This year's festival was shorter than usual, just two weekends long, and due to the new 10-trip concession tickets we saw fewer movies than we normally would. In the previous two years I saw 16 films, but this time around I only managed 11. All things considered it was a decent festival, but attending the opening night screening reminded me why I generally avoid the first and last nights - the interminable speeches meant for a late and grumpy start to proceedings. Had to chuckle at the festival manager bod who claimed "It's all about the movies" while the festival leadership spent 35 minutes talking about how much work it is to stage a film festival. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they do it, but talking about it at length is the height of self-indulgence!
Here's the films I saw this year, in rough order of preference:
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The Ballad of Wallis Island (dir. James Griffiths, UK, 2025)
A real delight - why aren't there more films like this? The most charming musical offering on the big screen since Once, with great songs to boot. Not surprising, given the multi-talented Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan are involved. Tim Key, Basden and Mulligan are all superb and it all wraps up into a charming homage to the healing power of music to bridge the doldrums of loss and regret. Also contains the most definitively British euphemism for undies possible. See it - the film, not the undies, although they are obviously in the film - if you can! And if you want to learn more about the making of the film, Key and Basden's May
2025 podcast interview with Adam Buxton is the perfect companion:
Werckmeister Harmonies (dir. Bela Tarr, Hungary, 2000)
Constructed of long, languid takes,
Werckmeister Harmonies proceeds at a stately pace depicting the descent of a Communist-era society into totalitarianism, but is anything but dull. Replete with stunning black-and-white cinematography and a gifted orchestral score, it illustrates the breakdown of a community as insidious superstition and cynical manipulation take hold, to chilling effect. Throughout, the haunted, expressive performance of lead actor
Lars Rudolph bears witness to the looming, inevitable dread.
Nouvelle Vague (dir. Richard Linklater, US/France, 2025)
Just the note-perfect fan service making-of-
Breathless that cinema buffs deserve and Richard Linklater has always wanted to make. An expert navigation of the rich mine of creativity and the innate and unavoidable frustration of working with the talented and insufferable Godard. Looks beautiful, superb casting (Zoey Deutsch and Aubry Dullin are perfect as Seberg and Belmondo),
and it deftly depicts the bemused camaraderie of the cast and crew brought along, willingly and unwillingly, on the fabulist's mad journey that created an improbable, indelible memory.
Prime Minister (dir. Michelle Walshe / Lindsay Utz, NZ, 2025)
A useful antidote to years of self-serving revisionism skewing the narrative of Jacinda Ardern's time in power, and distinctive due to the commendably frank and revealing access provided by her partner Clarke Gayford's personal interviews and the recorded-for-posterity
political diary oral history project by the Turnbull Library. Ardern's fleeting reference to Boris Johnson is a timely reminder that, whatever their political stripe, leaders aren't always equal to the tasks placed on their desks, and the skills and emotional investment required in peaceful, prosperous times don't fly for a second in times of sustained, historic crises like the Christchurch mosque massacres and the Covid pandemic. Gayford's perhaps poorly-worded query to Ardern near the end of the film - could she have perhaps delegated more, and by implication protected her own wellbeing better? - is understandably rejected by Ardern simply because of the sort of person she is; while tasks can be delegated, if you take the role of leadership seriously as Ardern does, overall responsibility can never be sloughed off. If anything,
Prime Minister reveals it's a surprise she stuck it out in the role as long as she did. Which does her credit, and is a sad indictment of the corrosive nature of modern politics.
It Was Just An Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2025)
Aspects of Jafar Panahi's NZIFF-opening Palme d'Or winner are intriguing, particularly its searing insights into the brutal repression of dissidents and leftists by the regime, and the lasting trauma that clouds the lives of those who survived their torture. It also benefits from wry shards of social commentary, such as the ever-present and ever-increasing nuisance of requests for baksheesh that Iranians use to make ends meet or extort tribute from those they hold fleeting power over. But the whole is perhaps less than the sum of its admittedly well-honed parts, given the implausibility of so many character actions and the handwavium needed to advance the plot being reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch's 1986 feature
Down By Law, in which the jail escape is breathlessly unexplained - because if it was explained the audience wouldn't buy it for a second.
Mirrors No.3 (dir. Christian Petzold, Germany, 2025)
A pleasingly gentle German drama featuring frequent Christian Petzold muse Paula Beer as a woman involved in a rural car-crash who lodges with a lonely older woman living nearby. Examining the trajectories of grief, the solace of companionship, and with touches of pathos as the characters reveal more of their personal demons,
Mirrors No.3 improves on Petzold's previous outing,
Afire, and may well achieve a wider audience. It also features a well-judged deployment of the 1972 Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons northern soul classic, The Night.
One to One: John & Yoko (dir. Kevin Macdonald, US, 2024)
An effective documentary glimpse into John & Yoko's years in Greenwich Village in Manhattan from 1971 to 1973, spanning their arrival in America til their move uptown to the Dakota Building on the Upper West Side. The highlight is the restored concert footage from the
August 1972 Madison Square Garden benefit gig they staged to aid the cruelly neglected children of the Willowbrook institution on Staten Island; astonishingly, the two Willowbrook benefit performances were John's last full-length public gigs. A recreation of the couple's tiny Village apartment with its telly blaring at the foot of the bed is the key to the documentary's use of snapshot TV footage from the era - news reports from Vietnam, hippie radicals expounding, and garish TV commercials speaking to middle America that John, in particular, lapped up after his youth in Britain as an America-obsessed rocker. The political machinations of the time, when the couple were flirting with revolutionary politics while at the same time trying to remain in the US legally under the Nixon administration, and every radical seemed to want them to lend their voices to their increasingly off-beat schemes, are successfully illustrated. A useful companion documentary to Michael Epstein's 2010 ungainly-named film
LennoNYC.
Sorry, Baby (dir. Eva Victor, US, 2025)
Eva Victor’s first feature is a lively and sympathetic depiction of twenty-something trauma and companionship with a polished grasp of humour to leaven the serious subject matter and a compelling gift for inspired casting, idiosyncratic character development and pleasingly authentic dialogue. Hopefully this is the emergence of the next actor-director star alongside the multi-talented Greta Gerwig. Also features an excellent kitten.
But Also John Clarke (dir. Lorin Clarke, Australia, 2025)
Clarke's daughter Lorin has assembled an understandably affectionate portrait of a genial comedic polymath who charmed two nations and built a distinctive Antipodean outpost in thrall to the British satire boom of the 1960s that expanded what was possible in comedy terms in both New Zealand and then Australia. Sam Neill is an obvious interviewee, Ben Elton and Oscar Kightley perhaps less so (the latter never met Clarke, but watched him on the telly like the rest of us). I also learned that RNZ's Simon Morris of 'At the Movies' fame provided the backing vocals on the hit Fred Dagg record.
The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt, US, 2025)
A perfect downbeat mood-piece accompaniment to Alexander Payne’s
The Holdovers, depicting the preparations for and aftermath of an amateur 1970 Ohio art heist that goes awry. The titular mastermind, played by Josh O’Connor, displays flashes of insight into the meticulous planning required for a successful heist but suffice it to say, continually fails to live up to the film’s title, often in subtle but compounding ways. Kelly Reichardt has assembled an excellent cast including Alana Haim as O’Connor’s long-suffering wife, and two young sibling actors as their lively sons, who regularly pop up at potentially inconvenient moments in the criminal process. The film’s second half takes up where Reichardt’s 2013 film
Night Moves left off, and adopts a loping, languid pace as O’Connor adapts to life on the lam. While the stakes may be relatively low, Reichard’s script contains welcome flashes of humour and period detail, and there’s a talented jazz score by Rob Mazurek and beautiful muted-tone cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt.
Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater, US, 2025)
A delightfully stagey production with a tightly-knit cast and a winning performance as Lorenz Hart by Ethan Hawke acting in shortface (is that a thing?). Able support is provided by Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley, and the script is laced with acidic epithets, self-deprecation and barbed quips aplenty. Potentially a proud double-feature companion for David and Jack Fincher's Mank.
See also:
Movies: Film festival roundup
2024,
2023,
2022,
2021,
2020,
2019,
2018,
2017,
2016 part 1 /
part 2,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011,
2009 
