Film Picks: Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy, Nordic Film Festival, The Power Of The Dog

Former lovers meet, driven by the need for closure, healing or the masochistic impulse to reopen wounds in this anthology of three short films by Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

As in his other 2021 film, Drive My Car (also showing at The Projector), a drama about lost love, Hamaguchi enjoys digging into the ways characters imprison themselves in the past. Each encounter carries the possibility of rekindled passion or something more dangerous.

In Once Again, the third short story in Wheel, a coincidental reunion occurs between former high-school classmates Natsuko (Fusako Urabe) and Aya (Aoba Kawai). But as the minutes tick by, regrets about things left unsaid begin to surface.

Like Drive My Car, Wheel is a festival favourite. It won the second highest award, the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, at this year's Berlin International Film festival.

This year's edition of the festival features 10 films from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

In 2013, the terror group ISIS kidnapped Danish photojournalist Daniel Rye while he was in Syria. Held For Ransom (M18, 139 minutes, screening on Dec 25, 8.30pm) is a dramatisation of his experience.

It covers Rye's (Esben Smed) time in captivity, his government's stance on negotiating with terrorists and his family's use of a crowd-funding campaign to raise the millions of dollars his kidnappers demanded, with no assurance he would be freed after it was paid.

Where: The Projector, Level 5 Golden Mile Tower, 6001 Beach Road
MRT: Nicoll Highway
When: Till Dec 26, various times
Admission: $15, with discounts for Fan Club, seniors and others
Info: The Projector's website

On a turn-of-the-century American ranch, two adults fight for the soul of a young man. New Zealand writer-director Jane Campion could have turned this story into a religious allegory about the battle between good and evil, or perhaps a western tale about hard men in a hard place.

The Oscar-winning film-maker of 1993 drama The Piano develops both these ideas, but adds the element that gives her films bite - psychosexual tension.

Adapted from novelist Thomas Savage's book of the same name, an emotional tug of war breaks out between wealthy rancher Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and recent arrival to the ranch Rose (Kirsten Dunst), the new wife of Phil's browbeaten brother George (Jesse Plemons). When Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Rose's son from a previous relationship, gravitates to the side of the bully Phil, she is heartbroken.