From Oscar-winning dramas to purely pleasurable blockbusters, here are our critics’ picks from the first half of the year
★★★★☆
Sofia Coppola shunts Elvis to the shadows, to beautiful effect, in this biopic focused on his wife Priscilla – thoughtfully and tenderly played by Cailee Spaeny.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision
★★★★☆
Anthony Hopkins stars as the “British Schindler”, Nicholas Wilton, in this extraordinary true story. Wilton travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1938 to save more than 600 children (most of them Jewish), transporting them to British foster homes away from danger.
Watch it: Due to drop on Neon from July 26. Watch now on Apple TV store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision
★★★★☆
The infamous 1972 Andes plane crash gets its third adaptation, with Spanish director J.A. Bayona creating, in his native tongue, a wrenching, harrowing story, with a stunning score and added gravitas coming from rising Uruguayan star Enzo Vogrincic’s emotive voiceover.
Watch it: Netflix
★★★★☆
Jason Statham is Adam Clay, a retired black ops agent-turned beekeeper. When phishers deplete the life savings of the sweet, retired old lady renting her barn to Clay and his bees, prompting her to shoot herself, Clay seeks revenge. It’s not clever, but this gory action thriller is proper guilty pleasure viewing.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision
★★★★☆
The Lindsay Lohan comedy classic about high schoolers vying to rule the school perfectly translates to the Gen-Z era in this musical remake by Tina Fey – now rumours don’t just circulate, but go viral on TikTok. And it’s still a complete scream.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision, Academy On Demand
★★★★☆
As soon as Jodie Comer’s nameless character gives birth, an apocalyptic flood hits in this dystopian version of England. She, her baby and its father flee. Comer is consistently compelling in this film’s unstable world.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals
★★★★★
A teacher is forced to look after a pupil at the boarding school he works at over the Christmas break in this 70s set piece. He takes refuge in the ancient world while the modern one tears itself apart; the troublemaker student is being threatened with a military academy by his mother and they’re joined by the school’s no-nonsense dinner lady. Awards-worthy performances, with a richly deserved Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals
★★★★★
A relationship develops between Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal), neighbours in a near-empty new London high-rise. Meanwhile, long-orphaned Adam visits his childhood home one day to find nothing has changed – his parents are seemingly living just as they did right before their death. Andrew Haigh’s drama is an unusual romance and a supremely sad ghost story.
Watch it: Disney+, Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube
★★★★☆
This musical take on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the struggles of black women in the American South in the early 1900s is a surprisingly fun jolt of joy. An irresistible all-singing, all-sobbing weepie – with sequins.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision, Academy On Demand
★★★★☆
Jeffrey Wright is superb in this satire about the publishing industry’s obsession with stories of black trauma. Frustrated that the only works by black writers that get picked up now are gritty memoirs of gun crime, trauma and terrible fathers, the teacher and author pens an inane pastiche, which, to his horror, becomes an unexpected hit.
Watch it: Prime Video
★★★★☆
A family of mallard ducks risks migrating south for the first time, leaving the corner of New England they call home, in this gently formulaic, handsome animation, with a fresh, bright score to boot.
★★★★★
Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning drama shows evil can flourish in the most mundane circumstances – it depicts the country house life of a family living next door to Auschwitz, where the father, Rudolf Höss, is a commandant. We don’t see any of the camp’s savagery directly until the epilogue – but its horrors gnaw and clamour at the edge of every shot.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals
★★★★☆
Set at a rural French chateau in 1885, the film follows a legendary gourmet, Dodin Bouffant, who, for 20 years, has employed brilliant cook Eugenie Chatagne. The two have fallen in love, but it’s on Eugenie’s terms – Dodin’s numerous offers of marriage have thus far been rebuffed. Its food shots are many – but always delectable.
Watch it: In NZ cinemas from June 27
★★★★☆
A delightful Mads Mikkelsen plays a frontiersman in 18th-century Denmark, pursuing his near-unreachable dream of cultivating wild northern Jutland, where cruel winds and barren soil make farming impossible. There are fights with local landowners and flutterings of romance ensue in this gritty Scandi remix of American Western tropes.
Watch it: In cinemas now
★★★★☆
A bonkers, unpredictable film-cum-music video, released alongside Jennifer Lopez’s ninth studio album. She uses a loosely connected series of dramatic scenes and musical numbers to reflect on her life as a serial monogamist. An astonishing pop-art tour de force.
Watch it: Prime Video
★★★★☆
This Oscar-nominated drama from Wim Wenders, which portrays a toilet cleaner’s day-to-day routine from morning until night, is a lovingly detailed character study and a beautiful portrait of everyday life in Tokyo.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, AroVision
★★★★☆
This bold, visually astonishing film picks up exactly where Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 sci-fi epic left off. Timothee Chalamet’s exiled Paul Atreides joins forces with Zendaya’s Chani and the native Fremen tribes of desert planet Arrakis to exact revenge on those who destroyed his family. An extraordinary technological achievement.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision
★★★★★
Eccentric young Englishwoman Bella’s (Emma Stone) pregnant corpse is dragged from the Thames by Willem Dafoe’s Godwin, after which he implants the unborn infant’s brain in its dead mother’s skull as an experiment. Revived, she leaves Godwin to cut a highly sexed swathe through western Europe in this raunchy gothic comedy. An Oscar-winner which is totally unique.
Watch it: Disney+, Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube
★★★★★
This wordless animated story follows a lonely dog, called Dog, who orders a robotic companion called Robot through the post. The two soon become firm friends. This wonderful tale of friendship will enchant and amuse children and leave grown-ups in tears.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, AroVision
★★★★☆
Jake Gyllenaal is Elwood Dalton, an ex-UFC fighter approached by a Florida bar owner desperate for help – the bar is constantly troubled by a local kingpin and his goons, who we soon discover want the bar for a lucrative land deal. But Dalton, now lead bouncer, is no pushover. This remake is pure entertainment.
Watch it: Prime Video, Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube
★★★★☆
Two endearing teenage cousins, who dream of becoming pop stars abroad, endure a gruelling journey from Senegal to Europe in this rich drama. A harrowing yet hopeful migration odyssey, with the title I, Captain (in English) referring to the treacherous sea crossing that is the final leg of the teens’ journey.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision, Academy On Demand
★★★★☆
Oscar-nominated director Ryusuke Hamaguchi returns with this study of a rural Japanese community fighting the nearby development of a glamping campsite, whose septic tank will send run-off into the river. The film’s great trick is to make us sympathise with both sides, as the film’s title suggests – and a twist in the third act creates a gripping conclusion.
Watch it: Coming to NZ cinemas from July 31
★★★★☆
This thought-provoking documentary, a companion piece to 2020′s Boy State, follows 500 girls taking part in a week-long politics bootcamp in Missouri. Filmed just before the June 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, we watch friendships form, sometimes regardless of ideological difference, and startlingly nuanced debates unfold.
Watch it: Apple TV+
★★★★★
Rufus Sewell and Gillian Anderson excel as Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis in this Netflix drama unpacking the origin story of the infamous Newsnight interview. You’ll clamp hand to mouth, aghast at how this trainwreck actually happened.
Watch it: Netflix
★★★★☆
A small sum of money going missing from a jacket in a secondary school staff room leads to a community meltdown. This tense Oscar-nominated German drama is less intrigued by the petty theft itself than with the complete hysteria that ensues.
Watch it: In NZ cinemas from July 31
★★★★★
Ex Machina director Alex Garland imagines the total societal disintegration of a very near-future version of the USA, through the eyes of Kirsten Dunst as a Lee Miller-esque photojournalist. Neither anti-Trump nor anti-woke, Garland is uninterested in taking a side, but rather the business of side-taking itself, and where our growing mania for doing so leads.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision, Academy On Demand
★★★★☆
Matilda’s Alisha Weir is an absolute force in this horror-thriller about six criminals who get more than they bargained for when they kidnap a pampered prima ballerina for ransom – she’s actually a bloodthirsty vampire.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals
★★★★☆
Bill Skarsgard stars as “Boy”, a John Wick-type figure wreaking vengeance for his family’s murder in this weird dystopia, in which a Hunger Games-esque form of televised bloodsport takes place every year. With Boy deaf-mute and played silently by Skarsgard, actor H. Jon Benjamin delivers his internal monologue.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision
★★★★★
Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist play two former doubles partners and best friends who, over years, vye for the affections of Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, a goddess of the American youth circuit. This is the most purely pleasurable film of the year, with its tennis love triangle serving up racquet-twanging steaminess.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube
★★★★☆
A stuntman becomes a scapegoat in a shady Hollywood conspiracy and has to leap, scuffle and rev his way to clearing his name. Loosely based on the ′80s TV series of the same name, David Leitch’s film is witty, fresh and propelled by charm from leads Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
Watch it: In cinemas now, and streaming on Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals
★★★★★
Kristen Stewart shines in this gruesome psychosexual thriller about the relationship between gym manager Lou (Stewart), who is part of a seasoned criminal family, and ambitious bodybuilder Jackie. Jackie gradually gets pulled into Lou’s family’s life of organised crime. Director Rose Glass remains one to watch.
Watch it: Apple TV Store, Google TV, YouTube, Neon Rentals, AroVision
★★★★☆
Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary about the making of the Beatles’ final album Let It Be is re-released, after being out of circulation since the early 1980s. With a welcomely economical length compared to Sir Peter Jackson’s mammoth 2021 documentary about the same album, Lindsay-Hogg offers a fresh perspective on the Beatles’ final days.
Watch it: Disney+
★★★★☆
The fourth chapter in the reboot series follows Noa, son of the leader of a chimp clan which has been enslaved by Proximus, a megalomaniacal bonobo. He joins forces with a young human, Mae, to try to free them. It’s (surprisingly) handsome and marvellous, for a film with only two characters who aren’t motion-captured apes.
Watch it: In cinemas now
★★★★☆
Josh O’Connor plays Englishman Arthur in 1980s rural Tuscany, originally in the area for archaeological study, but soon drawn into a small local troupe of grave robbers – Arthur can sniff out buried Etruscan antiquities they can resell for a fortune. All the while, he mourns for his dead lover. A piece to meditate on – about the loss of the sacred (grave robbing), and the struggle to move on (Arthur’s grief).
Watch it: In select cinemas now
★★★★☆
John Krasinski directs this tale of 12-year-old Bea, who learns she can see people’s imaginary friends (IFs), many of whom have been abandoned by their humans. The only person sharing her talent is neighbour Cal (Ryan Reynolds), and they team up to get the IFs back to work. Charming, sweet and moving.
Watch it: In cinemas now
★★★★☆
Richard Linklater and Glen Powell co-wrote this comedy thriller about Gary Johnson, an affable psychology lecturer with a second job investigating for the police embittered lovers planning to have their partners killed. While in his undercover persona, he catches the attention of a woman he’s investigating – thus creating a body-swap comedy.
Watch it: Netflix
★★★★★
Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth star in this follow-up to 2015′s Fury Road, which uses a pared-down approach to dialogue, a vast, epic structure, and incredible stunt work to tell the story of the character Furiosa. Totally electrifying.
Watch it: In cinemas now
★★★★☆
The latest in the Japanese franchise opens at the close of World War II (the title’s “Minus One” refers to Japan’s desperate state at that historical moment). An absconded kamikaze pilot’s new job as a minesweeper puts him at the front line of Tokyo’s efforts to fend off Godzilla. Both frightening, and a moving state-of-the-nation piece.
Watch it: Netflix
★★★★☆
The sequel to Pixar’s 2015 masterpiece Inside Out follows Riley as a teenager now, with a new squad of emotions – Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui – joining the crew inside her head, just in time for a hockey camp she’s attending before starting high school. Complex ideas are animated beautifully – Pixar is in terrific form.
Watch it: In NZ cinemas from June 27
Eric Murphy and Jasmin Lawrence have been together since 2021.