Warm-up with a weekend of classics

Audrey Hepburn in 1957 classic film Funny Face.

The organisation behind the mid-year New Zealand International Film Festival has announced the line-up for its annual "Autumn at The Civic" warm-up weekend in April. The weekend of Friday, April 11 to Sunday, April 13 will give movie buffs the chance to see five classics on the big screen of the country's greatest picture palace. They are:

Aguirre, The Wrath of God: Werner Herzog's restored 1972 epic of Spanish conquistadors going mad in the Amazon, starring German cult star Klaus Kinski at his most unhinged.

Funny Face: The 1957 musical which has Fred Astaire as a fashion photographer determined to make a runway star out of Audrey Hepburn (pictured), via an excursion from New York to Paris and some very nice frocks.

On the Waterfront: The 1954 Elia Kazan-directed Marlon Brando classic about crime, corruption and union intimidation among New York City dockworkers which swept the Academy Awards in eight categories.

The Third Man: From 1949, the great British film noir adapted by director Carol Reed from the pages of Graham Greene, which starred Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in a story of murder and black marketeering in post-war Vienna.

The Wind Rises: And from 2013, the subtitled version of what may be the final work of great and influential Japanese animator Miyazaki Hayao, who has announced his retirement. It tells the a fictionalised story of brilliant aeronautical engineer Horikoshi Jiro, who, in real life designed many of Japan's fighter aircraft during World War II.

Tickets for the screenings go on sale today via ticketmaster. For more info: nziff.co.nz/autumn-events.

- TimeOut