated to present-day New York City by American director Kent Jones: the Austrian’s posthumously published story Late Fame. Willem Dafoe is brilliant as Ed Saxberger, an unassuming post office worker. He is approaching his twilight years, but still has a glint of the street smart, intellectual edge that coloured his youth as a poet in the downtown scene. The slender book of verse he once published is now all but forgotten, until a handful of students desperate to start their own movement seek him out. What follows is a bittersweet, unpredictable satire of the literary pretensions of a new, moneyed crowd pushing up rents and hollowing out culture. And, through the dramatic but fragile Gloria (a show-stealing Greta Lee), an associate of the group that sparks Saxberger’s curiosity, it is also an ode to the rarest, most unexpected kind of creative light, in perpetual, defiant renewal. - CARMEN GRAY

A nominee for Best Animated Feature at the 2026 Academy Awards, the film opens with Amélie, a young Belgian girl living in Japan in the late 1960s. She isn't exactly enamoured with the world so far... that is, until her grandmother rouses in Amélie a lust for life's pleasures through the exquisite delight of white chocolate. Emerging from a vegetative state, Amélie forms a close bond with her family's housekeeper, Nishio-san, who provides Amélie with an intergenerational, multicultural appreciation of existing in the moment. However, Amélie quickly learns that life is not without its tribulations - her brother is nothing but a menace, and her family's landlady detests her Western tenants due to allied bombings during the war. Based on Amélie Nothomb's autobiographical novel, every frame captures the wonder and tranquility of a child's inner awe and the overwhelming turmoil when our confounding world becomes too much for a mere two-and-a-half-year-old. In this tender coming-of-age animation, Amélie learns that while there may be pain in our past, there is joy in remembering and making new memories. Little Amélie's big emotions are sure to resonate with the young and young at heart in this whimsical tale about the fleeting innocence of childhood. - Madison Marshall

- OFFICIAL SELECTION: Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024 - In this absorbing drama, Posy Sterling (The Outrun) delivers a powerful performance as Molly, a young mum from East London who has lost everything while in prison. After serving four months, Molly assumes it will be a matter of hours before she can collect her kids from foster care - but she now faces a longer ordeal than anticipated... Molly finds herself in the mother of all catch-22s: she can’t get housing because she doesn’t have her kids living with her; but she can’t get them back without a roof over her head. Molly has just six months to get housing and turn her life around before a judge in the family court makes the final determination whether her children will remain in long-term foster care, or return to live with her. A glimmer of hope in Molly’s world is reconnecting with her best friend from school, Amina, who also finds herself on hard times. Leaning on their friendship, can Molly and Amina beat the system and take destiny into their own hands? Book now for this incredibly passionate and moving tale.

In many respects, Vea Mafile'o and Gavin FitzGerald's documentary on Jonah Lomu is a story representative of Aotearoa's own emergence into the 21st century: a young nation of the South Pacific, still finding its footing in an increasingly commercialised world. Born in South Auckland as a first-generation Tongan and son of a minister, Jonah would transcend his humble beginnings and become rugby's first real international superstar. However, it was his childhood in the Kingdom of Tonga that was his foundation, and the film brings never-before-seen insights into his formative years, utilising personal photos and videos, as well as interviews with his mum Hepi and brother John, to trace his origin story. The film tracks Jonah's rise to fame from his schoolboy playing days at Wesley College, to his disappointing All Blacks debut, through to his dominant performance at the 1995 Rugby World Cup — drawing on archival interviews with Jonah himself and his former manager Phil Kingsley Jones, alongside former teammates and coach Laurie Mains, to illuminate his meteoric rise to stardom. But, while the documentary celebrates his highlight-reel career, it goes beyond the rugby field, examining how Jonah's breakthrough on the international stage coincided with rugby's shift from an amateur sport into professionalism — setting him on a collision course between the cultural values of his traditional upbringing and the pressures of relentless international media attention and intrusions into his personal life and relationships. What the world saw was a giant. But to those closest to him he was a shy, gentle and private man, navigating between two very different worlds. His kidney disorder would inhibit a career that had only scratched its potential — and rob a young family of a father who existed quietly behind the legend. – Heperi Mita

Environments 12 is an artistic intervention into the histories of ambient soundscape recordings—the sampling of the natural world popularised by the wellness industry. It takes after Irv Teibel, an ambient new age music pioneer and field recordist who founded the ‘Environments Series’, 11 records produced across 1969-79. As a speculative 12th edition to the Environments Series, this record could be thought of as an inverted environmental recording. Rather than presenting the ‘sounds of nature’ on their own, it is about these sounds, how they came into being, and how they are being used to reprogram nature itself.

It’s been nearly a decade since director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s last feature. His sleek, ice-cold noir, Grand Prix winner at Cannes, is set in a Russia returned to its most brutal imperialist ways. The regime is hungry for cannon fodder for its war on Ukraine, and Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a businessman in a provincial town, must contend with the mayor’s demand for a list of disposable employees to help fill military draft numbers. What’s more, Gleb’s suspicions that his wife (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair are confirmed (in a remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 The Unfaithful Wife). Her deep discontentment with her affluent but shallow existence is more than his ego can absorb. His family’s high-end lifestyle of top restaurants and luxury vacations has been a bubble detached from political realities. But the violence and self-serving corruption underpinning power in the nation bleeds through every corner of their lives; a spectacularly monstrous, abject horror that can be repressed no longer. Zvyagintsev, who has lived in exile in France since 2022, shot the film in Latvia, standing in for Russia. – Carmen Gray

Growing up in the Australian outback, creative and headstrong Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis) dreams of becoming a famous writer despite long odds and the objections of her family. Forced by money problems to move in with her rich grandmother (Aileen Britton), she soon makes the acquaintance of a handsome landowner, Harry (Sam Neill), and wins him over despite their class differences. When Harry proposes, Sybylla must choose between romantic love and the brilliant career she craves.

Plot unknown

On 13 November 1990, in the small Otago coastal settlement of Aramoana, local David Gray went on a day-long rampage with a semi-automatic rifle, killing thirteen people. The massacre was, until the Christchurch mosque shootings 28 years later, the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand’s history, sparking fierce debate around gun control and changes to firearms legislation. The decision of director Robert Sarkies to revisit the tragedy was controversial at the time, and his blow-by-blow dramatic reconstruction unnerves but carefully avoids sensationalism. It frames the event as a loss of innocence for the tranquil community, and a day the stoic resilience of local citizens shone through, as confusion gripped the township and residents hid in their homes. The delusional state of mind of Gray, the 33-year-old “eccentric” weapons collector and recluse, is externalised expressionistically in paranoid hallucinations, and his breaking-point agitation convincingly portrayed by Matthew Sunderland.

The wonderfully unsettling Gaylene Preston classic featuring a wonderful performance from Sam Neill. When Melanie goes home from the pub with a handsome stranger, she’s captivated by his charm and attentiveness. He sails her away to his ‘castle’ - a rundown shack on a deserted island. But when seduction becomes deception and passion becomes possession, Melanie realizes that she has been kidnapped. Torn between fear and desire, Melanie must escape – but her ardent admirer has other plans.

In 18th century Venice, 20-year-old violin virtuoso Cecilia lives at the Pièta orphanage, where, despite her talent, she remains confined, knowing that marriage is the only way out. Yet, her life takes a turn after she meets Antonio Vivaldi, a brilliant and ambitious composer who becomes the new violin teacher. Guided by Vivaldi and his music, Cecilia finds the strength to challenge the destiny that once seemed inevitable.

- OFFICIAL SELECTION: Tribeca Film Festival 2025 - Part courtroom drama, part true crime documentary, the extraordinarily inventive Re-Creation delves into one of Ireland’s most shocking unsolved crimes. In 1996, French filmmaker Sophie Toscan Du Plantier was murdered at her holiday home in West Cork. English journalist Ian Bailey was investigated by Irish authorities, but never faced trial in Ireland - despite the fact he was tried and convicted in absentia by the French government. Re-Creation directors Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) and David Merriman have constructed a fascinating mix of fiction and reality that explores the question: what if Bailey had been tried in Ireland? The film skilfully brings audiences into the room as a fictional jury sorts through the facts, inconsistencies and inconvenient truths that make the case so intriguing to this day. With spectacular performances from the ensemble cast, headed by the remarkable Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), Re-Creation is an unmissable entry in this year’s line-up.

Horror is central in the tragic life of Rose (a transcendent Sandra Hüller), victim of a harrowing childhood and innumerable atrocities on the battlefields of the Thirty Years War, leaving her face disfigured from a bullet-wound. From an early age, she noticed the freedom a pair of trousers would afford her, and has since spent her life posing as a man. With the war over, Rose travels to a remote German Protestant village, laying a dubious familial claim to a dilapidated stretch of farmland. Rose’s life is one of fabrications, careful deceptions, a delicate ecosystem of repression which begins to unravel when she is betrothed to a local’s daughter.

Atmospheric dread and aspects of folk horror drench the mysterious worlds of Mark Jenkin, who has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in current British cinema through “new kitchen sink” films that reflect his passion for DIY experimentation. Lately, he’s turned his interest in the timeless textures of a 16mm Bolex camera towards depicting the hands-on labour of fishermen in an era of precarity in his native Cornwall. Two cash-strapped men sign on for a stint on a fishing vessel that was lost at sea thirty years ago and has reappeared without its crew. The workers find themselves back on the initial voyage, and when they redock, it’s the 1990s — a chilling and queasy slippage in time and identity that is compounded by locals mistaking them for the dead sailors. The only thing worse than being at sea is not being at sea, as these fishermen are inclined to say. Jenkins built all the sound post-production with an ear for the poetry of place and for the enigmatic ability of nature’s elements to seduce and terrify in equal measure.

Set against the backdrop of 18th century England, a massive pox outbreak, and Jacobite uprising – this is a timely and darkly satirical story of Sir Chauncey Savage and Lady Savage and their blind pursuit of a better life. It is not without a tinge of irony that their family name is the Savages, for this is a Savage House indeed. Filled with duels, decadence, and bloodshed, this is a madcap play on class and power.

Known for his sincere observations of childhood, unconventional families and the emotional weight of loss and grief, Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest film combines his preferred themes in a speculative film that blends the preservation of memory with technological advancements. Set in near future Japan, grieving parents Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) turn to REbirth, a company providing the bereaved with humanoid replications of their loved ones. With this technology, the couple is granted more time with their seven-year-old son, Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki). Otone's architectural background fuels her desire to construct and control, whereas guilt-ridden Kensuke initially dismisses the humanoid as a "Tamagotchi", until a tender relationship forms. But as the humanoid develops and shares memories he shouldn't have, his parents grow perplexed and grapple with the ramifications of their decision.

Recluse Smith is drawn into a revolutionary struggle between guerrillas and right-wingers in New Zealand. Implicated in a murder and framed as a revolutionary conspirator, Smith tries to maintain an attitude of non-violence while caught between warring factions.

Created and performed by Morgana O'Reilly (The White Lotus) and co-directed with her husband and real-life birth partner, 2025 BAFTA nominee Peter Salmon (After The Party), Stories About My Body blends nudity, heart-swelling honesty and real birth footage into a stand-up comedy special like no other - intimate, fearless and unexpectedly profound. In a tiny theatre in Aotearoa, New Zealand, four teenage stagehands work tirelessly to help Morgana tell the stories that shaped her - from her own teenagehood in 1998, to working foot-fetish parties in New York City, to falling in love and later birthing her babies in a Melbourne living room. By turns vulnerable and riotously funny, she moves from lamenting her chins to marvelling at her cellular functions, using her body as the living template for every tale she tells.

Intelligent and unassuming 17-year-old Ainara (Blanca Sora) lost her mother at a young age but keeps her close through her faith. When she announces she is considering becoming a cloistered nun, this proposal takes her family by surprise and causes a rift between them, putting relationships and religious conviction to the test. Ainara’s somewhat distant father Iñaki (Miguel Garcés) is preoccupied with a struggling business and his two younger daughters, whereas Maite (Patricia López Arnaiz), Ainara’s atheist aunt, supports her niece’s autonomy but is fervent that the teenager considers university and travel first. Ainara must also consider a blossoming romance with a boy from her choir against the allure of an introspective, peaceful monastic life.

The cinema of Jane Schoenbrun is full of director surrogates, but few have felt closer to home than Kris (Hannah Einbender), an emerging filmmaker whose sexual frustration is reflected in her rigourously academic approach to her work, a worldview which is upended when she is hired to ‘reinvigorate’ the musty carcass of ‘70s slasher franchise Camp Miasma, whose influence has waned in the wake of endless shoddy sequels and cash-ins. Hoping to glean insights on how to tell a new story in this universe, Kris seeks out the original film’s final girl, Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson), a seductive recluse who lives in the hollowed-out set where she once found cinema stardom. Snowed in, Kris and Billy find their attraction spiralling into psychosexual mania as the line between reality and Miasma blurs. Schoenbrun’s attempt at the ‘sleepover classic’, Camp Miasma is at once hugely transgressive and invitingly cosy. As Kris finds freedom from over-intellectualising in the sublimity of sexual liberation, Schoenbrun takes their place as one of America’s most important young filmmakers, succeeding I Saw the TV Glow’s devastating lament for the life unlived for a mesmeric ode to horniness and matching your own freak.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved is the story of a famous film director, Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem), who returns to his native Spain to shoot a movie in the desert and hires his estranged actress daughter, Emilia (Victoria Luengo), to play one of the leads. He claims that she’s the best one for the role, but we assume he’s doing it to mend fences (he is). That makes the movie sound a lot like Sentimental Value. The two films overlap in numerous ways. But The Beloved, unlike “Sentimental Value,” really is one of those movies about the making of a movie. It’s a meaty and enjoyable entry in the genre, one that updates it to the present day, when it’s not as easy as it once was for a director to bully a cast and crew (and Esteban, make no mistake, is something of a bully).

The Black Ball opens in 1937, where a rural village loyal to Nationalist rebels is holding a celebration to welcome their Italian allies. Only, when the planes fly overhead, they strafe the villagers with bullets and send bombs whining down into buildings. One young man, Sebastián (the singer Guitarricadelafuente, making a promising acting debut), scrambles to safety, only to be conscripted into the fascist army. Five years earlier, with revolution approaching, another young man, Carlos (Milo Quifes), drowns his sorrows after being black-balled from his father’s social club due to unseemly rumours about his sexual proclivities. And in 2017, a gay writer and historian, Alberto (Carlos González), learns that a grandfather he didn’t know he had has left him something in his will — a document that will crucially link his story to the past. How these three plots intersect is the mystery of the film.

The children of a once famous artist (Ian McKellen) hire a forger (Michaela Coel) to complete some unfinished, long ago abandoned canvases so they’ll have an inheritance when he dies.

Probably the only documentary to ever draw thematic connections between Hallmark Christmas movies, affordable housing in New York City, and tattoo preservation after death, The History Of Concrete plays like a welcome continuation of John Wilson’s delightfully peculiar HBO series How To With John Wilson. As with that Emmy-nominated show, Wilson here becomes interested in a seemingly rudimentary topic but then plunges down diverse rabbit holes, finding unlikely through-lines that eventually develop into something far more grand and strange. Though ostensibly a comedy that spotlights the bizarreness of ordinary people, the documentary is never snide. Wilson finds himself hanging out on a low-budget film shoot, talking to an ageing singer whose neighbourhood is being affected by pollution, or filming a unique 3100-mile race that takes place on only one city block, and always approaches these different worlds with curiosity. As a result, the people Wilson meets open him up to new ways of thinking, and the longer he spends with them, the richer the conversations become.

- OFFICIAL SELECTION: Festival de Cannes (Out of Competition) - - CÉSAR AWARD WINNER: Best Actor – Laurent Lafitte - Few modern scandals have captivated France as the astonishing events surrounding Liliane Bettencourt, the billionaire heiress to the L’Oreal fortune and doyenne of Parisian society. Now writer/director Thierry Klifa has freely adapted the incredible story into a captivating dark comedy, featuring a jaw-dropping, tailor-made role for one of France’s most iconic stars. Marianne Farrère (Isabelle Huppert), the head of the Windler Group, is the richest woman in the world. Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte, who won a César award for his performance) is a vivacious dandy, writer and photographer. After meeting on a photo shoot, the two quickly become inseparable. Their friendship surprises, amuses, intrigues, and eventually unsettles the billionaire’s entourage and family. Most of all, Marianne’s daughter (Marina Foïs) struggles with her mother’s sudden complicity with this younger man, but her husband (André Marcon) and loyal butler (Raphaël Personnaz) share her concerns. Surreptitious queries soon transition into a private investigation, resulting in extraordinary ramifications for all involved… With several twists too good to spoil, The Richest Woman in the World makes the most of its fabulous ensemble cast, but Huppert and Lafitte simply eat up the screen. This wildly entertaining film became an enormous box-office hit in France for good reason.

- OFFICIAL SELECTION: Venice International Film Festival - - CÉSAR AWARD WINNER: Best Supporting Actor – Pierre Lottin - The superb new drama from multi award-winning writer/director François Ozon (Swimming Pool, 8 Women, Under the Sand), The Stranger is a gripping adaptation of Albert Camus’ landmark novella about a detached young expatriate on trial for murder in French-colonised Algeria. Summer, 1938. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin, Lost Illusions), a quiet and unassuming clerk in his early thirties, attends his mother’s funeral. The next day he begins a casual affair with Marie (Rebecca Marder), a colleague randomly encountered at the local baths, and quickly slips back into routine. However, daily life is soon disrupted by his volatile neighbour (an excellent Pierre Lottin, who won a César award for his performance), who draws Meursault into a dispute involving an ex-lover. And then, one blisteringly hot afternoon, an inexplicable event occurs on a beach, one that will see Meursault’s very moral standing brought to question… Visually resplendent with sensuous black-and-white imagery, Ozon’s elegant and masterfully realized film shines a contemporary lens on Camus’ classic tale of dissociation and morality, capturing the beauty and heat of a charged society on the boil. Both impactful and mysterious, The Stranger is one of the major highlights of this year’s Festival and should not be missed.

How did a city rubbish dump transform into a collection of gardens that is now a major visitor attraction? The story of how Hamilton Gardens became a unique museum of humanity, showcasing gardens from ancient Egypt to the surreal future, is told on screen. A Museum of Humanity: The Time Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens documentary explores this stunning achievement. Each of the gardens reflects the beliefs, lifestyles, and values of those who created them. The viewer can travel backwards and forwards in time – moving from 16th-century England, back to Song Dynasty China, Ancient Egypt, and the Italian Renaissance, and forward to the future, from sustainable to surreal. Masterminded by designer Peter Sergel and developed with council, community support, and sponsorship, Hamilton Gardens is now recognised as one of the great gardens of the world. More than places to walk, these gardens are living histories, waiting to be explored. Directed by Grant Sheehan and featuring Peter Sergel, Mark de Lisle, John Dobson, Lucy Ryan, Gus Flower, Alice Gwilliam, and Glen Morris.

In The Voice of Hind Rajab, the voice in question is a small one, belonging to a young girl alone and in unconscionable peril, high and breathless with fear and confusion. But it cuts through Kaouther Ben Hania’s film with piercing clarity, largely because, in contrast to a surrounding chorus of frantic adult voices, it isn’t performed. Rather, it’s a real-life recording of the last words ever spoken by Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian child killed on Jan. 29, 2024, after her family’s car was shelled by Israeli forces during their invasion of the Gaza Strip. In her final hours, the girl repeatedly phoned call-center volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society, pleading for a rescue vehicle that never made it to her. Making that horrifying 70-minute audio file the heart and spine of her film, Ben Hania baldly confronts her audience with the real-time fate of one of more than 18,000 children killed so far in an ongoing genocide. If The Voice of Hind Rajab opens one hitherto blinkered eye, or ear, to the atrocities in Gaza, it will have done its job. - Guy Lodge, Variety

Russia, in the early 1990’s is the aftermath of the USSR’s collapse. In a new world that promises freedom and flirts with chaos, a young artist-turned-TV producer, Vadim Baranov, unexpectedly becomes the spin doctor of a promising member of the FSB (ex-KGB), Vladimir Putin.

Renowned Icelandic poet and author Andri Snær Magnason is chasing something elusive. As the glacial ice of his homeland melts, he constructs a cinematic time capsule to hold onto this moment and send it to the future, before everything he loves slips away. Using his own collected archives, his grandparents’ photographs, and films, as well as traditional songs and folktales, Andri interlaces his family’s story with that of the land around him. From Academy Award®-nominated director Sara Dosa, TIME AND WATER is a universal reflection on the power of home and what it means to be alive amid profound epochal change.

Delving deep into the woodland realms, where lynxes, bears, deer, owls, capercaillies, and other river creatures roam, Vincent Munier not only seeks to pay tribute once again to the visual splendor of nature but also to capture the forest’s poetic sounds. The whispers of the woods are echoing the whispers passed from Munier’s father to himself, and now to his own son. This becomes a heartfelt declaration of Munier’s love for his father, intertwining familial bonds with the untamed beauty of the natural world.

A group of international whistlers compete in Hollywood's Masters of Musical Whistling, the world's largest competition, causing euphoria, notes, and tears, with only one whistler crowned the best.

The marriage of Derya and Aziz is under pressure after losing their jobs because of state arbitrariness and moving to Istanbul to live with Aziz's parents. They and their 13-year-old daughter Ezgi have to redefine their way of life.