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Nelson Mail film reviewer David Manning offers a guide and some picks for this year's New Zealand International Film Festival.

Documentaries dominate the 2010 New Zealand International Film Festival, which started yesterday at the Suter Cinema in Nelson.

Of 35 movies from 16 countries screening in the festival, 18 are documentaries, including three of the four films from New Zealand.

Sam Hunt: Purple Balloon and Other Stories offers a portrait of the well-known Kiwi poet; Last Paradise is Clive Neeson's compilation of his best adventure sports filming; and Gordonia is Tom Reilly's documentary about Graham Gordon's struggle in Waitakere to retain his dominion of wrecked cars and outcast vehicles.

New Zealand's fourth festival film is The Hopes and Dreams of Gazza Snell, a comedy-drama from Brendon Donovan about a Howick dad obsessed with go-kart racing and badly needing to grow up.

The festival again includes Homegrown, a selection of six new New Zealand short films.

Besides documentaries, the festival offers dramas, comedies, thrillers, a romance, an animated feature and a couple of nostalgic treats. Here are six that stand out.

I Am Love: This lavish Italian drama about a clannish family of wealthy Milanese industrialists undergoing sweeping changes opened the festival in Nelson last night, but also screens tomorrow and on Saturday. Visually lavish, it's a tragic love story starring Tilda Swinton.

Animal Kingdom: Set in the crime world of Melbourne's underbelly, this blistering tale of a crime family's implosion, starring Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton and Guy Pearce, won the World Jury Dramatic Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Four Lions: British comedian Chris Morris targets fear-mongering terrorist mythology in this pitch-black comedy about four British jihadists which, according to rottentomatoes.com, is "a comic tour de force" showing "that while terrorism is about ideology, it can also be about idiots".

Please Give: This comedy of liberal guilt is, says Rolling Stone magazine, "a perceptive, rounded portrait of middle-class Manhattan women bound together by family ties and real estate envy" and "an unnervingly hilarious and heartfelt comedy of bad manners". Starring Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt.

Exit Through the Gift Shop: This documentary, from famously anonymous British street artist prankster Banksy, calls itself "the world's first street art disaster movie", but Film Comment magazine says it's also "one of the most inspired, adroit, hilarious debut features ever".

Honey: Semih Kaplanoglu's trilogy finale (after Milk and Egg) offers a child's evolving view of the natural world. Set in Turkey, the film has been described as mesmerising and magical, with the Financial Times calling Bora Altas' performance "touching, truthful and overpoweringly charming".

Other documentaries screening are Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, a frank and funny portrait of the American comedienne; Oceans, a showcase of an otherworldly underwater world; Babies, documenting the first year in the lives of four infants from different parts of the world; His & Hers, on girls and women talking about the boys and men in their lives; Teenage Paparazzo, focusing on a 12-year-old paparazzi photographer and investigating fame; and Waste Land, a study of the men and women who sift through the refuse in one of the world's largest rubbish dumps in Rio de Janeiro.

Profiles of American comedian Bill Hicks, New York photographer Bill Cunningham, pianist Glenn Gould and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat are also among the documentaries.

Dance features in NY Export: Opus Jazz, described as a "ballet in sneakers", and in a look at the Paris Opera Ballet in La Danse. World-famous pianists and a piano tuner star in Pianomania, while When You're Strange focuses on Jim Morrison and the Doors.

For dramas and comedies, or a blend of both, the festival offers Mammuth, a nutty French comedy starring Gerard Depardieu; Kawasaki's Rose, a Czech drama about communist state surveillance; Howl, about the trial for obscenity of Allen Ginsberg's titular poem; Puzzle, an Argentine-French comedy-drama about a housewife who is a whiz at giant jigsaw puzzles; and I Killed my Mother, a Canadian comedy-drama about a teenage boy and his mother's intense dislike for each other.

Cell 211, a tough Spanish-French prison movie that won Spain's best-film Goya Award plus seven others, and 25 Carat, a taut Spanish romantic pulp fiction full of plot twists, are the festival's thrillers.

Looking for a love story? Certified Copy is a much-praised French romance starring Juliette Binoche, who won the Cannes best actress award this year for her performance. The Illusionist is an animated delight from the maker of The Triplets of Belleville, while Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone's 1968 epic Italian western, and The Red Shoes, the 1948 tale of a young ballerina, are the festival's offerings from yesteryear.

• The New Zealand International Film Festival's Nelson season runs from September 8 to 23. Bookings through the Suter Cinema. See nzff.co.nz for more.

- © Fairfax NZ News