Something you probably can't watch tonight: Tuesday 17 December

Acclaimed films from 2024 that haven't made it to cinemas in New Zealand

This is a bit of an intellectual (and statistical) exercise, so please indulge me.

Every year I write a ‘year in review’ or ‘top ten’ piece and every year I read in the international media about the great films that I haven’t seen. For one reason or another – risk aversion, hoping for festival placement, NZ being too darn small – we continue to miss out on a lot of stuff and the streaming services aren’t really filling the gap.

Here’s a list of films that I have read about in the “Best of” lists from the likes of New York Times and The Guardian that either only played NZIFF and don’t look like coming back, or haven’t shown up at all. I’ve got a pretty comprehensive guide to forward releases here in Aotearoa (courtesy of Hadyn at Readings) so if it appears in that schedule, I assume it is coming and haven’t listed it.

(Also, different publications have different formats. New York Times is top ten by two critics, Esquire is a top 60. I say we cast the net wide.)

It’s a big list and took me a lot longer than I thought to prepare. What have we learnt? One thing, is that you shouldn’t sleep on the programme at the New Zealand International Film Festival. Every year they programme films that haven’t yet built reputations but go on to become pretty big deals – 2024 was no different.

NZIFF Only

Good One (Washington Post, NY Times, Indiewire, Slate, Esquire, The Guardian) – Debut drama from India Donaldson (daughter of Roger) about a teenager tramping with her unhappy father

Hollywoodgate (Washington Post, The Guardian) – documentary about the American pullout from Afghanistan and what became of the US$7b of hardware that was left behind

Cuckoo (Washington Post) – “riotous” and “offbeat” sci-fi horror

No Other Land (Vulture, Indiewire, New Yorker, RogerEbert.com, Slate, Esquire, The Guardian) – documentary about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the “attempts to extinguish the West Bank village of Masafer Yatta” made by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers has picked up numerous awards but appears to be undistributable commercially

Green Border (Vulture, NY Times, Time, RogerEbert.com, Esquire, The Guardian) –”Epic” about the mistreatment of refugees shuttled back and forth between Belarus and Poland

Sleep (Vulture, The Guardian) – thriller about a young wife whose husband starts saying disturbing things in his sleep

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (Vulture, Esquire) – posthumous gift of a final concert from the great Japanese composer

Pictures of Ghosts (Vulture, NY Times, Esquire) – documentary love letter to his home town of Recife by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau)

Eno (NY Times, Slate) – groundbreaking documentary about the musician, producer and philosopher that, thanks to digital technology, is a different film every time it screens

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (NY Times, The Guardian) – “furious, brilliant” documentary inspired by the CIA-backed assassination of President Patrice Lumumba of Democratic Republic of Congo in 1960

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Indiewire, New Yorker, Time, Slate) – yet another ‘shot in secret in Iran’ film, this is described as “an anguished cry from the heart of Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian filmmaker who recently fled his home country for Europe after receiving an eight-year prison sentence from the Islamic Republic”

Black Box Diaries (Slate, The Guardian) – documentary about a Japanese journalist investigating her own sexual assault and revealing some profound and uncomfortable truths about Japanese judicial and social norms

The Settlers (Esquire, The Guardian) – Brutal revisionist Western revealing the truth behind Chile’s colonial foundations

Tótem (Esquire) – “Taking place over the course of a single day, Tótem is the story of a family navigating immense grief told from the perspective of seven-year-old Sol. While the matriarchs fret and fight over preparations for that evening’s party, Sol simply wants to see her father, Tona.”

Omen aka Augure (The Guardian) – Belgian-Congolese man takes his wife home to meet the family in this “complex, risky and bold” drama

The Delinquents (The Guardian) – “Argentinian director Rodrigo Moreno’s beguilingly surreal slow-motion heist movie makes for a meanderingly long crime caper”

Samsara (The Guardian) – teenage monks accompany a soul in transit towards reincarnation

Crossing (The Guardian) – “… a Georgian woman and her young sidekick head to Istanbul in search of her estranged trans niece.”

No Shows

Piece by Piece (Washington Post) – innovative documentary about Pharrell Williams told with Lego

Look Into My Eyes (Washington Post) – documentary about New York psychics

Between the Temples (Washington Post, Vulture, Indiewire, New Yorker, Esquire) – Jason Schwartzman as a cantor who has a crisis of faith

National Anthem (Washington Post) – Gentle coming-of-age story about a young labourer who goes to work at a ranch populated by gender-fluid rodeo riders

June Zero (Washington Post) – documentary by Jake Patrow about the moral questions behind the execution of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1960.

Flipside (Washington Post) – documentary about the New Jersey record store that director Chris Wilcha worked in as a teen and the quixotic attempts to save it

Backspot (Washington Post) – drama set in the world of competitive cheerleading staring Evan Rachel Wood

The Sixth (Washington Post) – “chilling” documentary about the January 6 Washington DC insurrection

They Shot the Piano Player (Washington Post) – animated documentary about a talented Bossa nova pianist who disappears mysteriously while on tour in Argentina in 1976

Sometimes I Think About Dying (Washington Post) – Daisy Ridley stars in an “unconventional love story”

Girls Will Be Girls (Vulture) – coming-of-age story set in an elite Indian girls boarding school

Universal Language (Vulture) – “goofy” cultural blend about a young man returning home to an imaginary Winnipeg where everyone speaks Farsi and his mother thinks someone else is her son

Nickel Boys (Vulture, NY Times, Indiewire, New Yorker, The Atlantic, RogerEbert.com, Esquire) – adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by RaMell Ross (Hale County, This Morning, This Evening), I can’t imagine this not arriving at some point next year as it is picking up critics’ awards left, right and centre

Close Your Eyes (Vulture, Indiewire, Slate, The Guardian) – the first film in over thirty years from the Spanish legend Victor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive)

Red Rooms (Vulture, Esquire) – a psychological thriller about a woman who becomes obsessed with the trial of a serial killer

Union (Vulture, NY Times, Esquire) – documentary about the formation of the first trade union of Amazon workers

Rumours (Vulture) – comedy-horror directed by Canadian Guy Maddin about the G7 leaders getting lost in the woods

Matt and Mara (Vulture) – low budget romantic drama about a writing professor in an unhappy marriage who rekindles a relationship with an author she once worked with

The Killer (Vulture) – after 35 years, John Woo finally (sort of) delivers an American remake of his smash hit thriller

Alam (Vulture) – “marvellous, mesmerising” coming-of-age film about a young Palestinian girl who lives and goes to school in Israel

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Vulture, New Yorker, The Guardian) – “unclassifiable deadpan comedy” about a New York woman who just can’t seem to be taken seriously by anyone in her life

In Flames (Vulture) – Pakistan’s submission for the 2024 International Oscar, about a woman whose life falls apart after the death of her father

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Vulture, Esquire, The Guardian) – “After a Vietnamese woman dies in a car crash in Saigon, her brother-in-law and her young son transport her body back to the former’s hometown in rural Vietnam, where they plan to give her a funeral.”

Here (NY Times, Esquire) – not the Zemeckis/Hanks/Wright reunion, a chance meeting in a park between a botanist and a construction worker results in a mediation on impermanence and transcendence

The Breaking Ice (Indiewire) – “sweet and shimmeringly beautiful” film about a love triangle that develops between young people in the freezing city of Yanji

Oh, Canada (New Yorker) – Richard Gere reunites with director Paul Schrader for the first time since American Gigolo (1980) for a film about ageing and mortality

It’s Not Me (New Yorker, Esquire) – autobiographical new film from Leos Carax, the visionary behind Holy Motors

The Featherweight (New Yorker) – mockumentary set in 1964 following a retired boxer on the comeback trail

Winner (New Yorker) – Susanna Fogel’s comedy-drama about the whistleblower Reality Winner

Rap World (Esquire) – “In 2009, four friends attempt to record a rap album over the course of one eventful night”

The Front Room (Esquire) – a nightmare mother-in-law movie from Max and Sam Eggers (brothers of Nosferatu’s Robert Eggers)

The Fire Inside (Esquire) – from a script by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, the film is the true story of the first American woman to win an Olympic golds medal in boxing

Exhibiting Forgiveness (Esquire, The Guardian) – André Holland stars as a successful painter struggling to overcome the trauma of his childhood

Family Portrait (Esquire) – Debut feature from Lucy Kerry about a dysfunctional Texan family reunion

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (The Guardian*) – documentary by Mark Cousins about the painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

The Dead Don’t Hurt (The Guardian) – Western written, directed by and starring Viggo Mortensen with Vicki Krieps

Opponent (The Guardian) – after a devastating accusation an Iranian wrestling champion attempts to start a new life with his family as refugees in Sweden

Hoard (The Guardian) – a young woman is asked to conform a traumatic childhood in order to heal

The Goldman Case (The Guardian) – this may have shown up in another festival (the French?) but I can’t find it - gripping courtroom drama about antisemitism

Small Things Like These (The Guardian) – Cillian Murphy follows up Oppenheimer with a film about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries

Baltimore (The Guardian) – Imogen Poots plays Rose Dugdale, a former debutante who joins the IRA at the height of the Troubles

The Commandant’s Shadow (The Guardian) – documentary about the family at the centre of The Zone of Interest

*The Guardian top five for the UK hasn’t been posted yet

The Girl With the Needle (The Guardian) – Danish drama about a young woman dragged into a backstreet adoption business