Workplace dramas

Two very different workplace-set dramas provide the highlights of today’s programme at the New Zealand International Film Festival.

Welcome to New York (R18, 8.30pm, Northlands) focuses on the career-imploding misadventures of former IMF chief (and presumptive French presidential candidate) Dominique Strauss-Kahn (played here with verve by Gerard Depardieu). ‘‘A bluntly powerful provocation that begins as a kind of tabloid melodrama and gradually evolves into a fraught study of addiction, narcissism and the lava flow of capitalist privilege,’’ wrote Variety magazine’s Scott Foundas. Check back here each weekday for festival highlights until its conclusion on August 10.

Meanwhile, The Double (M, 4pm, Hoyts Riccarton) sees Richard Ayoade ( Submarine) adapt Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1846 novella about a government worker who finds himself replaced by a far more charismatic doppelganger. The superb, dystopian art direction reminds one of Orson Welles’ The Trial meets Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, while Jesse Eisenberg proves why he’s one of the most exciting actors of his generation by creating two distinct characters without any physical transformation.

Check back here each day for festival highlights until its conclusion on August 24. For more festival information and films, see The Press Entertainment pages, or nziff.co.nz