Best New Zealand movies

Many thousands of years in the future, Earth’s cities roam the globe on huge wheels, devouring each other in a struggle for ever diminishing resources. On one of these massive traction cities, the old London, Tom Natsworthy has an unexpected encounter with a mysterious young woman from the wastelands who will change the course of his life forever.

Vampire housemates try to cope with the complexities of modern life and show a newly turned hipster some of the perks of being undead.

The life story of New Zealander Burt Munro, who spent years building a 1920 Indian motorcycle—a bike which helped him set the land-speed world record at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats in 1967.

When Kylie Bucknell is sentenced to home detention, she's forced to come to terms with her unsociable behaviour, her blabbering mother and a hostile spirit who seems less than happy about the new living arrangement.

Journalist David Farrier stumbles upon a mysterious tickling competition online. As he delves deeper he comes up against fierce resistance, but that doesn’t stop him getting to the bottom of a story stranger than fiction.

Two teenage boys unwittingly summon an ancient evil entity known as The Blind One by delving into black magic while trying to escape their mundane lives.

Precocious teenager Juliet moves to New Zealand with her family and soon befriends the quiet, brooding Pauline through their shared love of fantasy and literature. This friendship gradually develops into an intense and obsessive bond.

A warrior-assassin is forced to hide in a small town in the American Badlands after refusing a mission.

Boy, an 11-year-old child and devout Michael Jackson fan who lives on the east coast of New Zealand in 1984, gets a chance to know his absentee criminal father, who has returned to find a bag of money he buried years ago.

After a top-secret experiment misfires, a scientist may be the only man left alive in the world.

A genetic engineering experiment gone horribly awry turns a large flock of docile sheep into unrelenting killing machines.

A drama about a Maori family living in Auckland, New Zealand. Lee Tamahori tells the story of Beth Heke’s strong will to keep her family together during times of unemployment and abuse from her violent and alcoholic husband.

A contemporary story of love, rejection, and triumph as a young Maori girl fights to fulfill a destiny her grandfather refuses to recognize.

Every culture has one – the horrible monster fueling young children's nightmares. But for Tim, the Boogeyman still lives in his memories as a creature that devoured his father 16 years ago. Is the Boogeyman real, or did Tim make it up to explain why his father abandoned his family?

Love blossoms for Lily over double Meaty Boy burgers at mid-day when uber-computer nerd Jarrod comes in and leaves with free extra large fries. After gatecrashing Jarrod's party and proving her skills on the game console, Lily goes down to Jarrod's home town with him so he can settle an old score with a past school bully.

A school teacher is forced to confront a brutal act from his past when a pair of ruthless drifters takes him and his family on a nightmare road-trip.

The documentary tells the hitherto unknown story behind an extraordinary and desperate fight to bring the truth to light. Told and made by those who lived it, the filmmakers' unprecedented access to the inner workings of the defense allows the film to show the investigation, research, and appeals process in a way that has never been seen before; revealing shocking and disturbing new information about a case that still haunts the American South.

Two women run a business breaking up couples for cash but when one develops a conscience their friendship unravels.

In 1978 Oregon, Ben and Jules inherit an abandoned coastal property from Ben's late mother, who's never mentioned it. The untouched house has been kept a secret for 40 years and comes with a beautiful private cove and beach. Jules searches for answers while Ben unwittingly awakens a fiercely protective creature.

When a terrified family flees a desolate southern New Zealand farmhouse, two cynical scientists and a young psychic are sent to investigate their claims of a haunting. There they encounter a powerful spirit that will protect the house's secrets at all costs.

Heidi, star of the "Meet The Feebles Variety Hour" discovers her lover Bletch the Walrus is cheating on her. And with all the world waiting for the show, the assorted co-stars must contend with drug addiction, extortion, robbery, disease, drug dealing, and murder.

The story of New Zealander Bruce McLaren, who founded the McLaren Motor Racing team, showing the world that a man of humble beginnings could take on the elite of motor racing and win.

Confined to a secluded rest home and trapped within his stroke-ridden body, a former Judge must stop an elderly psychopath who employs a child's puppet to abuse the home's residents with deadly consequences.

Eleven-year-old Mildred’s life is turned upside down when her mother lands in hospital and estranged, American magician father, Strawn Wise, comes to look after her. Hoping to entertain the bookish tween, Strawn takes Mildred camping in the notoriously rugged New Zealand wilderness, and the pair embark on the ultimate test of family bonding – a quest to find the mythological beast known as the Canterbury Panther.

Milton, a college dropout, was only supposed to cook meth for one day. Broken out of rehab by a brash young woman and her trigger-happy ("ex") boyfriend and driven to a remote cabin the woods, Milton finds himself drawn into a dangerous love triangle gone haywire. The couple's deadpan half-truths spin around Milton like a song on repeat. They seem to read him like an open book, until a mysterious message opens his eyes to his cursed existence. With unlimited ammunition, any hunting tool they could desire, and an ever-growing body count, for what did Milton really sign up?

Hongi, a Maori chieftain’s teenage son, must avenge his father’s murder in order to bring peace and honour to the souls of his loved ones after his tribe is slaughtered through an act of treachery. Vastly outnumbered by a band of villains led by Wirepa, Hongi’s only hope is to pass through the feared and forbidden “Dead Lands” and forge an uneasy alliance with a mysterious warrior, a ruthless fighter who has ruled the area for years.

Filling the giant screen with stunning time-lapse vistas of Antarctica, and detailing year-round life at McMurdo and Scott Base, Anthony Powell’s documentary is a potent hymn to the icy continent and the heavens above.

In 1989 the trimaran Rose Noelle set sail from Picton, New Zealand, bound for Tonga with four crew. After a freak wave capsized the yacht, they drifted for 119 days before landing on Great Barrier Island.

When an awkward but brilliant Chinese student wins a scholarship into a prestigious New Zealand University, she finds a new way of achieving the popularity she craves one bloody body at a time.

Film adaptation of French economist Thomas Piketty's ground-breaking global bestseller of the same name: an eye-opening journey through wealth and power.

A trio of accidental outlaws travel the length of New Zealand, protesting conformity and chasing lost love, with a posse of cops and a media frenzy in pursuit.

Zenon Kar is 15 and lives on a space station which the military has taken over and is dismantling. She receives a mysterious signal and must convince everyone that it's from aliens who have come to help them.

War journalist Paul Prior returns to his New Zealand hometown after his father’s death, rekindling strained relationships with his brother and memories of a troubled past. He befriends Celia, a curious and aspiring writer, who shares a fascination with his world. When Celia mysteriously disappears, Paul becomes the prime suspect, forcing him to confront buried secrets and uncover the dark truths of his family and community.

A 3D feature film about Sir Edmund Hillary's monumental and historical ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953 - an event that stunned the world and defined a nation.

As a war rages on in the province of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, a young girl becomes transfixed by the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, which is being read at school by the only white man in the village.

Who says being an undead creature of the night is easy? With that in mind, three ancient friends—centuries-old vampires Vulvus, the romantic and temperamental Lord Byron wannabe; Viago, the flamboyant 19th-century dandy; and Deacon, the rebellious 107-year-old youngster—invite a documentary crew to shed light on a vampire’s daily life. Starting from the fateful day of their eternal transformation, these modern-day blood-suckers don’t shy away from answering deeply personal questions about their quirky flatmate situation—after all, this is an interview, not just an excuse for a quick bite.Will we ever truly find out what vampires do in the shadows?

Following reports of fraudulent car clamping in Auckland, journalist and filmmaker David Farrier opens an investigation that pushes him to the limits of his sanity in this incredible true story of psychological warfare.

American ballet dancer Joy Womack is accepted into Moscow's infamously tough Bolshoi Ballet Academy, with the dream of becoming a great ballerina.

The film tells the story of Mosley, a "thoriphant" who rebels against his life of servitude and embarks on a treacherous journey to find the fabled city of Uprights.

Global, dynamic, and eye-opening, this is story of the most daring cyber heist of all time, the Bangladeshi Central Bank theft, tracing the origins of cyber-crime from basic credit card fraud to the wildly complex criminal organisations in existence today, supported by commentary and fascinating insight from highly regarded cyber security experts.

Inspired by the true stories of New Zealand's street gangs across 30 years, we follow Danny at three defining moments in his life as he grows from a boy into the violent enforcer of a gang.

Set in the Channel Islands on the eve of D Day, two Kiwi commandos, sent to destroy German gun emplacements to distract Hitler's forces away from Normandy, discover a Nazi occult plot to unleash demonic forces to win the war.

Hercules and Iolaus take time out from Iolaus' wedding preparations, to help a distant village under attack from "monsters". When they reach their destination, they find the monsters are in fact Amazonian women who are controlled by Hera. "Hercules and the Amazon Women" is the first movie-length pilot episode of the television series "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys".

When a self-destructive teenager is suspended from school and asked to look after his feisty alcoholic grandmother as a punishment, the crazy time they spend together turns his life around.

Wannabe-adventurer Zoe freaks out when she falls pregnant to her long-term boyfriend Tim. As Tim embraces the prospect of fatherhood, Zoe attempts to rush through her dreams.

In the midst of a new scheme to publicly report surgeons’ performance, a gifted surgeon’s life is thrown into disarray as her colleagues begin to close ranks, and even her partner, a nurse at the hospital, turns her back on her.

A 17 year-old student is forced to get off the fence he has actively sat on all his life to stand up for himself, his whanau (family) and his future in this heartwarming story of identity.

A dysfunctional gang of criminals takes a middle class Maori family hostage and discovers too late that they are cannibals.

Ordinary people find extraordinary courage in the face of madness. On 13–14 November 1990 that madness came to Aramoana, a small New Zealand seaside town, in the form of a lone gunman with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle. As he stalked his victims the terrified and confused residents were trapped for 24 hours while a handful of under-resourced and under-armed local policemen risked their lives trying to find him and save the survivors. Based on true events.

The vampire myth is given a stylish 1960s treatment, where a human cop partners with a vampire cop to stop a vamp bent on creating a war between the two "separate but equal" races.

When villagers begin disappearing it is discovered that they had fallen through a crack in the earth which goes straight to Hades. Hercules once again comes to the rescue and faces one of his most difficult challenges, and must prove himself as a man as well as a god. "Hercules in the Underworld" is the fourth made for TV movie in the series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

The life story of Colin McKenzie, a forgotten pioneer of international cinema who was born in rural New Zealand in 1888.

Hercules comes to the aid of a young woman who is seeking the lost city of Troy. Eventually, Hercules leads her to a camp of refugees from the city, which has been taken over by Hera's Blue Priests. Hercules helps the refugees take back the city. "Hercules and the Lost Kingdom" is the second movie-length pilot episode of the television series "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys".

A four-day journey turns into a fight for survival. This is a psychological thriller about Ian, who wants to get as far away from humanity as possible, into the New Zealand bush. Some other individuals get attached to him. And he has the feeling that they are being followed. Is that real though?

Jim is preparing for his first professional fight but begins to rethink his life's trajectory and his sexuality after tangling with Whetu, a gay Maori boy who spends his days in an old shack down by the beach.

Five years have passed and Jake has turned his back on his family. He's still up to his usual tricks in McClutchy's Bar, unaware, as he downs his latest opponent, that his eldest son, Nig, has died in a gang fight. The uncomfortable family reunion at Nig's funeral sparks a confrontation with second son, Sonny, and sets Jake and Sonny on a downward spiral.

When all the earth's fire begins to go out, Hercules and Deianeira must go in search for fire to stop the world from cold. "Hercules and the Circle of Fire" is the third movie-length pilot episode of the television series "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys".

Teenage twins battle dark forces hidden beneath Auckland's volcanoes.

Sometimes first love is found in the most unlikely of places, like in the carpark outside the Te Kaha pub.

From the land of early Peter Jackson comes another Braindead movie in bad taste. It’s the third day of shooting the low budget horror ‘Tonight They Come’ on location in the wilds of New Zealand. Director SMP is already beside himself having to work with a self-obsessed leading man and a bimbo actress when into his line of fire comes a new runner, wannabe screenwriter Wesley Pennington. Clearly an accident-prone nerd, Wesley nevertheless tries his best to fit in with the crazed cast and demented crew while falling head over heels for Susan, the set caterer. But something nasty has entered the local water supply and suddenly the zombie extras start acting like genuine members of the living dead, gore stunts looks even more authentic and actual severed limbs fly. Reel life turns real as Wesley attempts to save the day while ensuring his latest script will get made.

Coming of age tale told through the eyes of 'Tu', an ambitious young man from Auckland who dreams of being a professional hip-hop dancer.

Sometimes the best things in life happen on the fly. From the moment an injured duck crash-lands on Doug's roof, everything changes. Recently dumped and wallowing in self pity, Doug decides to nurse Pierre back to health with the assistance of an eccentric vet and bird specialist, Holly.

Chasing Great is an insightful portrayal that weaves Richie McCaw's life story into his final season as an All Black, revealing the determination and mental toughness of an international sporting legend who still sees himself as an 'ordinary guy' from small town New Zealand.

Bunny King is a mother of two, a rough cut diamond with a sketchy past. While battling the system to reunite with her children, a confrontation leads her to take her niece Tonyah under her wing. With the world against her and Tonyah, Bunny’s battle has just begun.

American tattoo artist Jake Sawyer wanders the world, exploring and exploiting ethnic themes in his tattoo designs. At a tattoo expo in Singapore, he gets his first glimpse at the exotic world of traditional Samoan tattoo (tatau), and, in a thoughtless act, unwittingly unleashes a powerful angry spirit. In his devastating journey into Pacific mysticism, Jake must find a way to save his new love, Sina and recover his own soul.

In a distant future, a mysterious boy becomes the central figure in the search for a new hope. Who is this kid? Why is everyone looking for it? Sometimes it is better not to know certain answers…