Features

As awkward teenagers, most of us got sucked into the idea that taking your crush out to the movies was the way to handle business. Getting past the “Holy shit, we’re actually going out!” phase, you both had to settle on a location to ‘go out’ to. You never put much thought into where you […]

  Iron Sky is a sci-fi comedy you can sum up in just four words: Nazis on the moon. Of course there’s a little more to it than that, but what makes the film tick is the bonkers notion that at the end of the WWII, the Nazis fled to the dark side of Earth’s […]

Once a decade Sight & Sound magazine conducts a comprehensive poll of critics, programmers, academics and distributors to rank the top 50 films ever made. This year the 846 film experts who took part departed from common wisdom and dethroned Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane. See the full Top 50 on their site. 10. 8½ (1963) […]

Magic Mike dropped in theatres a few weeks ago, pleasuring the female masses and making its way to second place on the NZ Box Office (below The Dark Knight Rises). Two of our writers (Rose Matafeo, who saw it of her own free will, and Liam Maguren, who had no say in the matter) had a […]

In The Ambassador, playing at the NZ International Film Festival, director Mads Brügger makes himself the central character in his documentary. By buying diplomatic status and exploiting it in the Central African Republic, Brügger was able to capture on film the sort of corruption that’s endemic to countries plagued by inequality and the huge sums of money […]

We are now more than half-way through the American Summer blockbuster season, and the first looks at big movies from further down the road are starting to emerge. In this blog I’m gonna review the trailers for some notable upcoming films and quantify their awesomeness. Man of Steel Now that we’ve got definitive contemporary screen […]

Peter Young, one of New Zealand’s leading nature cameramen, heads a conservationist case against the relentless fishing in the Antarctic Ross Sea in his documentary The Last Ocean. The movie is showing nationwide as part of this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival. We asked Young a number of questions about his film and the […]

Paul Janman is the director of Tongan Ark, a New Zealand-made documentary exploring the ‘Atenisi Institute, which is a unique Tongan university that embraces the teachings of ancient Greek philosophers, setting it apart from church and state. The film is doing the rounds at this year’s NZ International Film Festival. We fired off a number […]

Village by the Sea is a documentary about New Zealand painter Edith Collier, tracing the time she spent in the Irish village of Bunmahon in 1914-1915. This is writer-director Michael Heath’s follow-up to his 2007 biopic of the artist Edith Collier: A Light Among Shadows. He was kind enough to answer a couple of our questions… FLICKS: […]

I’ve been plowing through the silliest TV series I’ve had the strangest pleasure of watching in a while. NBC’s The Event only survived one season, and it’s no surprise why after you’ve seen the pilot: there was no way in hell it could ever satisfyingly resolve the ludicrous narrative overreach of its Lost-meets-V-meets-FlashForward set-up. The […]

A romantic caravan trip around Britain’s Lake District becomes a killing spree in this mix of black comedy, horror and satire that a number of Flicks writers are extremely excited about seeing at the NZ International Film Festival. We have a chat to director Ben Wheatley, whose amazing Kill List was a major highlight from last […]

Since 2009 poet Bill Manhire, composer-pianist Norman Meehan and vocalist Hannah Griffin have written and recorded three albums. Persuading the Baby to Float explores their collaborative process: the ways the songs were composed, and what lies behind the words and music. We put forth a bunch of questions for director Keith Hill to answer… FLICKS: […]

We Feel Fine is a low-budget drama set in Auckland, following a random collection of characters all connected via a bizarre video project. Features Morgana O’Reilly, a Florian Habicht cameo and music by Golden Axe. We put out a few questions for directors Jeremy Dumble and Adam Luxton to answer… FLICKS: Hello from Flicks.co.nz. How are […]

Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237: Being an Inquiry into The Shining in 9 parts explores hidden themes in Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining ranging from symbolism to conspiracy theories. Nine segments address specific aspects of the film, drawing on the ideas of Kubrick experts to produce an in-depth analysis. With Jack Nicholson’s performance in Kubrick’s Stephen King […]

I had always thought comedy was the hardest genre of film to review, due to the subjectivity of humour (my Three Stooges review being a prime example). However, I may need to revise that assertion, for reviewing family films can be a total pain in the rectum. With the end of the school holidays, I […]

To conclude Strange Encounters, the next three films will be plucked from the non-retro side of the ISFF… The first signs of the festival’s gradual move away from being an all-trash haven can probably be traced back to the inclusion of Masayuki Ochiai’s Hypnosis in 2000, where the programming still featured titles like Zontar, Thing […]

Some reckon the scariest way to watch a horror movie is in a packed theatre full of terrified people – and yes, that’s pretty scary. But have they ever paused a film to walk across a dark room and make sure the door’s locked? That’s exactly what some of these films did to us. True […]