Films by Collection

Staff Picks: Rebecca McMillan

What an exercise in restraint. I don’t endorse restricting your own festival wishlist to a mere dozen. But IF you were forced to… then I recommend going no further than this fine selection of female voices, Cannes audience winners, animation storytelling, retro cinema, fresh adventures, and humour. 

Aquarius

Kleber Mendonça Filho

Brazilian actress Sonia Braga has the role of her life in this engrossing and richly surprising portrait of a fiercely intelligent and independent woman fighting to save the apartment she loves from demolition.

Toni Erdmann

Maren Ade

Hailed at Cannes as a brilliantly original comic masterpiece, Austrian writer/director Maren Ade’s epic of parent-child dysfunction centres on a father assailing his uptight corporate daughter with crazy pranks.

Tanna

Bentley Dean, Martin Butler

Australian documentary filmmakers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler collaborated with villagers in the Vanuatu highlands who’d never seen a movie to create this luminous tale of forbidden love and continuously evolving tradition.

Lovesong

So Yong Kim

Jena Malone and Riley Keough play former college friends whose infrequent meetings run deep in director So Yong Kim’s intimate, beautifully nuanced study of friendship and the attraction of opposites.

Kate Plays Christine

Robert Greene

Director Robert Greene and actress Kate Lyn Sheil blur fiction and reality as they investigate and reconstruct the story of newscaster Christine Chubbuck, who infamously committed suicide live on-air in 1974.

McCabe & Mrs Miller

Robert Altman

A stunning digital restoration of Robert Altman’s classic, lyrical reinvention of the American Western, made in 1971. Warren Beatty stars as a gambler going into business with Cockney madam Julie Christie. Songs by Leonard Cohen.

Cameraperson

Kirsten Johnson

Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson assembles excerpts and offcuts from her remarkable career (to date) to evoke an assortment of uneasily resolved questions about ethics and compassion in documentary film.

Thirst

Jajda

Svetla Tsotsorkova

In this richly atmospheric debut, a hot summer in the Bulgarian countryside gets hotter when a family acquires two extra inhabitants on their parched property – a well-driller and his unruly teenage daughter.

The Lure

Córki dancingu

Agnieszka Smoczyńska

A bizarre, sublimely surreal vampire-mermaid musical from Poland about two siren sisters who lure their prey from the stage of a trashy Warsaw nightclub.

Swiss Army Man

Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan

Paul Dano discovers all the tools he needs for survival in Daniel Radcliffe’s multi-purpose corpse in this wildly weird desert island comedy from viral and music video oddballs the Daniels.

The Red Turtle

La Tortue rouge

Michael Dudok de Wit

Studio Ghibli’s first international co-production is a ravishing castaway fable that combines beauty, mystery, drama and heartbreak – with not a word spoken. It’s a triumph for animator Michael Dudok de Wit.