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Taking you further into film every Monday night on the big screen, the way nature intended🎬

06/10/2026

Amélie for goth girls - HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDALPERSON (Ariane Louis-Seize, 2023, 87 mins) screens Mon 12 Oct at 7.30pm at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

The film follows sensitive teenage vampire Sasha (Sara Montpetit) as she struggles with the moral weight of killing humans for their blood. When her parents enact tough love and cut off her blood supply, she is forced to hunt, but quickly finds her fangs don’t necessarily cooperate – she just can’t bring herself to commit murder. She is sent to live with her ruthless cousin Denise (Noemie O’Farrell) who is more than eager to show her the ropes – and meat-hooks.

Only when Sasha meets Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a depressed teenage boy planning his su***de, does she find a moral loophole – killing someone who wants to die. The two make a pact – she can kill him for his blood on the condition that she spends the night helping him complete a few final tasks before he dies. - NZIFF.

05/10/2026

The Show Me Shorts Film Festival plays at Alice Cinema from 14-25 October.

See the best shorts from Aotearoa and around the world.

04/10/2026

Celebrate “150 Years of Specialness.” - TRUE STORIES (David Byrne, 1986, 90 mins) screens tonight at 7.30pm at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

There are more than 50 sets of twins in David Byrne’s “True Stories,” I learned by studying the press notes, and perhaps we should pause here for a moment to meditate upon that fact. A hundred twins are not going to make or break a movie, and the average audience is not going to notice more than a fraction of them.

Consider the state of mind of the person who decided the film should have 50 sets of twins. That person undoubtedly is Byrne. What was he thinking of? My hunch is that he was thinking about the movie’s voodoo: the magical things that go on beneath the surface of the work of art, lending it an aura that seeps up into the visible parts. Any movie made by actors and technicians who know that the director has hired 50 sets of twins is going to be a movie made by people who think the director is a very strange man. And that will affect their work. Even the ordinary moments in “True Stories” seem a little odd, as if the actors are trying to humor the weirdo they’re working for. - Roger Ebert.

03/10/2026

Affectionate comedy of funhouse Americana is one of the most ahead-of-its-time films of the 80s - TRUE STORIES (David Byrne, 1986, 90 mins) screens Mon 5 Oct at 7.30pm at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

As the frontman for the Talking Heads, David Byrne constructed a persona of nervous anxiety—a mercurial blend of ironic kitsch and earnest sentiment—pitted against the baffling ways of a rapidly modernizing world. Inspired by local tabloid stories and personal sketches he made while touring, 1986’s True Stories is clearly the product of this artistic mindset...

The film’s depiction of Americana at the onset of globalizing capitalism presents a Tati-esque vision of cultural homogenization that nonetheless feels like an honest tribute to the drab surroundings of much of the country’s small towns. Shopping malls, box-like office buildings, and metal warehouses conspicuously dot an otherwise gorgeous landscape, but these edifices are as crucial to the identity of Virgil as the surrounding widescreen vistas.

As shot by Ed Lachman, True Stories balances worn, realistic looking neighborhoods with vivid splashes of color that deepen the off-kilter nature of the film’s setting and people, stressing that both sprang out of Byrne’s head and reflect his skewed perception of the world. - Slant Magazine.

01/10/2026

David Byrne’s exuberant musical road trip through Texas - TRUE STORIES (David Byrne, 1986, 90 mins) screens Mon 5 Oct at 7.30pm at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make this sole foray into feature film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind.

Byrne plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness. As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyper-realistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings.

In True Stories, Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show—all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience. - BFI.

29/09/2026

A film about a bunch of people in Virgil, Texas - TRUE STORIES (David Byrne, 1986, 90 mins) screens Mon 5 Oct at 7.30pm at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make his sole foray into feature-film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind. The Talking Heads front man plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness.

As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyperrealistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings. In True Stories, Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show—all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience. - Criterion Collection.

27/09/2026

Mesmeric horror of inescapable grief - DON'T LOOK NOW (Nicolas Roeg, 1973, 110 mins) screens tonight at 7.30pm at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

Time collapses in Don’t Look Now. The past and future are folded into the present. Anyone who has seen Roeg’s work from this peak period of his career – this film was preceded by the sensual Outback adventure Walkabout and the elliptical science fiction of The Man Who Fell to Earth – will recognize his intuitive, semi-experimental editing and how much it pushed the boundaries of commercial cinema. Yet there’s something special about the way certain patterns and visual motifs keep cycling through this film, a reminder that grief can strike at any time for John and his wife Laura (Julie Christie), no matter how far they run from it. - The Guardian.

25/09/2026

Sutherland and Christie give the movie its mournful, deeply moving heart - DON'T LOOK NOW (Nicolas Roeg, 1973, 110 mins) screens Mon 28 Sept at 7.30pm at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

Based on a Daphne du Maurier short story and made in 1973, it's one of the most haunting, enigmatic and, in the final moments, bloodily shocking movies ever made - and it showcases, in Roeg, one of Britain's most distinctive voices...

It's difficult to pin down exactly what makes Don't Look Now so effective. From its opening, in which we witness the sudden drowning of the Baxters' daughter (brilliantly shot with pre-Steadicam hand-held by cinematographer Anthony Richmond), the film starts to creep into the subconscious. Images of water permeate the movie; red is associated both with overwhelming grief and danger. Shattered glass and empty dining rooms are equally regular symbolic motifs, while Venice, deserted and wintry, is a suitably chilly setting for the enigmatic riddle. - Empire Magazine.

23/09/2026

Few films can as efficiently induce an attack of the screaming heebie-jeebies - DON'T LOOK NOW (Nicolas Roeg, 1973, 110 mins) screens Mon 28 Sept at 7.30pm at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie mesmerize as a British married couple on an extended trip to Venice following a family tragedy. While in that elegantly decaying city, they have a series of inexplicable, terrifying, and increasingly dangerous experiences. A masterpiece from Nicolas Roeg, Don’t Look Now, adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier, is a brilliantly disturbing tale of the supernatural, as renowned for its innovative editing and haunting cinematography as for its naturalistic eroticism and its unforgettable climax and denouement—one of the great endings in horror history. - Criterion Collection.

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Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū
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