RICK'S REEL RECOMMENDATIONS | ISSUE THREE | WHENUA Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai  & Letterboxd   | Film Columnist Chocolat (Claire Denis, 1988) Don’t get mixed up here: I don’t mean ‘ Chocolat ’ (2000). Not the shlocky rom-com starring Juliette Binoche as a travelling chocolatier who brings love back to rural France with the power of sweeties, the DVD which you find on op-shop shelves next to Hayley Westenra CDs. I mean the lesser-known ‘Chocolat’ , about a native African...

COLUMN | WAIRUATANGA / SPIRITUALITY Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai  on IG & Letterboxd   | Film Columnist 1.   A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956) The goal is to escape. It’s the only goal. Hours, days, and months pass while Fontaine, a captured French Resistance fighter, chips away at the door of his prison cell. Sweeping away the wood shavings on the floor, he plies the frame of his bed for a wire with which to weave a rope. Bresson is famously a director who leaves...

RICK'S REEL RECOMMENDATIONS | COLUMN | TUAKIRI / IDENTITY Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Film Columnist We're All Going To The Worlds Fair (Jane Schoenbrun, 2021)   Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) The infallible tale of Mary Shelley’s ‘ Frankenstein ’   has seen a well-deserved refresh in the people’s consciousness since it was resurrected last Halloween season by Guillermo Del Toro, the monster-lovin’ sweetheart. As much as I was moved by his...

FEATURE | REVIEW | HANGA / CRAFT Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickylaitheokperson | Contributing Writer ‘You need to be bigger, you need to be bolder, and you need to be everywhere’ , declared Kaine Thompson, Chair of the 2025 board of the Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival on its opening night in Tāmaki Makaurau. These words were their vision statement as accrued from the previous year’s feedback, and yet I, who couldn’t have been sizzling more with excitement in the...

DEBATE X NZIFF | REVIEW | WEB EXCLUSIVE Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickylaitheokperson  | Contributing Columnist Follow Ricky Lai...

DEBATE X NZIFF | REVIEW | WEB EXCLUSIVE Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickylaitheokperson  | Contributing Columnist Follow Ricky Lai...