David Rittey has just returned to Wellington from the Cannes Film Festival. Closer, which he wrote and directed, was one of only ten official selections in the short film section. Closer is the story of a deaf teenage boy dealing with the death of his sister, and has also recently been selected for the New Zealand and Melbourne International Film Festivals. SÁNDOR LAU caught up with David for Lumière.

The Triplets of Belleville – Sylvain Chomet's skewed animated riff on cabaret, cycling and the Tour de France – is a visual sensation, says CALEB STARRENBURG.

Faouzi Bensaïdi's A Thousand Months carries an air of beauty in the presence of absence, says KUNAL D'SOUZA.

Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder does original things with a well-worn genre, as CALEB STARRENBURG finds.

Surrealism, yakuza and Chris Doyle converge in the cool, oddly romantic comedy of Last Life in the Universe. MUBARAK ALI writes.

Chaos theory becomes a spanner in the works for one Austrian town in Barbara Albert's Free Radicals. KUNAL D'SOUZA gets to the bottom of its effects.

The pursuit of profit and power gets a working over by filmmakers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot in their new documentary The Corporation. KIM LESCH makes sense of it all.

Escapism and airy playfulness (and a whole lot of cats) ensue in the latest addition to the Studio Ghibli stable, The Cat Returns. MUBARAK ALI reviews.

2004's unprecedented festival foray into the world of bloody-edged combat saw the long-awaited arrival of one film in particular: Takeshi Kitano's samurai-revival Zatoichi. TIM WONG writes.