Our NZIFF 2025 minis: A to M

This year’s Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival is now underway, and features plenty of gems.

Check out what we’re watching, and keep checking this page for our latest reactions, updated throughout the festival.

Latest NZIFF minis | Minis A – M | Minis N – Z

Anchor Me – The Don McGlashan Story

Don McGlashan’s discography spans from weird to wide appeal, and here Shirley Horrocks takes a chronological path through the living legend’s output. While there are insights to be had about McGlashan’s relationship with the creative process, I don’t feel I came away knowing a whole lot more about him as an individual (outside an impactful family tragedy). Nevertheless, there’s plenty to draw on in moving through Don’s formative musical experiences, and then in Blam Blam Blam, From Scratch, The Front Lawn, The Mutton Birds and as a solo artist. The strong visual accompaniments to much of his work, and his seeming fearlessness as a performer, are apparent throughout, with glimpses of some shorts and vids nothing short of magnificent on the giant Civic screen.
STEVE NEWALL

Brand New Landscape

A restrained family drama as much about mood as it is plot, this recalls Ozu and Kore-eda in subject and emotional beats, but trades their warmth and poetic touch for something cooler and more clinical. Conversations about divorce, reconnection, and domestic drift are delivered with matter-of-fact flatness, which is punctuated occasionally with loud, raw outbursts. The contemplative tone offers plenty to vibe with for fans of Japanese family dramas, who will also undoubtedly appreciate the masterful evocation of the city of Tokyo.
DANIEL RUTLEDGE

Bring Them Down

A feel-bad drama that delivers in terms of brooding atmosphere, growing tension, and inevitable violence. Director Christopher Andrews deftly captures the brutal beauty of a rural Irish farm. Barry Keoghan smoulders, and Colm Meaney menaces, in a claustrophobic revenge tragedy of Shakespearian proportions, in which characters fume and feud with fierce intensity in a dark and gripping thriller.
ADAM FRESCO

Chain Reactions

Documentary catnip for horror and movie fans, focusing on interviews with five artists and their reflections on Tobe Hooper’s seminal 1974 horror, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Talking heads include author Stephen King, comic Patton Oswalt, and prolific Japanese horror maestro Takashi Miike. A lovingly assembled documentary offering both insight and outtakes, it’s a fascinating dive for fans into the legacy of a once-shocking horror that’s now a chain-cold classic.
ADAM FRESCO

Deaf (Sorda)

Writer-director Eva Libertad dives into the delicate details of a deaf woman and new mother (played so vividly and vulnerably by Miriam Garlo) as she slowly projects her chaotic frustrations and calibrated fears over her newborn daughter’s place in both a hearing and hearing-impaired world. Though it’s an affecting and well-made “savour the scenes” kind of drama, I couldn’t help but feel it was all a bit stylistically unadventurous—that is, until Libertad pulls a narrative trick in the third act that takes all these small details and expands them to something truly memorable.
LIAM MAGUREN

DJ Ahmet

Footloose by way of Northern Macedonia, this hits all the expected beats of coming-of-age colliding with uptight parenting and tradition, but does so well enough to earn its place in the programme—even with its predictability. The good young leads certainly help. Found myself recommending this as a median NZIFF film that would be great to take an older relative to, faint praise though this may be. Hope the pink-dyed sheep is doing ok…
STEVE NEWALL

Ebony & Ivory

OK, you’re either going to be on the wavelength of this absurd-as-absurd-can-be comedy or you really, really will not (I loved every second of it). An uncharitable description of this would be ‘comedy sketch stretched out to feature length’, however that description also works in the film’s favour, with breathing room and repetition (and repetition and repetition…) doing a lot of its comedic/hypnotic heavy lifting. Great performances, incredible art department and excellently incongruous score from former Fuck Button Andrew Hung.
STEVE NEWALL

Jim Hosking (director of one of my NZIFF favourites, the gloriously funny and totally strange The Greasy Strangler) imagines Paul and Stevie’s retreat to a cottage on Scotland’s Mull Of Kintyre. It’s a surreal, vegetarian nightmare that would have made a great short, but as a feature feels repetitive, stretched, awkward, and, well, repetitive. Still, if off-the-wall is your dopey comedy kick, there’s plenty here to tickle your stoner funny bone, from outlandish male nudity, to Sky Elobar and Gil Gex’s outlandishly off-kilter portrayals of bat-shit pop gods.
ADAM FRESCO

A hallucinatory imagining of what “almost definitely” happened between legally-not-Paul McCartney and legally-not-Stevie Wonder in Paul’s SCOTTISH COTTAGE. Fans of Tim and Eric, I Think You Should Leave and the director’s first film The Greasy Strangler will find a lot to revel in here, as the two demented not-legally-superstars go head-to-head. You’ll never look at vegetarian schnitzel the same.
MATTHEW CRAWLEY

Eddington

Black lives matter protests, antifa, youtube grifters, the advent of AI and, of course, the pandemic that killed lots and lots of people, are all fodder for Ari Aster’s ambitious and deliberately antagonistic Covid era satire, but an overstuffed agenda and an overreliance on low hanging fruit left a bad taste in my mouth—or is that the whole point? A portrait of a small American town brought to its knees by the brain-breaking reality of the pandemic and the culture wars that ensued, Eddington is ragebait as cinema, a vision of social alienation and casual cruelty becoming as contagious as a virus. Listening to a nearly sold-out Civic audience roar with laughter at a character’s use of the word “retarded”, I guess it’s safe to say that Aster’s point was made.
KATIE PARKER

Exit 8

You’ve probably never seen a video game adaptation that replicates the experience and frustration of gaming quite like this. A small loop of tiled Japanese subway corridors are revisited over and over and over and over and over again, with the principal character stuck in a loop and tasked with spotting anomalies in the environment to progress. Fluid, oner-aping cinematography enhances the fear of what’s around the next corner, in an experience that’s unique but not immune to flaws—though still very well worth the growing hypnotic horror on the big screen (and in surround sound). Good late addition to NZIFF (though I disagree with their quoted programme note ‘no jump scares’ and so would others in the Hollywood Avondale audience).
STEVE NEWALL

Hard Boiled

Still a stunning knockout on the big screen, John Woo’s seminal, 1992, kick-ass Hong Kong action flick remains as hard and thoroughly boiled as ever. Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung rock in a cop versus gangster tale that takes a back seat to the fist-pumping, heart-thumping action set pieces. Staged and shot with deliciously over-the-top panache, it’s a violent bullet ballet of dazzlingly choreographed mayhem in which moments of incredulity are tempered by hilarious sight gags—from a peeing infant extinguishing our hero on fire, to slow-mo explosions, gravity-defying feats of physical prowess, and enough bullets to make Michael Bay blush.
ADAM FRESCO

It Was Just an Accident

I always try to go into the big-award movies cold where possible, and all I knew about this year’s Palme d’Or winner was that it was a tale about the toll of violence, and the price of revenge. That being said, It Was Just an Accident was much funnier than I anticipated. The ensemble cast was great, and the dialogue and mise-en-scène theatrical. I enjoyed this film—but I wasn’t blown away. Sometimes I felt that the story was zooming out too much, getting caught up trying to draw circles around authoritarianism in general—when a punchier critique of those systems could have come from allowing more personal or specific narratives room to breathe.
RACHEL ASHBY

Equal parts tragedy and farce, Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winning story of revenge and justice in the face of political oppression by the Iranian regime is a surprisingly comedic, crowd-pleasing affair—particularly considering Panahi has been previously imprisoned for filmmaking by his government, and had to conduct production for it in secret. The final 20 or so minutes, in which this levity gives way to the dread and horror that has been bubbling beneath are not so much a bait and switch as the revelation of something that was hiding in plain sight all along.
KATIE PARKER

Late Shift

Riding shotgun with a nurse in an understaffed hospital, I felt stress gradually expanding in my chest across all 90 minutes of filmmaker Petra Biondina Volpe’s tense but empathetic feature. While the relentless chainsaw juggling tasks effortlessly engages, it’s the tender moments our head nurse chooses to slow down for—ticking clock be damned—that stayed with me. The end captions hit like a thrown brick to the teeth, especially with what’s currently going on in Aotearoa’s nursing sector.
LIAM MAGUREN

Lesbian Space Princess

When a clingy Lesbian Space Princess is dumped at her special birthday party by the space assassin she’s dating, all space-hell breaks loose. This animated debut feature from Australian film makers Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese is not only good for a laugh every ten seconds, it’s also got ridiculously catchy tunes (it’s not a musical, don’t worry), plus the sexist, racist, homophobic, ableist, misogynist, impatient spaceship you didn’t know you needed in your life. The voice cast is killer, including our very own Madeline Sami, Drag Race Down Under darling Kween Kong, The Pitt’s Shabana Azeez, comedian Demi Lardner, and the Aunty Donna trio using their absurd parodies of Aussie masculinity to its fullest effect in the role of the three Straight White Malien baddies.
MATTHEW CRAWLEY

Lurker

About an hour in, I grew pretty frustrated at the lack of momentum in this otherwise very well made look at the vulture-eat-vulture world of being Insta-famous and famous adjacent. Little did I know, writer-director Alex Russell was setting up traps for the film’s devilishly compelling final act, leaning hard into Théodore Pellerin’s stupendous Nightcrawler-esque turn. Had fun imagining Abel Tesfaye watching this movie and realising how a proper film tackles the vanity and insecurity of modern fame while he cried into a massive box of unsellable Hurry Up Tomorrow blu-rays.
LIAM MAGUREN

Superior psychological thriller sees a young man inveigle his way into the orbit of a pop star—the modern equivalent of ambitious players vying for favour in a royal court. Desperate to strengthen the relationship and see off rivals, Lurker’s made all the better by said pop star’s music being vacuous and shit (yet plausibly low-tier successful), making all the smoke blown up his arse all the more empty and entertaining. Could have come to an abrupt stop and satisfied as a character study, but finds a final act to lurk longer in your post-movie recollections.
STEVE NEWALL

The Mastermind

At this green stage of his career, Josh O’Connor is en route to securing a very specific type-cast as ‘useless posh guy who does art crime’ (first La Chimera, and now The Mastermind) and I’ll tell you what, he’s the man for the job. He plays the infuriatingly selfish art crim at the centre of Kelly Reichardt’s latest feature with a kind of dirtbag charm and innate hopelessness: he’s every guy you fancied at art school, but worse. The Mastermind is unhurried and wry storytelling, laying out the futile vanity of O’Connor’s James against a backdrop of bubbling social unrest and 1970s domestic tension. Some might have found the film’s conclusion a little on the nose symbolically, but it worked for me. Men- am I right?
RACHEL ASHBY

Maya, Give Me a Title

Totally charming children’s film from Michel Gondry, made for his daughter Maya’s entertainment. The cut-out stop-frame animation was gloriously DIY, and the stories were silly and fanciful as a good kids’ story should be. The bilingual children sitting in front of me in the cinema were cracking up throughout. Trop mignon!
RACHEL ASHBY

Misericordia

If a creepy little man returning to a sleepy little French village and disturbing the peace sounds like a bit of you, get on board with this quirky little number. Sure, the pallid weirdo at the centre of the story seems to have no clear motivation for being such a leech, but who cares about that when you’ve got porcini mushrooms to pick and horny, lonely villagers to have dinner with?
MATTHEW CRAWLEY

Mistress Dispeller

Fascinating contemporary Chinese doco follows a professional breaker-upperer, engaged to find out the truth about a philandering husband and disengage him from his mistress. Through subterfuge and persistence, the mistress dispeller shows a deft hand at deceit in the name of true love. Conversations are allowed to run long in this observational pic, which leaves you asking many questions, such as why did the husband agree to take part, and when can we have a Western version starring Nathan Fielder?
STEVE NEWALL