Note: I have just realised that more films from MIFF are missing in this directory than exist in it. How can that be? It started as me researching a friend’s webpage on the MIFF site which listed the films he was going to attend - as we were trying to meet up at a film. I then published it here, forgetting that it was a very partial list of films. In case it’s useful, I’m leaving it up. But I’ve since got ChatGPT to go back and do it for all the films - of which there are a lot more. You can find the result here.
Welcome to my Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) guide. The films featured in MIFF are presented twice: first by estimated merit, from those rated highest according to publicly available reviews to lowest (alphabetically within equal ratings), and then alphabetically. Each rating is shown numerically and as stars.
If you’re interested, a bit of history and indeed, theory of this guide is presented in a Substack post that will be published at 10.15 am tomorrow (Wed).
By estimated merit
La Gradiva 5.0/5 ★★★★★
Marine Atlan’s first feature follows a French school trip to Pompeii, concentrating on teacher Mercier and a group of adolescents whose friendships, attractions and cruelties shift over the course of the excursion. Lessons about the eroticism, violence and social meanings contained in the ancient frescoes gradually coexist with the students’ own attempts to understand desire and one another.
This currently has the most extraordinary critical reception of anything on the list. Metacritic is at 98 from eight reviews, all positive; The Guardian, IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter each gave it their highest score, and TheWrap describes it as a major discovery. The praise centres on Atlan’s observation of adolescents, formal control and refusal to impose adult explanations on them. The sample is still small, but there is almost no critical reservation so far.
Reviews: Metacritic · TheWrap review
Ben’Imana 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Set in Rwanda in 2012, as the gacaca courts dealing with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide are coming to an end, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s first feature centres on three generations of women living with a past that remains present in family life. Elements of ghost story and domestic drama allow the historical violence to appear indirectly rather than through conventional explanatory flashbacks.
The early response is extremely strong. Screen Daily particularly admires the film’s perspective from inside Rwandan experience and its restraint, while Metacritic shows a very positive early review pool. The attraction seems to lie in its specificity and in refusing to turn trauma into a neatly resolved lesson.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Metacritic
Better Go Mad in the Wild 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Miro Remo follows identical twins František and Ondřej Klišík, now in their sixties, living an eccentric and largely self-contained existence in the Šumava mountains. They swim, quarrel, tend animals, wander the landscape and talk about art, mortality and the world they have chosen to keep at a distance. The documentary sometimes crosses into staged or dreamlike territory.
The response suggests something considerably richer than a documentary about colourful eccentrics. TheWrap found it unusually affecting, while ACMI’s MIFF notes cite similarly warm criticism and note its Crystal Globe win at Karlovy Vary. Its humour appears gradually to give way to a fairly serious film about brotherhood, solitude and death.
Reviews: TheWrap review · ACMI / MIFF listing
Closure 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Michal Marczak follows Daniel, a Polish father whose 16-year-old son Chris has disappeared. Daniel repeatedly searches the Vistula and follows traces online while the rest of the family tries to continue living without knowing whether Chris is dead or alive. The film is therefore about the peculiar condition of grief without certainty as much as about the search itself.
Screen Daily describes a sombre, humane film and particularly values Marczak’s restraint; it also won the Golden Alexander at Thessaloniki. Metacritic reflects a similarly strong response. The evidence suggests a difficult film emotionally, but one that avoids turning the disappearance into true-crime entertainment.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Metacritic
Gabin 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Maxence Voiseux films Gabin Jourdel over roughly ten years, beginning when he is eight. Gabin grows up in the farming and butcher community of rural Artois in northern France, and the documentary watches childhood give way to adolescence while the question of whether he will remain within that inherited world becomes increasingly consequential.
The reviews are remarkably consistent. Sight & Sound calls it remarkable and admires how much the years communicate without explanatory narration; Screen Daily calls it delicate and absorbing. Both suggest that patient observation produces considerable cumulative emotion.
Reviews: Sight & Sound review · Screen Daily review
Minotaur 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Andrey Zvyagintsev loosely remakes Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife in contemporary Russia. Gleb, the wealthy head of a logistics company, suspects his wife Galina of an affair while simultaneously being ordered to provide employees for military mobilisation. Jealousy, murder, class privilege and complicity in the state’s violence become increasingly difficult to separate.
This is one of the strongest new films by critical consensus. Sight & Sound calls it beautifully sinister and sees the domestic plot as a very precise account of Russian authoritarianism; The Guardian is similarly enthusiastic. The political meaning seems to arise through the characters’ conduct rather than speeches explaining it.
Reviews: Sight & Sound review · The Guardian review
Portrait of Jason 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Shirley Clarke’s 1967 documentary consists almost entirely of Jason Holliday, a gay Black hustler and aspiring cabaret performer, talking to Clarke’s camera through a long night at the Chelsea Hotel. Jason tells stories about work, sex, racism, prison and show business, while his flamboyant performance gradually makes it difficult to know where confession ends and self-invention begins. Clarke’s offscreen questioning eventually becomes part of the ethical problem posed by the film.
Its reputation has risen substantially. Richard Brody’s New Yorker essay treats it as a major work and Jason as an extraordinary monologist; MIFF’s page also foregrounds the unresolved question of whether Clarke is revealing Jason or exploiting him. It seems historically important without depending on historical importance for its interest.
Reviews: The New Yorker essay · MIFF programme page
Rehearsals for a Revolution 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Iranian filmmaker Pegah Ahangarani combines family photographs, home movies, animation, recordings and political footage to trace several decades of Iranian history through events that she or people close to her experienced. The film moves from the aftermath of the 1979 revolution and Iran-Iraq war through the 1999 student protests, the 2009 Green Movement and more recent repression and exile.
Screen Daily finds it both politically intelligent and deeply personal, particularly admiring the way private memories provide the structure for the history. Reuters gives useful background on Ahangarani’s methods and intentions. It appears to avoid the deadening effect of a chronological historical survey because each political moment belongs to an actual relationship or memory.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Reuters background
The Unfaithful Wife 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Claude Chabrol’s 1969 thriller concerns Charles and Hélène, an affluent married couple whose orderly bourgeois existence conceals Hélène’s affair. Charles discovers her lover, visits him and kills him. Chabrol then concentrates less on solving the murder than on what jealousy, violence and concealment reveal about the marriage itself.
This is one of the safest classical choices on the list. The BFI is giving it a new 4K theatrical release and describes it as a mid-career masterpiece; RogerEbert.com’s Jim Emerson likewise calls it a masterpiece and analyses how Chabrol creates unease from apparently placid domestic images. Its coolness is deliberate: the film’s power comes from how little outward melodrama accompanies rather extreme behaviour.
Reviews: BFI 4K release page · RogerEbert.com essay
Two Seasons, Two Strangers 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Sho Miyake adapts two Yoshiharu Tsuge stories into a film about encounters between solitary people and about the process of turning such encounters into stories. A seaside episode involving Natsuo and Nagisa is followed by material involving a screenwriter and a winter mountain inn; gradually the act of writing and the lives being written begin to reflect upon one another.
RogerEbert.com calls it Miyake’s most accomplished work so far and praises the way modest conversations acquire emotional force. It also won Locarno’s Golden Leopard, and the Metacritic review page contains similarly strong notices. The recurring virtue in the reviews is understatement: little is forced, yet seemingly minor meetings acquire considerable weight.
Reviews: RogerEbert.com review · Metacritic
Variations on a Theme 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs make a 65-minute South African hybrid of documentary and fiction centred on Hettie, an elderly goat-herder in the semi-desert Kamiesberge region of the Northern Cape. Around her, the film observes a community marked by dispossession, old promises and improbable dreams, while a poetic narrator and deliberately fictionalised elements prevent it from becoming a conventional social documentary.
Screen Daily is extremely enthusiastic, calling it strange, touching and fresh, and particularly praising its respect for the people it depicts and its widescreen landscapes. The film won Rotterdam’s Tiger Award. The review pool remains relatively small, but what exists makes this look like one of the more promising discoveries in the wishlist.
Reviews: Screen Daily review
Broken English 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard avoid the standard cradle-to-grave music documentary in their portrait of Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull is placed within a fictional institution called the Ministry of Not Forgetting, with George MacKay and Tilda Swinton helping construct an inquiry into the different versions of Faithfull created by herself, the press and popular culture. It culminates in footage of her final performance.
The conceit divides critics. Sight & Sound thinks the Ministry material can become clunky and didactic but finds the final performance devastating; Screen Daily is more persuaded by the invention and rebelliousness of the form. The common ground is Faithfull herself, who seems much more compelling than any device built around her.
Reviews: Sight & Sound review · Screen Daily review
Gone to Earth 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Powell and Pressburger’s 1950 Technicolor melodrama stars Jennifer Jones as Hazel Woodus, a fiercely independent young woman living amid the animals, folklore and countryside of Shropshire. Hazel becomes caught between a gentle clergyman and a predatory fox-hunting squire, with sexuality, landscape and the pursuit of animals increasingly becoming parts of the same tragedy.
The film has never possessed quite the canonical status of The Red Shoes or A Matter of Life and Death, but the current revival makes a persuasive case for it. MIFF’s programme page cites Empire on its ‘breathtaking visual delirium’, while Criterion’s coverage of the MIFF restorations places it among the significant restorations being revived. The main appeal appears to be its feverish colour, Jennifer Jones and its unusually strange conjunction of rural melodrama and folklore.
Reviews: MIFF programme page · Criterion restoration coverage
How to Divorce During the War 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Andrius Blaževičius begins in Vilnius in 2022. Marija tells her husband Vytas she wants a divorce just as Russia invades Ukraine, leaving the family’s private disintegration to unfold alongside a political catastrophe occurring frighteningly close by. The film does not simply make one crisis an allegory for the other.
Next Best Picture strongly praises the performances, writing and restrained direction, while noting a certain emotional distance and wishing the child’s viewpoint were developed further. IONCINEMA is somewhat cooler but also praises the actors and precision. The criticism suggests a controlled and intelligent domestic drama whose austerity may keep some viewers at a distance.
Reviews: Next Best Picture review · IONCINEMA review
Jauja 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Lisandro Alonso’s 2014 film casts Viggo Mortensen as Gunnar Dinesen, a Danish officer in 1880s Patagonia travelling with his teenage daughter. When she disappears with a young soldier, Dinesen enters the wilderness to find her, and what begins as a spare western gradually becomes much less certain about place, time and reality.
Metacritic records a strong critical reception, with particularly favourable notices from major US critics, and Rotten Tomatoes reflects the film’s established reputation. The recurring descriptions are beautiful, hypnotic, enigmatic and slow. If Alonso’s refusal to explain is attractive rather than irritating to you, this is one of the safer choices among the programme’s more austere films.
Reviews: Metacritic · Rotten Tomatoes
La Bola Negra 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo build a large, episodic film from queer stories occurring in different periods of Spanish history, particularly 1932, 1937 and 2017, drawing inspiration from an unfinished work by Federico García Lorca. Individual lives become part of a longer history of sexuality, repression, performance and memory.
Sight & Sound treats it as an ambitious, operatic journey through queer history, while Metacritic shows a broadly favourable but not uniform response. Admirers think the film earns its scale and emotional excess; cooler reviews find the maximalism less disciplined. I would expect something large, politically engaged and emotionally emphatic rather than subtle.
Reviews: Sight & Sound review · Metacritic
Los muertos 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Lisandro Alonso’s 2004 film follows Vargas, a middle-aged man released from prison, as he travels through rural Argentina and then upriver toward the remote home of his daughter. Alonso gives very little explanation of Vargas’s past or psychology. Actions such as travelling, rowing, obtaining food and moving through the landscape occupy more of the film than conventional plot.
Its reputation is much stronger than the hostile early Screen Daily review, which found its opacity maddening. Metacritic records an 81 from the five archived reviews, all positive, including strong notices from the New York Times, Village Voice and Salon. Critics who admire it see the physical textures and rhythms of Vargas’s journey as the substance of the film rather than an absence of substance.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Metacritic
On the Road 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
David Pablos’s Mexican film follows Veneno, a young sex worker and drug seller, and Muñeco, an older married truck driver. Their relationship develops on the road within a world of long-haul trucking, sexual commerce, masculine codes and cartel violence, making the romance inseparable from the physical dangers around them.
The festival criticism I found is strongly favourable. Cinerama Film calls it charged and unusually authentic, while EscribiendoCine responds to its treatment of desire, male prostitution and violence. The review pool remains smaller than for the Cannes competition films, so the rating carries a little more uncertainty.
Reviews: Cinerama Film review · EscribiendoCine review
School for Defectors 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Jeremy Workman spends a year at Jangdaehyun School in Busan, a small boarding school for young people who have left North Korea. The students have to deal with ordinary adolescence alongside separation from family, traumatic journeys out of the North and prejudice once they reach South Korean society.
The professional review pool is still thin, but what exists is very favourable. Film Festival Today gives it five stars and praises its humanity; The Moveable Fest likewise finds it deeply touching, particularly in showing the students gaining confidence rather than treating them simply as illustrations of North Korean politics. My rating is deliberately a little more conservative because two positive reviews do not yet make much of a consensus.
Reviews: Film Festival Today review · The Moveable Fest review
We Are All Strangers 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Anthony Chen returns to Singapore for a 157-minute family drama. Widowed noodle-stall owner Boon Kiat lives with his aimless young son Junyang; Junyang’s girlfriend Lydia becomes pregnant just as Boon Kiat begins a relationship with Bee Hwa, a bar waitress. The expanding household lets Chen move between generational conflict, money, aspiration, work and contemporary Singaporean ideas of success.
The criticism is quite strong. The Guardian calls it marvellously addictive and responds to its generosity toward the characters. Screen Daily also finds it involving and well performed, while noting that it is overextended and occasionally schematic. The length appears to be the main reservation rather than the material itself.
Reviews: The Guardian review · Screen Daily review
Bitter Christmas 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Pedro Almodóvar constructs a story in which filmmaking itself becomes part of the subject. One strand concerns Elsa, a director in 2004; another introduces Raúl, a filmmaker in 2026 whose relationship to Elsa’s story makes the boundary between lived experience and its artistic appropriation increasingly unstable. Grief, friendship and the morality of turning other people into material run through it.
The reviews are favourable without approaching the enthusiasm surrounding Almodóvar’s strongest films. Metacritic records a fairly broad spread of positive and middling responses, while the Financial Times is much more enthusiastic. Critics tend to like its wit, performances and formal playfulness, while some find the recursion emotionally distancing.
Reviews: Metacritic · Financial Times review
Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Henry Jaglom’s 1983 New York comedy, now circulating in a new 4K restoration, begins when Zee, played by Karen Black, is abandoned by her husband. While eating chocolate ice cream in an Upper West Side café she meets Eli, another divorcee, and the two embark on an eccentric, argumentative and deliberately unpolished courtship.
The recent reassessment is affectionate rather than reverential. The Movie Buff thinks Black is the main reason to see it and responds to the film’s loose New York character; InSession Film calls it sweet and enjoyable while giving it a more qualified grade. This seems a good choice if shaggy, actor-led 1980s American independent cinema appeals to you.
Reviews: The Movie Buff review · InSession Film review
Coward 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Lukas Dhont moves to the Belgian front during the First World War. Pierre and Francis, two soldiers, become involved in a clandestine relationship while participating in amateur theatrical performances that permit identities and desires which military life otherwise suppresses.
The reception is positive but noticeably qualified. Screen Daily admires its intimacy and restraint; The Guardian finds it heartfelt and well acted but also fairly predictable. It sounds finely made and sincere, though perhaps more conventional than its setting initially promises.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · The Guardian review
Dead Man’s Wire 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Gus Van Sant reconstructs Tony Kiritsis’s extraordinary 1977 hostage crisis. Kiritsis kidnapped a mortgage executive and connected a shotgun to him with a wire arranged so that killing Kiritsis would also fire the weapon. The ensuing standoff became both a media spectacle and an expression of Kiritsis’s rage at lenders and the economic order he believed had cheated him.
Critical opinion ranges from strong enthusiasm to indifference. RogerEbert.com is among the advocates, while the Associated Press gives it three stars out of four and stresses its energy. Other reviews find the material more compelling than the interpretation Van Sant ultimately places on it. It sounds entertaining, blackly comic and well acted, but not necessarily a major Van Sant.
Reviews: RogerEbert.com review · Associated Press review
Dry Leaf 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Alexandre Koberidze follows Irakli after his adult daughter Lisa, a sports photographer, announces that she is disappearing from her parents’ lives. Because Lisa had been travelling through Georgia photographing football grounds, Irakli retraces her route from pitch to pitch with her friend Levani, whom we hear but never see. The three-hour film is shot in deliberately degraded low-resolution digital video.
This is probably the most taste-dependent selection here. The Guardian sees intriguing beauty and invention but ultimately finds the long, drifting journey defeating; Metacritic collects several more sympathetic responses to its visual experiments and slowness. The qualities one critic experiences as patience and mystery are almost exactly those another experiences as inertia.
Reviews: The Guardian review · Metacritic
Flesh and Fuel 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Pierre Le Gall’s debut is a romance set among European long-haul truckers. Étienne, a French driver, meets Bartosz, a Polish driver, and their relationship develops within a working life governed by distance, schedules, border crossings and considerable economic inequality.
In Review Online finds it open-hearted and affecting, although increasingly conventional as the plot develops; IONCINEMA likewise responds to the romance while finding Bartosz less fully written than Étienne. The evidence points to a sympathetic and credible love story rather than an especially formally adventurous one.
Reviews: In Review Online review · IONCINEMA review
My Wife Cries 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Angela Schanelec begins with crane operator Thomas and his wife Carla after Carla has survived a car crash in which a man she knew has died. Rather than supplying an ordinary psychological account of her distress, Schanelec moves elliptically through the couple’s life, conversations and separations, leaving causes, emotional connections and sometimes basic narrative information unstated.
Screen Daily thinks it may be catnip to devotees of Schanelec’s severe modernism while warning that others may find its opacity exasperating. Cineuropa is much warmer, finding austerity, humour and emotion in the same approach. This looks less like a question of quality than of whether Schanelec’s radical withholding appeals to you.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Cineuropa review
The Day She Returns 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Hong Sangsoo’s black-and-white film follows an actress returning to public life after an absence of twelve years. She gives interviews and visits an acting class, where versions of the interviews are later reconstructed. Hong uses repetition and altered retellings to make performance, memory and the instability of an apparently simple encounter into the subject.
Screen Daily admires Song Sunmi but finds the film slight and increasingly ponderous. Loud and Clear is appreciably warmer about the humour, repetition and performance, although it too has reservations about the final section. This sounds like a film for existing Hong admirers rather than an especially strong introduction to him.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Loud and Clear review
The Man I Love 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Ira Sachs sets his film in late-1980s New York. Rami Malek plays Jimmy George, a gay theatre artist recovering from an HIV-related health crisis while continuing to perform, live with his partner Dennis and become involved with a new neighbour. Sachs keeps AIDS present without organising the film around a conventional illness narrative.
The division among critics is interesting because it centres partly on Malek. Screen Daily finds him powerful and the film intelligent and touching; The Guardian thinks his mannered performance overwhelms the subtler film around him. The result sounds deliberately fragmentary and emotionally serious, but with no settled agreement that Sachs’s restraint and Malek’s intensity fit together.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · The Guardian review
Yesterday Island 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Sam Voutas’s Australian comedy begins when failed novelist Amos agrees to substitute for a friend at a remote island research station. He discovers that he is repeating the same day and can apparently escape only by persuading somebody else to take his place. His ex-partner Gemma subsequently becomes involved, turning a neat escape mechanism into an increasingly awkward moral and comic problem.
There is very little professional criticism yet. The most substantial review I found, at FictionMachine, finds it cheerfully entertaining, clever about repetition and impressively resourceful for its budget, while also saying it produces more smiles than big laughs and does not reach the best films in the time-loop genre. ACMI’s MIFF page is useful for programme information, but there simply is not enough criticism yet for a confident consensus.
Reviews: FictionMachine review · ACMI / MIFF listing
Sheep in the Box 3.0/5 ★★★☆☆
Hirokazu Kore-eda moves into near-future science fiction. A grieving couple receive an artificial child associated with the son they have lost, allowing Kore-eda’s recurring interest in what makes a family to intersect with questions about replacement, artificial personhood and whether grief can be technologically managed.
The reception is surprisingly weak for Kore-eda. RogerEbert.com finds much of the character material moving but regards the ending as a serious failure; Screen Daily calls it scattershot and syrupy, while The Guardian is harsher again. There seems to be a good Kore-eda family drama inside it, but much less agreement that the speculative story resolves successfully.
Reviews: RogerEbert.com review · Screen Daily review
The Fence 3.0/5 ★★★☆☆
Claire Denis adapts Bernard-Marie Koltès, setting the action around a construction compound in West Africa. Alboury arrives demanding the body of his dead brother from Horn, the white supervisor. The resulting confrontation exposes the racial, economic and colonial hierarchy on which the apparently functional workplace depends.
Metacritic currently places the film in distinctly mixed territory, with positive and mixed reviews roughly evenly divided. Screen Daily finds atmosphere and force in it, while other major critics have been much less persuaded. Even sympathetic responses tend to describe recognisably Denis-like qualities rather than one of her major achievements.
Reviews: Metacritic · Screen Daily review
The Legend of Lylah Clare 3.0/5 ★★★☆☆
Robert Aldrich’s 1968 Hollywood gothic gives Kim Novak two connected roles. Unknown actress Elsa Brinkmann is cast as dead screen goddess Lylah Clare and enters the orbit of Lylah’s former husband and director, played by Peter Finch. Elsa begins to resemble Lylah in increasingly disturbing ways while the film turns the Hollywood star system itself into a form of possession.
The interesting thing here is the change in reputation. Roger Ebert’s contemporary review thought it awful, if enjoyably so; Richard Brody’s later New Yorker reassessment takes its excess and Hollywood satire much more seriously. ACMI accurately describes its present status as a reclaimed camp cult film. I would see it for fascination and Novak rather than because criticism has established it as a neglected masterpiece.
Reviews: Roger Ebert review · The New Yorker reassessment · ACMI / MIFF listing
Parallel Tales 2.5/5 ★★½☆☆
Asghar Farhadi’s French-language film stars Isabelle Huppert as Sylvie, a novelist who watches neighbours through a telescope and turns observed lives into fiction. When the resulting material begins circulating and people recognise themselves, questions about voyeurism, authorship and a writer’s entitlement to other people’s experiences become part of the plot.
This is the clearest critical warning sign in the list. Metacritic currently sits at 41, with no positive reviews among the 17 it counts. Sight & Sound finds the ideas interesting but the drama frustratingly opaque; The Guardian is somewhat kinder but still regards it as middleweight Farhadi. Huppert seems to be the most reliable pleasure.
Reviews: Metacritic · Sight & Sound review
Reviews by alphabetical order
Ben’Imana 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Set in Rwanda in 2012, as the gacaca courts dealing with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide are coming to an end, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s first feature centres on three generations of women living with a past that remains present in family life. Elements of ghost story and domestic drama allow the historical violence to appear indirectly rather than through conventional explanatory flashbacks.
The early response is extremely strong. Screen Daily particularly admires the film’s perspective from inside Rwandan experience and its restraint, while Metacritic shows a very positive early review pool. The attraction seems to lie in its specificity and in refusing to turn trauma into a neatly resolved lesson.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Metacritic
Better Go Mad in the Wild 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Miro Remo follows identical twins František and Ondřej Klišík, now in their sixties, living an eccentric and largely self-contained existence in the Šumava mountains. They swim, quarrel, tend animals, wander the landscape and talk about art, mortality and the world they have chosen to keep at a distance. The documentary sometimes crosses into staged or dreamlike territory.
The response suggests something considerably richer than a documentary about colourful eccentrics. TheWrap found it unusually affecting, while ACMI’s MIFF notes cite similarly warm criticism and note its Crystal Globe win at Karlovy Vary. Its humour appears gradually to give way to a fairly serious film about brotherhood, solitude and death.
Reviews: TheWrap review · ACMI / MIFF listing
Bitter Christmas 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Pedro Almodóvar constructs a story in which filmmaking itself becomes part of the subject. One strand concerns Elsa, a director in 2004; another introduces Raúl, a filmmaker in 2026 whose relationship to Elsa’s story makes the boundary between lived experience and its artistic appropriation increasingly unstable. Grief, friendship and the morality of turning other people into material run through it.
The reviews are favourable without approaching the enthusiasm surrounding Almodóvar’s strongest films. Metacritic records a fairly broad spread of positive and middling responses, while the Financial Times is much more enthusiastic. Critics tend to like its wit, performances and formal playfulness, while some find the recursion emotionally distancing.
Reviews: Metacritic · Financial Times review
Broken English 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard avoid the standard cradle-to-grave music documentary in their portrait of Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull is placed within a fictional institution called the Ministry of Not Forgetting, with George MacKay and Tilda Swinton helping construct an inquiry into the different versions of Faithfull created by herself, the press and popular culture. It culminates in footage of her final performance.
The conceit divides critics. Sight & Sound thinks the Ministry material can become clunky and didactic but finds the final performance devastating; Screen Daily is more persuaded by the invention and rebelliousness of the form. The common ground is Faithfull herself, who seems much more compelling than any device built around her.
Reviews: Sight & Sound review · Screen Daily review
Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Henry Jaglom’s 1983 New York comedy, now circulating in a new 4K restoration, begins when Zee, played by Karen Black, is abandoned by her husband. While eating chocolate ice cream in an Upper West Side café she meets Eli, another divorcee, and the two embark on an eccentric, argumentative and deliberately unpolished courtship.
The recent reassessment is affectionate rather than reverential. The Movie Buff thinks Black is the main reason to see it and responds to the film’s loose New York character; InSession Film calls it sweet and enjoyable while giving it a more qualified grade. This seems a good choice if shaggy, actor-led 1980s American independent cinema appeals to you.
Reviews: The Movie Buff review · InSession Film review
Closure 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Michal Marczak follows Daniel, a Polish father whose 16-year-old son Chris has disappeared. Daniel repeatedly searches the Vistula and follows traces online while the rest of the family tries to continue living without knowing whether Chris is dead or alive. The film is therefore about the peculiar condition of grief without certainty as much as about the search itself.
Screen Daily describes a sombre, humane film and particularly values Marczak’s restraint; it also won the Golden Alexander at Thessaloniki. Metacritic reflects a similarly strong response. The evidence suggests a difficult film emotionally, but one that avoids turning the disappearance into true-crime entertainment.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Metacritic
Coward 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Lukas Dhont moves to the Belgian front during the First World War. Pierre and Francis, two soldiers, become involved in a clandestine relationship while participating in amateur theatrical performances that permit identities and desires which military life otherwise suppresses.
The reception is positive but noticeably qualified. Screen Daily admires its intimacy and restraint; The Guardian finds it heartfelt and well acted but also fairly predictable. It sounds finely made and sincere, though perhaps more conventional than its setting initially promises.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · The Guardian review
Dead Man’s Wire 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Gus Van Sant reconstructs Tony Kiritsis’s extraordinary 1977 hostage crisis. Kiritsis kidnapped a mortgage executive and connected a shotgun to him with a wire arranged so that killing Kiritsis would also fire the weapon. The ensuing standoff became both a media spectacle and an expression of Kiritsis’s rage at lenders and the economic order he believed had cheated him.
Critical opinion ranges from strong enthusiasm to indifference. RogerEbert.com is among the advocates, while the Associated Press gives it three stars out of four and stresses its energy. Other reviews find the material more compelling than the interpretation Van Sant ultimately places on it. It sounds entertaining, blackly comic and well acted, but not necessarily a major Van Sant.
Reviews: RogerEbert.com review · Associated Press review
Dry Leaf 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Alexandre Koberidze follows Irakli after his adult daughter Lisa, a sports photographer, announces that she is disappearing from her parents’ lives. Because Lisa had been travelling through Georgia photographing football grounds, Irakli retraces her route from pitch to pitch with her friend Levani, whom we hear but never see. The three-hour film is shot in deliberately degraded low-resolution digital video.
This is probably the most taste-dependent selection here. The Guardian sees intriguing beauty and invention but ultimately finds the long, drifting journey defeating; Metacritic collects several more sympathetic responses to its visual experiments and slowness. The qualities one critic experiences as patience and mystery are almost exactly those another experiences as inertia.
Reviews: The Guardian review · Metacritic
Flesh and Fuel 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Pierre Le Gall’s debut is a romance set among European long-haul truckers. Étienne, a French driver, meets Bartosz, a Polish driver, and their relationship develops within a working life governed by distance, schedules, border crossings and considerable economic inequality.
In Review Online finds it open-hearted and affecting, although increasingly conventional as the plot develops; IONCINEMA likewise responds to the romance while finding Bartosz less fully written than Étienne. The evidence points to a sympathetic and credible love story rather than an especially formally adventurous one.
Reviews: In Review Online review · IONCINEMA review
Gabin 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Maxence Voiseux films Gabin Jourdel over roughly ten years, beginning when he is eight. Gabin grows up in the farming and butcher community of rural Artois in northern France, and the documentary watches childhood give way to adolescence while the question of whether he will remain within that inherited world becomes increasingly consequential.
The reviews are remarkably consistent. Sight & Sound calls it remarkable and admires how much the years communicate without explanatory narration; Screen Daily calls it delicate and absorbing. Both suggest that patient observation produces considerable cumulative emotion.
Reviews: Sight & Sound review · Screen Daily review
Gone to Earth 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Powell and Pressburger’s 1950 Technicolor melodrama stars Jennifer Jones as Hazel Woodus, a fiercely independent young woman living amid the animals, folklore and countryside of Shropshire. Hazel becomes caught between a gentle clergyman and a predatory fox-hunting squire, with sexuality, landscape and the pursuit of animals increasingly becoming parts of the same tragedy.
The film has never possessed quite the canonical status of The Red Shoes or A Matter of Life and Death, but the current revival makes a persuasive case for it. MIFF’s programme page cites Empire on its ‘breathtaking visual delirium’, while Criterion’s coverage of the MIFF restorations places it among the significant restorations being revived. The main appeal appears to be its feverish colour, Jennifer Jones and its unusually strange conjunction of rural melodrama and folklore.
Reviews: MIFF programme page · Criterion restoration coverage
How to Divorce During the War 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Andrius Blaževičius begins in Vilnius in 2022. Marija tells her husband Vytas she wants a divorce just as Russia invades Ukraine, leaving the family’s private disintegration to unfold alongside a political catastrophe occurring frighteningly close by. The film does not simply make one crisis an allegory for the other.
Next Best Picture strongly praises the performances, writing and restrained direction, while noting a certain emotional distance and wishing the child’s viewpoint were developed further. IONCINEMA is somewhat cooler but also praises the actors and precision. The criticism suggests a controlled and intelligent domestic drama whose austerity may keep some viewers at a distance.
Reviews: Next Best Picture review · IONCINEMA review
Jauja 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Lisandro Alonso’s 2014 film casts Viggo Mortensen as Gunnar Dinesen, a Danish officer in 1880s Patagonia travelling with his teenage daughter. When she disappears with a young soldier, Dinesen enters the wilderness to find her, and what begins as a spare western gradually becomes much less certain about place, time and reality.
Metacritic records a strong critical reception, with particularly favourable notices from major US critics, and Rotten Tomatoes reflects the film’s established reputation. The recurring descriptions are beautiful, hypnotic, enigmatic and slow. If Alonso’s refusal to explain is attractive rather than irritating to you, this is one of the safer choices among the programme’s more austere films.
Reviews: Metacritic · Rotten Tomatoes
La Bola Negra 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo build a large, episodic film from queer stories occurring in different periods of Spanish history, particularly 1932, 1937 and 2017, drawing inspiration from an unfinished work by Federico García Lorca. Individual lives become part of a longer history of sexuality, repression, performance and memory.
Sight & Sound treats it as an ambitious, operatic journey through queer history, while Metacritic shows a broadly favourable but not uniform response. Admirers think the film earns its scale and emotional excess; cooler reviews find the maximalism less disciplined. I would expect something large, politically engaged and emotionally emphatic rather than subtle.
Reviews: Sight & Sound review · Metacritic
La Gradiva 5.0/5 ★★★★★
Marine Atlan’s first feature follows a French school trip to Pompeii, concentrating on teacher Mercier and a group of adolescents whose friendships, attractions and cruelties shift over the course of the excursion. Lessons about the eroticism, violence and social meanings contained in the ancient frescoes gradually coexist with the students’ own attempts to understand desire and one another.
This currently has the most extraordinary critical reception of anything on the list. Metacritic is at 98 from eight reviews, all positive; The Guardian, IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter each gave it their highest score, and TheWrap describes it as a major discovery. The praise centres on Atlan’s observation of adolescents, formal control and refusal to impose adult explanations on them. The sample is still small, but there is almost no critical reservation so far.
Reviews: Metacritic · TheWrap review
Los muertos 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Lisandro Alonso’s 2004 film follows Vargas, a middle-aged man released from prison, as he travels through rural Argentina and then upriver toward the remote home of his daughter. Alonso gives very little explanation of Vargas’s past or psychology. Actions such as travelling, rowing, obtaining food and moving through the landscape occupy more of the film than conventional plot.
Its reputation is much stronger than the hostile early Screen Daily review, which found its opacity maddening. Metacritic records an 81 from the five archived reviews, all positive, including strong notices from the New York Times, Village Voice and Salon. Critics who admire it see the physical textures and rhythms of Vargas’s journey as the substance of the film rather than an absence of substance.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Metacritic
Minotaur 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Andrey Zvyagintsev loosely remakes Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife in contemporary Russia. Gleb, the wealthy head of a logistics company, suspects his wife Galina of an affair while simultaneously being ordered to provide employees for military mobilisation. Jealousy, murder, class privilege and complicity in the state’s violence become increasingly difficult to separate.
This is one of the strongest new films by critical consensus. Sight & Sound calls it beautifully sinister and sees the domestic plot as a very precise account of Russian authoritarianism; The Guardian is similarly enthusiastic. The political meaning seems to arise through the characters’ conduct rather than speeches explaining it.
Reviews: Sight & Sound review · The Guardian review
My Wife Cries 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Angela Schanelec begins with crane operator Thomas and his wife Carla after Carla has survived a car crash in which a man she knew has died. Rather than supplying an ordinary psychological account of her distress, Schanelec moves elliptically through the couple’s life, conversations and separations, leaving causes, emotional connections and sometimes basic narrative information unstated.
Screen Daily thinks it may be catnip to devotees of Schanelec’s severe modernism while warning that others may find its opacity exasperating. Cineuropa is much warmer, finding austerity, humour and emotion in the same approach. This looks less like a question of quality than of whether Schanelec’s radical withholding appeals to you.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Cineuropa review
On the Road 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
David Pablos’s Mexican film follows Veneno, a young sex worker and drug seller, and Muñeco, an older married truck driver. Their relationship develops on the road within a world of long-haul trucking, sexual commerce, masculine codes and cartel violence, making the romance inseparable from the physical dangers around them.
The festival criticism I found is strongly favourable. Cinerama Film calls it charged and unusually authentic, while EscribiendoCine responds to its treatment of desire, male prostitution and violence. The review pool remains smaller than for the Cannes competition films, so the rating carries a little more uncertainty.
Reviews: Cinerama Film review · EscribiendoCine review
Parallel Tales 2.5/5 ★★½☆☆
Asghar Farhadi’s French-language film stars Isabelle Huppert as Sylvie, a novelist who watches neighbours through a telescope and turns observed lives into fiction. When the resulting material begins circulating and people recognise themselves, questions about voyeurism, authorship and a writer’s entitlement to other people’s experiences become part of the plot.
This is the clearest critical warning sign in the list. Metacritic currently sits at 41, with no positive reviews among the 17 it counts. Sight & Sound finds the ideas interesting but the drama frustratingly opaque; The Guardian is somewhat kinder but still regards it as middleweight Farhadi. Huppert seems to be the most reliable pleasure.
Reviews: Metacritic · Sight & Sound review
Portrait of Jason 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Shirley Clarke’s 1967 documentary consists almost entirely of Jason Holliday, a gay Black hustler and aspiring cabaret performer, talking to Clarke’s camera through a long night at the Chelsea Hotel. Jason tells stories about work, sex, racism, prison and show business, while his flamboyant performance gradually makes it difficult to know where confession ends and self-invention begins. Clarke’s offscreen questioning eventually becomes part of the ethical problem posed by the film.
Its reputation has risen substantially. Richard Brody’s New Yorker essay treats it as a major work and Jason as an extraordinary monologist; MIFF’s page also foregrounds the unresolved question of whether Clarke is revealing Jason or exploiting him. It seems historically important without depending on historical importance for its interest.
Reviews: The New Yorker essay · MIFF programme page
Rehearsals for a Revolution 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Iranian filmmaker Pegah Ahangarani combines family photographs, home movies, animation, recordings and political footage to trace several decades of Iranian history through events that she or people close to her experienced. The film moves from the aftermath of the 1979 revolution and Iran-Iraq war through the 1999 student protests, the 2009 Green Movement and more recent repression and exile.
Screen Daily finds it both politically intelligent and deeply personal, particularly admiring the way private memories provide the structure for the history. Reuters gives useful background on Ahangarani’s methods and intentions. It appears to avoid the deadening effect of a chronological historical survey because each political moment belongs to an actual relationship or memory.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Reuters background
School for Defectors 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Jeremy Workman spends a year at Jangdaehyun School in Busan, a small boarding school for young people who have left North Korea. The students have to deal with ordinary adolescence alongside separation from family, traumatic journeys out of the North and prejudice once they reach South Korean society.
The professional review pool is still thin, but what exists is very favourable. Film Festival Today gives it five stars and praises its humanity; The Moveable Fest likewise finds it deeply touching, particularly in showing the students gaining confidence rather than treating them simply as illustrations of North Korean politics. My rating is deliberately a little more conservative because two positive reviews do not yet make much of a consensus.
Reviews: Film Festival Today review · The Moveable Fest review
Sheep in the Box 3.0/5 ★★★☆☆
Hirokazu Kore-eda moves into near-future science fiction. A grieving couple receive an artificial child associated with the son they have lost, allowing Kore-eda’s recurring interest in what makes a family to intersect with questions about replacement, artificial personhood and whether grief can be technologically managed.
The reception is surprisingly weak for Kore-eda. RogerEbert.com finds much of the character material moving but regards the ending as a serious failure; Screen Daily calls it scattershot and syrupy, while The Guardian is harsher again. There seems to be a good Kore-eda family drama inside it, but much less agreement that the speculative story resolves successfully.
Reviews: RogerEbert.com review · Screen Daily review
The Day She Returns 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Hong Sangsoo’s black-and-white film follows an actress returning to public life after an absence of twelve years. She gives interviews and visits an acting class, where versions of the interviews are later reconstructed. Hong uses repetition and altered retellings to make performance, memory and the instability of an apparently simple encounter into the subject.
Screen Daily admires Song Sunmi but finds the film slight and increasingly ponderous. Loud and Clear is appreciably warmer about the humour, repetition and performance, although it too has reservations about the final section. This sounds like a film for existing Hong admirers rather than an especially strong introduction to him.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · Loud and Clear review
The Fence 3.0/5 ★★★☆☆
Claire Denis adapts Bernard-Marie Koltès, setting the action around a construction compound in West Africa. Alboury arrives demanding the body of his dead brother from Horn, the white supervisor. The resulting confrontation exposes the racial, economic and colonial hierarchy on which the apparently functional workplace depends.
Metacritic currently places the film in distinctly mixed territory, with positive and mixed reviews roughly evenly divided. Screen Daily finds atmosphere and force in it, while other major critics have been much less persuaded. Even sympathetic responses tend to describe recognisably Denis-like qualities rather than one of her major achievements.
Reviews: Metacritic · Screen Daily review
The Legend of Lylah Clare 3.0/5 ★★★☆☆
Robert Aldrich’s 1968 Hollywood gothic gives Kim Novak two connected roles. Unknown actress Elsa Brinkmann is cast as dead screen goddess Lylah Clare and enters the orbit of Lylah’s former husband and director, played by Peter Finch. Elsa begins to resemble Lylah in increasingly disturbing ways while the film turns the Hollywood star system itself into a form of possession.
The interesting thing here is the change in reputation. Roger Ebert’s contemporary review thought it awful, if enjoyably so; Richard Brody’s later New Yorker reassessment takes its excess and Hollywood satire much more seriously. ACMI accurately describes its present status as a reclaimed camp cult film. I would see it for fascination and Novak rather than because criticism has established it as a neglected masterpiece.
Reviews: Roger Ebert review · The New Yorker reassessment · ACMI / MIFF listing
The Man I Love 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Ira Sachs sets his film in late-1980s New York. Rami Malek plays Jimmy George, a gay theatre artist recovering from an HIV-related health crisis while continuing to perform, live with his partner Dennis and become involved with a new neighbour. Sachs keeps AIDS present without organising the film around a conventional illness narrative.
The division among critics is interesting because it centres partly on Malek. Screen Daily finds him powerful and the film intelligent and touching; The Guardian thinks his mannered performance overwhelms the subtler film around him. The result sounds deliberately fragmentary and emotionally serious, but with no settled agreement that Sachs’s restraint and Malek’s intensity fit together.
Reviews: Screen Daily review · The Guardian review
The Unfaithful Wife 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Claude Chabrol’s 1969 thriller concerns Charles and Hélène, an affluent married couple whose orderly bourgeois existence conceals Hélène’s affair. Charles discovers her lover, visits him and kills him. Chabrol then concentrates less on solving the murder than on what jealousy, violence and concealment reveal about the marriage itself.
This is one of the safest classical choices on the list. The BFI is giving it a new 4K theatrical release and describes it as a mid-career masterpiece; RogerEbert.com’s Jim Emerson likewise calls it a masterpiece and analyses how Chabrol creates unease from apparently placid domestic images. Its coolness is deliberate: the film’s power comes from how little outward melodrama accompanies rather extreme behaviour.
Reviews: BFI 4K release page · RogerEbert.com essay
Two Seasons, Two Strangers 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Sho Miyake adapts two Yoshiharu Tsuge stories into a film about encounters between solitary people and about the process of turning such encounters into stories. A seaside episode involving Natsuo and Nagisa is followed by material involving a screenwriter and a winter mountain inn; gradually the act of writing and the lives being written begin to reflect upon one another.
RogerEbert.com calls it Miyake’s most accomplished work so far and praises the way modest conversations acquire emotional force. It also won Locarno’s Golden Leopard, and the Metacritic review page contains similarly strong notices. The recurring virtue in the reviews is understatement: little is forced, yet seemingly minor meetings acquire considerable weight.
Reviews: RogerEbert.com review · Metacritic
Variations on a Theme 4.5/5 ★★★★½
Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs make a 65-minute South African hybrid of documentary and fiction centred on Hettie, an elderly goat-herder in the semi-desert Kamiesberge region of the Northern Cape. Around her, the film observes a community marked by dispossession, old promises and improbable dreams, while a poetic narrator and deliberately fictionalised elements prevent it from becoming a conventional social documentary.
Screen Daily is extremely enthusiastic, calling it strange, touching and fresh, and particularly praising its respect for the people it depicts and its widescreen landscapes. The film won Rotterdam’s Tiger Award. The review pool remains relatively small, but what exists makes this look like one of the more promising discoveries in the wishlist.
Reviews: Screen Daily review
We Are All Strangers 4.0/5 ★★★★☆
Anthony Chen returns to Singapore for a 157-minute family drama. Widowed noodle-stall owner Boon Kiat lives with his aimless young son Junyang; Junyang’s girlfriend Lydia becomes pregnant just as Boon Kiat begins a relationship with Bee Hwa, a bar waitress. The expanding household lets Chen move between generational conflict, money, aspiration, work and contemporary Singaporean ideas of success.
The criticism is quite strong. The Guardian calls it marvellously addictive and responds to its generosity toward the characters. Screen Daily also finds it involving and well performed, while noting that it is overextended and occasionally schematic. The length appears to be the main reservation rather than the material itself.
Reviews: The Guardian review · Screen Daily review
Yesterday Island 3.5/5 ★★★½☆
Sam Voutas’s Australian comedy begins when failed novelist Amos agrees to substitute for a friend at a remote island research station. He discovers that he is repeating the same day and can apparently escape only by persuading somebody else to take his place. His ex-partner Gemma subsequently becomes involved, turning a neat escape mechanism into an increasingly awkward moral and comic problem.
There is very little professional criticism yet. The most substantial review I found, at FictionMachine, finds it cheerfully entertaining, clever about repetition and impressively resourceful for its budget, while also saying it produces more smiles than big laughs and does not reach the best films in the time-loop genre. ACMI’s MIFF page is useful for programme information, but there simply is not enough criticism yet for a confident consensus.
Reviews: FictionMachine review · ACMI / MIFF listing