Docos are tricky. Like short films they can ride (for a while) on the basic legs of a strong story; alternatively they can coast on high production values, smooth editing, and gripping 're-enactments' of key moments. Problems crop up when the story simply lacks interesting material or the production values are so profoundly bad that one feels bolted back into the Blair Witch Project, fighting for stomach control from the awful handheld camera work. So this leads us to the question of whether Lover Other: The Story Of Claude Cahun And Marcel Moore was an okay documentary or not.

Get ready to party like it's 1999 with Dave Chappelle's Block Party, this festival's most affirmative, rambunctious, infectiously entertaining film. SIMON SWEETMAN revelled in the phat beats and comedy gold.

At the age of seven CATHERINE BISLEY wanted to be a goat farmer. Two years later, after tasting goat’s milk and being chased around a paddock by a billy goat with rather large horns, she decided it wasn’t for her and fixed her sights on being a ballerina. Fickle at heart she also tired of that idea, but many years later, watching the documentary Ballets Russes, she has once again been drawn to tutus, Tchaikovsky and pas de chats.

James Longley's beautiful, affecting, and urgent document of a war-torn country – conveyed intimately through a trio of personal stories – observes quite literally Iraq in Fragments. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM picks up the pieces.

Charles Bukowski's lethargic alter-ego meanders through the streets, bars and jobs of contemporary Los Angeles in Bent Hamer's Factotum, the Norwegian director's follow-up to his scandinavian gem Kitchen Stories. JACOB POWELL reviews.

With little over a fortnight until the 38th Telecom Auckland International Film Festival kicks off (thankfully, after the Football World Cup for those of us currently hooked on the early morning broadcasts), the excitement is clearly reaching a fever pitch. Just talk to those who hounded the box office when tickets first went on sale, or those who easily spent over half-a-grand in order to squeeze 50+ films in under three weeks. However insane that may sound to regular movie-goers, it's a time of year any movie-goer shouldn't dismiss. Even considering the inevitability of many films returning in one form or another, to see these films in the moment and with big, emphatic audiences is something else entirely.

Latest Additions: BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM begins our festival column with his thoughts on Sri Lankan Un Certain Regard winner The Forsaken Land; we prime the festival with a series of curated top ten lists, from the editors personally, and in general; plus 14 capsule reviews to date make up our Festival Form Guide, a regularly updated index of every film seen by Lumière staffers at the TNZIFF06.

The editors list their most wanted in batches of ten.

Sri Lanka barely registers on the international film stage. Having seen my share of sub-Bollywood films (and trust me that’s not a good thing) from the country, it’s a good sign to see an artistic statement coming from my land of birth (and the first Sri Lankan film to play at the festival). The film was also successful at Cannes, winning the Best First Film Prize (Un Certain Regard) in 2005.

With programmes already browsed, checked, underlined and dotted since their release to the public earlier this week, our own personal must-sees from the 160+ strong lineup have invariable made their way into a handful of curated top ten lists. We consider the following essential viewing – or at the very least, films we hope will inspire, invigorate, surprise or provoke debate.

Programme launch week marks the commencement Lumière's second annual online Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals coverage: all forthcoming features, reviews and festival column entries can be found on The Festival Reader, which continues throughout July and August. Pre-festival reviews have begun filtering through, with Lumière's daily festival column to begin on July 13th. When in doubt, visit nzff.telecom.co.nz.

Latest Additions: TIM WONG reviews Lodge Kerrigan's unnerving new film Keane, a revisitation of mental illness first explored in 1994's Clean, Shaven; and Mutual Appreciation, indie bright light Andrew Bujalski's amusing and perfectly observed sophomore feature about post-grad drifters and stunted musical ambition.

TIM WONG knows all too well that the road to adulthood is fraught with uncertainty – an insecurity of age no better portrayed than in Andrew Bujalski's amusing, perfectly observed post-grad film Mutual Appreciation.

Media Release | June 20th, 2006
After one year’s absence, orchestral Live Cinema will again be part of the Telecom 2006 Wellington Film Festival and be performed in its new venue The Opera House.

“Thanks to the support of the Wellington City Council and The Opera House, the Film Festival and the Vector Wellington Orchestra are able to collaborate once again” says Bill Gosden.

Children are again at the core of Lodge Kerrigan's troubled new world. His latest film, Keane, revisits mental illness in a milieu of urban dread. TIM WONG probes further.

Eager festival fans take note: hardcopy programmes for this year's Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals hit the pavement this week (although much of it can already be sampled online). The programme launches officially in Auckland tonight; Wellington on Thursday. This also coincides with the commencement of our annual TNZIFF coverage: two months where we dedicate comprehensively to the review of the festivals' vast and compelling catalogue. Curated reviews and occasional features will present themselves here over the next three weeks to get you in the mood. Then from July 13, our festival column kicks off, with daily reports dispatched from both Auckland (July 13-30) and Wellington (July 21-August 6). This year, we've added to the mix a semi-rating system, with "Recommended" and "Festival Favourite" tags to indicate our good and great picks, plus a forthcoming Festival Form Guide, which will endeavor to collate all festival films seen by Lumière staffers, with footnote reviews, into an at-a-glance overview of the programme at large.

Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

JANUARY 2006 marked the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth; In Search of Mozart arrives in this same anniversary year and, somewhat surprisingly, is the first feature-length commentary on Mozart’s life and work.

Milos Forman’s Amadeus is a well-known film, a classic – many would say, but it is ultimately a work of fiction. It is a shaky biopic based on half-truths, rumours and wild and wilful speculation. It makes for good cinema – as is so often the case – and it certainly helped Forman to make a great film, but it is not a reliable telling of Mozart’s tale.

Reviewed by Imogen Neale

SOME MOVIES you go to see you can come home, after dinner, a few drinks, a little hit of espresso perhaps, and pen a fairly comprehensive and satisfying review that you feel, cleanly surmises all you thought and felt about that movie. Some movies you can not. The reasons differ; perhaps it annoyed you, perhaps you thought the ending was a self-conscious act of the world is all better again-ism. Perhaps it got you in that dark and daunting place some people quietly refer to as your soul...

Media Release | June 12th, 2006
Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, winner of cinema’s most prestigious award, the Cannes Palme d’Or, will open this year’s Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals and screen in the country’s four main centres. It is just one of many Cannes winners to play at the Festivals.

Alligators in New York City sewers: pre-Gawker hype cache, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-spurred paranoia, or just a further widening of the gap between unwashed enviros and the a-Pollock-for-every-mood types? However you cut it, proportionally little attention seems to be paid to the problem of bodies congesting Florida’s waterways – meaning, when your pet fish starts coughing up bits of ependyma, it probably isn’t gonna be a job for PETA. Night Moves closets a nautical skeleton, and you just know director Penn’s been dining on cine-euro’s marked remnants, ‘cos it only ventures to make its debut more than halfway through this stonewashed noir. Smiling and demure, the atrophied star intercedes the sight of a nymphal, barely-legal Melanie Griffith out skinny-dipping one night (incidentally, now also an atrophied star); but, more than charging her sexual current with an adverse voltage, it registers as a total, haunting aburdism, one that insidiously flips the hourglass on detective Harry Moseby’s (Gene Hackman) ‘case closed’.

Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

TIMOTHY TREADWELL is one of the great flawed characters of cinema. But he is (or rather was) – and this is the best part – real; he was no creation – Treadwell was a real human and he filmed himself on a strange quest to become something other than a real human – extra-real, unreal, surreal – whatever his ambition might have been we may never truly know. But from the hours of footage that survive, Werner Herzog has fashioned a superb, funny, grim, sensational(ist), sublime, bizarre and always compelling documentary work. Treadwell himself may have been stranger than fiction could ever concoct – and there are moments during Grizzly Man that will have you pondering how far po-faced documentary can prod before revealing itself as more than the actual authentic antecedent of mockumentary and in fact its own mad strain – but Treadwell is the stuff of documentary gold. And Herzog proves himself to be the alchemist.

Marilyn Agrelo/USA/2005; R4
Warner Bros, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Caleb Starrenburg

GROWING UP in West Auckland, the only dance I was ever exposed to was a subtle nodding of the head to AC/DC or Guns N’ Roses, which is why I find the achievements of the children featured in Mad Hot Ballroom that much more remarkable. Mad Hot Ballroom, the award winning documentary by Amy Sewell and Marilyn Agrelo, follows a group of ten-year-old New York school kids as they journey into the world of dance.

Liev Schreiber/USA/2005; R4
Warner Bros, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER's audacious first novel won critics’ awards and garnered rave reviews. He deserved this for the blazing trail of his multi-voiced narrative and the weirdly wonderful plot, structured via sequential flashbacks, transliterated voices and miscommunications. That Safran Foer put himself (literally, as a character) in to his own book, was just one of many indulgent extravagances that the first-time novelist managed to pull off with wit an alacrity – coming across as daring rather than arrogant.

Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

HOLLYWOOD has structured most of its worst comedies around one joke (try anything with Martin Lawrence, Chris Kattan or anything post-1990 with Steve Martin). Then again, Hollywood has managed to also create some of its finest comedies around one joke (try most things with Ben Stiller on his one-man shame quest or the early pairing of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor). We all know it’s not the joke – it’s the way it’s told; not the tale but the telling. The Aristocrats is a documentary that centres itself on one joke; one very infamous joke, perhaps the worst of all time.