Classy fare from Africa to Poland

British/South Africa co-production Tsotsi is a penetrating character piece and an edge-of-the-seat thriller.

The World Cinema Showcase, now established as the second festival on the Auckland filmgoer's calendar, is significantly different in flavour from the midwinter behemoth in intensity and scale.

Bill Gosden, the director of both, uses the autumn event to give another outing to classy movies from last year's main fest that were never picked up for general release (the Dardenne brothers' terrific The Child and the ecological disaster documentary aptly titled Darwin's Nightmare are cases in point this year.)

The star attraction, thanks to its best-foreign-film nod at the Oscars, is the British/South Africa co-production Tsotsi, an electrifying drama set and shot in the townships of Johannesburg. The film's eponymous gangster hero is the vicious cock of the walk whose life is upended when a car theft goes wrong. At once intimate and epic, it's both a penetrating character piece and an edge-of-the-seat thriller.

But the festival is also a platform for multiple screenings of excellent European, arthouse or independent films that would struggle to find general distribution.

This year's programme has some titles with ready-made audiences of people who enjoyed the makers' earlier movies. 5x2 is the work of Francois Ozon, and Russian Dolls is from Cedric Klapisch.

Ozon's recent films, Under the Sand and Swimming Pool, both starring the agelessly elegant Charlotte Rampling, were well-received here. The new picture depicts a marriage in meltdown but narrates the story in reverse. Klapisch made the popular The Spanish Apartment, to which Russian Dolls is a sequel of sorts.

The Danes are well represented. Brothers (by Suzanne Bier, the maker of 2004's Open Hearts) delves deep into family dynamics with a story about strikingly different siblings - a soldier and a wastrel - whose lives collide. And Accused is an edge-of-the-seat drama about a family torn apart when the teenage daughter accuses her father of having slept with her.

You can seek refuge in some of the programme's lighter moments. The Great Dictator (1940), Charlie Chaplin's first full talkie, was a merciless satire of Hitler (Chaplin plays him as Adenoid Hynkel) and although it's scarcely a laugh-out-loud comedy it has moments of comic genius.

A Fistful of Dynamite is the oddest of the so-called spaghetti westerns made in the 1960s and 70s by Italian director Sergio Leone. The most famous were those starring Clint Eastwood, but the man in charge this time is James Coburn.

With the exception of the odd Spanish comedy Ferpect Crime, much of the programme is downbeat. That's no bad thing when it serves up work of the class of Down To The Bone, a perfectly observed drama about a cocaine addict trying to go straight. The radiant authenticity of its performances recalls the fabulous You Can Count On Me of a few years back.

And there's Le Grand Voyage, a sometimes funny but very moving film about a young and irreligious Frenchman reluctantly taking his pious Muslim father to Mecca.

Kiwi film-makers are in evidence, too. Apart from Disarm, there's a new film by Annie Goldson (Punitive Damage, Georgie Girl) about a curious connection with the Elgar cello concerto.

A special treat is Tickets, in which three directors (Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi) collaborate on a single film, each directing a part that seamlessly links to the others.

Fans of the late Polish maestro Krzysztof Kieslowski (whose Dekalog was a highlight of the 1980s) get the chance to revisit his ravishing, mysterious and ineffable masterpiece The Double Life of Veronique. Watching it, you have to agree they don't make movies like they used to.