Film Carew: Melbourne International Film Festival Edition 1

Sometimes when I'm out there on the streets, the kids they come up to me and say 'Film Carew, how can we be more like you?' and I tell them they can't, but they can sure die trying. And sometimes, the kids say 'Film Carew, is it true that you've seen every single film at the Film Festival already?' and I gotta break their little hearts again and say, sorry son, I've only seen like 70 or something; there's 250 of them things! But when they say 'Film Carew, could you review every single film you've seen, and tier them into hierarchical groupings that let us know what is actually worth witnessing?' well, then, I can give the kids exactly what they ask for. So, with the MIFF kicking off today, here you are: as much as the program as I've been humanly able to consume, broken down and beaten down, for your utmost pleasure.

DEFINITELY

Alps (Greece, director Yorgos Lanthimos): Lanthimos' prior picture, Dogtooth, was one of the best films of the past decade, and even if Alps doesn't quite match its majesty, it's still a glorious piece of cinema from one of the world's most interesting directors. It's another piece of deadpan provocation whose buried themes seem to be cinema, the theatricality of human life, Greek obsession with ersatz traditions and archaic institutions, and authoring the world around you to be its own work of fiction.

The Ambassador (Denmark, Mads Brügger): Fresh off the brilliance of The Red Chapel —in which his theatrical troupe's touring ruse was no match for the sustained performance-art of daily life in North Korea— the shit-stirring Danish satirist poses as a venture capitalist seeking a sideline in corrupt African diplomacy. Those seeking journalistic scruples may want to look away, as Brügger —strutting about like some Sacha Baron-Cohen caricature— exposes corruption by committing it; using his 'honorary consulship' to procure blood diamonds on the Zentropa dime.

Beijing Besieged By Waste (China, Wang Jiuliang): Making high art from the depths of human society, Wang chronicles —in majestic photography— the scourge of illegal dumps and overflowing landfill sights that ring Beijing like a noose; and those luckless urchins who live and work amongst the refuse of the megacity. It's very much a film of this thematic instant: this abundance of waste a problem growing ever-more dire on this overpopulated, under-resourced planet.

Bestiaire (Canada, Denis Côté): The oddball Québécois filmmaker follows last year's absurdist Curling with a documentary movie of stunning silence. Consisting solely of a series of unbroken long-takes looking wordlessly at animals within their man-made enclosures, it's a damning —yet warm, beautiful, and odd— look at man's destructive, depressing dominion.

Best Intentions (Romania, Adrian Sitaru): In an ironic inversion of the mighty The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu, here the Romanian health-care system's tattered reputation drives the lead character crazy with paranoia that his mum'll be misdiagnosed and maltreated. Nearly the entire narrative is shot POV, but they're different points-of-view in every scene, and sometimes multiple times therein; Sitaru creating a kind of cinematic schizophrenia as the narrative is perceived from a constant —but ever-shifting— subjective perspective.

Holy Motors (France, Leos Carax): After thirteen years in the wilderness, the onetime enfant terrible of French cinema returns with his undoubted magnum opus: a wild cinematic ride of absurdist comedy, symbolist storytelling, bona fide strangeness, and Kylie Minogue musical numbers; taking place in a surreal otherworld of immortality and pantomimed death that suggest Paris as cinema itself.

Las Acacias (Argentina, Pablo Giorgelli): Fans of humanist cinema, narrative simplicity, and/or lengthy stretches of silence will be in awe of Giorgelli's tender, touching, warmly-beautiful-but-barely-there tale, which can be synopsised entirely like this: an Argentine truck driver gives a cross-the-border lift to a young Paraguayan mother and her infant daughter. As they roll along the highway, barely a word is spoken, but slowly the communion of their co-travelling becomes its own form of profundity.

Miss Bala (Mexico, Gerardo Naranjo): If we're going to dare to call Miss Bala an action movie: then let's call it one of the best action movies in recent memory; a kinetic, claustrophobic, crushing descent into a Tijuana turf war in which the audience is, like our titular beauty-queen heroine, taken hostage. If there's a comparable contemporary picture, it's probably The Hurt Locker: another action movie of very little action, but copious, almost unbearable tension; in which the accessibility of the chosen genre does nothing to diminish its artistry.

Modest Reception (Iran, Mani Haghighi): No one does cinematic parables like the Iranians, and there's shades of Kirosmatic/Makhmalbaf/Farhadi/etc in this piece of stark provocation, in which a pair of mysterious grifters dispatch bags of cash to the waifs of the rural mountains, with their true motives never disclosed and, thus, wide-open to interpretation.

Moonrise Kingdom (USA, Wes Anderson): Acolytes in the Church of Wes may just pass out in rapturous swoons mid-Moonrise Kingdom, an impossibly-beautiful portrait of pre-adolescent lovers whose attempts to refashion the adult world into the stuff of their daydreams is analogous to Anderson's career-long cinematic shrine to his own imaginary realm.

Oslo, 31. August (Norway, Joachim Trier): Trier's follow-up to his rollicking literary-rivals drama Reprise is an elegant, intensely beautiful piece of sociological cinema; a survey of a city and its citizens through the final day in the life of one existential ex-junkie.

Our Children (Belgium, Joachim Lafosse): Lafosse's slow-burning drama turns a family unit into thematic quicksand; the austere Belgian creating an air of smothering, ever-descending dread as a child-rearing young couple cedes increasing power to their in-house 'godfather' figure; a wealthy benefactor, grandpa, and emotional blackmailer all in one. It's a brutal portrait of the cost of living, in both its literal and figurative senses; and the climax —or, in this case, nadir— is unbearable.

Pink Ribbons, Inc. (Canada, Léa Pool): Clear-eyed, unsentimental takedown of the billion-dollar industry of breast cancer 'awareness'; in which corporate entities hijack a deadly disease in aid of morally-questionable marketing, and women are robbed of their righteous anger via a top-down demand to put a cheerful, smiling, reassuring face on human suffering, so as not to offend our sponsors.

Tropicália (Brazil, Marcelo Machado): Rockumentaries recounting the counter-cultural epoch of '68 are usually filled with tepid clichés, but Machado's wild, riotous, endlessly-colourful study of the Brazilian psychedelic explosion liberally leaps off the screen with life, pirouetting gaily through back-in the-day footage of Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes et al tearing shit up.

Wuthering Heights (England, Andrea Arnold): One of the most radical adaptations of canonical English lit ever, Arnold's gloriously glowering slice of rural socio-realism foregrounds the wiley, windy moors of Emily Brontë's tragic Gothic romance; reducing its star-cross'd lovers to tiny figures, ghost ships drifting through the rolling fogs.

PROBABLY

Almayer's Folly (France, Chantal Akerman): Whilst the fruity drama of its literary adaptation is most on-the-nose, there's plenty of blessed instances when the narrative recedes completely behind Akerman's formalist command. And Almayer's Folly has some of the greatest cinematic moments in the MIFF program: filled with a host of long takes —man on back of cyclo, illuminated boat slowly approaching dock at night— that're utterly breathtaking.

Avalon (Sweden, Axel Petersén): In some ways, Petersén's picture plays as noir: a washed-up entertainer running a nightclub in a resort-town accidentally kills a man, covers it up, then slides into a downward psychological spiral. But the filmmaker has no interest in old tropes or genre clichés; instead telling an oddly-phrased story as much about glittering sunlight as shadows through horizontal blinds.

Chicken With Plums (France, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud): After adapting Persepolis into a towering piece of animated high-art, Satrapi and Paronnaud convene for an adaptation of another Satrapi graphic novel; the achingly-sad Chicken With Plums. This time, it's a highly-stylised live-action picture, with Mathieu Alamric as the maestro who lays down to die, and falls into a life of memories.

Falkenberg Farewell (Sweden, Jesper Ganslandt): Amidst the so-so Swedish sub-section, Ganslandt's ol' debut uses a gentle camera, sharp musical cues, and dear-diary romanticism to stir up an air of unexpected elegance; a melancholy summer told in ambling episodes as idle youth pass away their indolent days in a dope haze, and tragedy lingers in the smoke.

Hail (Australia, Amiel Courtin-Wilson): There's no doubting the cinematic gifts (and ear for music) of the local interpretive-documentarian; with Courtin-Wilson's camera capturing an array of inspired, sometimes dreamlike images (like an actual horse hurtling through the fucking sky, non-CGI). Yet, his debut 'narrative' feature is, still, a riff on the revenge movie; and thus the tropes of noir are in play, with a desperate ex-con descending into a nightmare of failed retribution.

Headshot (Thailand, Pen-ek Ratanaruang): Ratanaruang has been on an amazing recent kick: 2007's Ploy abusing the cinematic misdirection until it folded in on itself several dozen times over; Nymph floating off into a world of mystical folkstory. Headshot, a little sadly, tracks back to his crim-movie early days, but flips the genre —quite literally, with a nifty narrative device— upside down. Though there's hitmen hunting down marks —and each other— it's, at the end, a tale of Buddhist transcendence.

How To Survive A Plague (USA, David France): Blessed with an astonishing raft of archival footage, this Arthur Russell-soundtracked chronicle of AIDS activism in New York in the '80s and '90s is a profound piece of recent history barely-told; a glorious shrine to civil disobedience and mobilised political action that is both subject-specific and endlessly universal.

Into The Abyss (USA, Werner Herzog): O, the glories of Werner as interviewer. Here, his portrait of a pair of Texan inmates —a symbols of the state's imposition of the death penalty— happily gab with the ever-inquisitive German about the inhumane crimes that may or may not've committed.

L (Greece, Babis Makridis): The Greek Weird Wave gets plenty weird in this astonishing slice of deadpan symbolism. The L in question evokes the L plate; Makridis' oddball parable giving us a world in which everyone lives in their car, and every day is a pantomimed groundhog day.

The Last Romantic: The Cinema Of Leos Carax (France, Leos Carax): The non-Holy-Motors chapters in Carax's spare filmography are all, in different ways, flawed works from a cinematic daydreamer. His debut, Boy Meets Girl, is a work of glorious style yet minor, diffident drama; whilst Lovers On The Bridge and Pola X exist at opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum, each wild, symbolist melodramas whose operatic excess and 'visionary' lengths pushed them towards fiasco status. 1986's sci-fi-ish nouvelle-vague homage Bad Blood may be his most satisfying early work, but even it only flirts with transcendence, never managing to sustain it.

The Law In These Parts (Israel, Ra'anan Alexandrowicz): Incisive study of the men charged with authoring and interpreting law in the Occupied Territories, which feels like both a tribute to their thankless work and cross-examination at a war-crimes trial.

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (USA, Matthew Akers): The Artist in question makes this portrait of her career, her crowning magnum-opus, and her crossover into art superstardom a profoundly, almost exhaustingly moving work. But, we must note, being in the presence of greatness doesn't make the documentary itself great.

Monsieur Lazhar (Canada, Philippe Falardeau): Whilst marketed as an Inspirational Teacher Movie, this emotionally-robust French-Canadian film is a morally-complex study in social repression, institutionalised imposition of unfeeling rules, and the kid-glove treatment of tragedies.

Nana (France, Daniel Joseph Borgman): Profound piece of rural naturalism is a study in the young child's conception of existence; its four-year-old lead is both ensconced within her interior world and yet so alive to the landscape around her.

Ruby Sparks (USA, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris): In an unexpectedly-subversive piece of screenwriting, Zoe Kazan —who also plays the pic's titular character— spoon-feeds the audience a sickly-sweet concoction of male cinematic fantasy, then reveals it to be poisoned; her faux-crowdpleaser a withering critique of romantic projection, masculine dominion, and that most persistent indie-movie archetype, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The Student (Argentina, Santiago Mitre): This dressed-down take on the political thriller is verbose and complex in the extreme; telling the convoluted tale of a half-hearted student radical in bombed-out Buenos Aires blithely bumbling into the backrooms of internal university politics, wherein waits an ever-shifting minefield of ad-hoc allegiances. Mitre —who also authored the grim ambulance-chasin' drama Carancho— submits a dense script loaded with discussion; in which Argentine political history is a persistent part of the present, and oft undermines those dreaming of change in the future.

When A City Falls (New Zealand, Gerard Smyth): Ambling through the aftermaths of Christchurch's twin earthquakes, Smyth authors a democratising, people's-history portrait of life-amidst-disaster; its on-the-ground and in-the-moment footage a chronicle of the tenuousness of societies and the resilience of humanity.

MAYBE

Alois Nebel (Czech Republic, Tomás Lunák): highly-stylised black-and-white animation rotoscopes its way through a stark, noir-ish descent-into-the-darkness for the down-and-outers of a border town in the dying days of Communist Czechoslovakia; its stylised light-and-shade summoning an ever-growing dread leading, invariably, to ultraviolence.

The Blindfold (Indonesia, Garin Nugroho): There's no doubting the astonishing social worth of The Blindfold, which looks at the increasing rise of cult-like militant Islamic groups in Indonesia; dispossessed teenagers lured into lives of hive-mind devotion and unwaged employment. It doubles as a portrait of a national culture moving against the times.

Certain People (Sweden, Levan Akin): When a small crew of bourgeois friends gather at a country house for a birthday party, it's only ever heading to a bad place; with old secrets and lies spilling out, and confrontations looming. Akin's picture thankfully underplays so much of its drama, but neither the mise-en-scène nor the dialogue distinguishes itself, either.

Gainsbourg By Gainsbourg: An Intimate Self-Portrait/Souvenirs Of Serge (France, Jane Birkin): The neverending procession of Gainsbourg-related pictures continues unabated, with a pair of portraits of the French crooner. Gainsbourg By Gainsbourg: An Intimate Self-Portrait has a title that comes off as a bit of a hollow boast; sure, it's filled with audio from candid conversations and prime archival footage, but it's hardly 'intimate' given how its subject talks of how he's always performing and how this footage is, by now, achingly familiar; and, well, as for 'self-portrait', um, he died 20 years ago, pretty sure he didn't edit this. Souvenirs Of Serge is, in contrast, astonishingly intimate; Gainsbourg's famous paramour Jane Birkin assembling old super-8 home-movies of she and Gainsbourg and their children; at times it's astonishingly warm and sweet, at other moments watching these family moments feels a shade voyeuristic.

Girimunho (Brazil, Helvécio Marins Jr & Clarissa Campolina): This portrait of an aging matriarch in a tiny Brazilian town is ethnographic socio-realism with a stylised bent; beautifully photographed and elliptically told, with its spare, largely empty story filled with blessed bursts of music.

In Another Country (South Korea, Hong Sang-soo): If you've never seen a film by the monomaniacally-consistent Hong, his unexpectedly collaboration with Isabelle Huppert isn't exactly the worst place to start. However, if you've seen the previous 12, all his standard quirks —the storyteller authoring the tale as it goes, narratives endlessly repeated as variations on a theme, drunk men making foolish passes— will seem almost painfully familiar.

In The Company Of Eric Rohmer (France, Marie Rivière): The 'maybe' to this is solely divided down the lines of fandom; those who love the works of the late auteur will find this intimate, just-prior-to-his-death portrait of the artist surveying his career profound and suitably Rohmeresque, but for non-converts it may play more as slight, lacking structure, and of questionable standalone merit.

Involuntary (Sweden, Ruben Östlund): Östlund's gloriously-provocative Play pissed off nearly all who saw it at MIFF last year, now the program of Swedish cinema brings back his first feature, in which his thematic interests first were explored; this another film about the tenuousness of politeness, the tension of public space, awkward social confrontations, and the façade of well-adjusted Swedish society.

I Wish (Japan, Hirokazu Kore-eda): It's impossible not to compare this tale of kids-of-divorce and their bawdy schoolfriends to Kore-eda's amazing Nobody Knows, and the comparison does it no favours. After his pitch-perfect parable Air Doll, here the great Japanese auteur is noticeably not-great, submitting a sunny crowdpleaser that may or may not be meant for ten-year-old boys.

The Legend Of Kaspar Hauser (Italy, Davide Manuli): With Vincent Gallo chewing the Italian seaside scenery in two separate —and painfully unfunny—roles, this self-consciously-strange style-piece will grate on most; even in the face of its admirable lunacy and giddy absurdity.

Love Story (USA, Florian Habicht): Habicht's home-made shrine-to-New-York meta-movie —in which the amiable Kiwi makes a movie about making a movie, soliciting advice from random passersby— is a 'documentary' for our modern day: Habicht living out his life through the film he's making, hoping that by staging a love story he can bring actual love to life.

Low Life (France, Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval): If you can handle impossibly-attractive young actors spouting political rhetoric with po-faced, deadpan seriousness, Klotz and Perceval's dreamy depiction of modern France as dystopian Fascist state may be your MIFF highlight. But for those who fear 'pretentiousness' or who see Gallic style-pieces as somehow contradicting the cinematic norms of American studio storytelling, then Low Life will play more as utter annoyance. I, of course, hewed way towards the former.

Metropia (Sweden, Tarik Saleh): There's shades of Richard Linklater's so-so A Scanner Darkly in this twitchy Swedish animation; a tale of the dystopian near-future, paranoia, conspiracy, dreams, and mass-media that harbours a Dickian debt.

Palaces Of Pity (Portugal, Mati Diop): This year's most defiant old-school-art-movie is a short, strange film from a Portuguese debutante; in which modern-day adolescent tennis protégés pirouette in a strange, surrealist dance with persecuted homosexuals from ancient empirical history.

Postcards From The Zoo (Indonesia, Edwin): Mixes rural naturalism, hypnotic minimalism, and magic-realism to paint a sweet tale of a girl who grew up in a Jakarta Zoo. Self-styled mystical director Edwin (yes, iconic singular!) sees the zoo as a place of wonder and imagination, a symbolic enclave shielding dreamers amidst a hateful state that's either a dystopian satire on modern Indonesia or a post-apocalyptic near-future.

A Respectable Family (Iran, Massoud Bakhshi): The merits and meaning of 'family honour' get wrung through the wringer in this portrait of the conservatism, bureaucracy, and daily judgment of life in modern Iran; a ex-patriot intellectual returns to take up a teaching post. It's not about the immediate, solely, as his homecoming stirs up old memories of his childhood during the Iran-Iraq war; those old conflicts contrasting with the nation's current internal conflicts.

The Rest Of The World (France, Damien Odoul): “I wish I had another family” yelps one of the three squabbling sisters in Odoul's lacerating drunken-family drama, which finds Emmanuelle Béart bidding adieu to a career of fragile-waifism by playing a hideous, drunken wench. When she spills the beans on an old family secret, the conflicted clan is forced to examine what family —and the ties that bind— actually means.

Shock Head Soul (England, Simon Pummell): This highly-meta, sound-stage-shot, gallery-installation-artpiece retelling of a 19th-century judge's descent into delusional schizophrenia —jumping back-and-forth between dramatic recreations of his testimonies and a documentary discussion on his life by talking-heads— is highly reminiscent of Peter Greenaway's recent works, though not as inspired nor as profane.

Side By Side (USA, Chris Kenneally): Hatcheting up a host of film-biz talking-heads and a history of Oscar-worthy classics, this supposed digital-vs-celluloid 'debate' reduces its surfeit of ideas into a 'yay movies!' vibe.

Something From Nothing: The Art Of Rap (USA, Ice-T): Befitting its name, Ice-T's documentary is a succession of interviews with rap's 'masters', who all get the chance to spit unplugged and unplanned. But it's also an unintentional indictment of the genre's orthodoxy; Ice-T still amazed, when speaking to Eminem, that a white man can rap.

Step Up To The Plate (France, Paul Lacoste): The haute cuisine documentary is fast becoming an arthouse staple, and Lacoste's portrait of a master French chef seceding control of his Michelin three-star'd restaurant to his son knows when to just look on in silence at kitchen experiments or fastidiously-prepared dishes.

This Ain't California (Germany, Marten Persiel): Skateboarding is symbol of freedom in this portrait of shreddin' yoofs in '80s East Germany; effectively a sentimental trip down old-super-8-movies  memory lane for nostalgic, aging skaters.

Your Sister's Sister (USA, Lynn Shelton): Talkie, character-driven American indie opens with a great set-up —two sisters and one dude in a cabin, loyalties and lust shifting whilst old skeletons get shaken from the closet— and then ditches it with some crazy dramatic developments and this unending things're-getting-better montage that kills the film dead.

NO WAY

Charles Bradley: Soul Of America (USA, Poull Brien): Artless DVD-bonus-disc fodder chronicling the contrived career rebirth of a 60-something soul-singer in shades of broad inspirationalism and unironic nationalism.

Crazy Horse (France, Frederick Wiseman): Sometimes Wiseman's observationist portraits of the inner workings of institutions are masterworks of direct cinema, but his uneventful chronicle of the famous Parisian nude revue is without incident or insight; playing more as wank fodder for the raincoat brigade than work of cinematic resonance.

Facing Mirrors (Iran, Negar Azarbayjani): This reminds me of your standard Queer Film Festival fare, and an American indie movie from the '90s; its well-meaning social crusade and anti-patriarchal sentiments far extending its actual filmmaking merit.

Faust (Russia, Alexander Sokurov): No auteur swings so wildly between wondrous and shithouse quite like Sokurov, and Faust is, sadly, plenty turdly. Abandoning the stilled minimalism of his better pictures —like Mother & Son and Moloch— the ol' Russian stages a super-theatrical Goethe adaptation, all eyeball-buggin' grotesquerie, funhouse mirror visual effects, and scenery-chewing hysteria.

Happy End (Sweden, Björn Runge): Effectively Sweden's answer to British council-estate realism, this is wild, theatrical soap-opera dressed in realist threads is as subtle and enjoyable as a two-by-four upside the head.

The Intouchables (France, Eric Toledano & Olivier Nakache): Based on an inspirational true story, this slice of crowd-pleasin' hokum is effectively a singular riff on the ol' a-white-man-drives-a-car-like-this comic clichés.

King Of Pigs (South Korea, Yeun Sang-ho): A tedious piece of 'cool' comic-bookish animation that puffs itself up with the importance of a social crusade —out to overthrow the social hierarchies and systematised adolescent bullying— King Of Pigs is a reprehensible parade of 'cool' violence and rampant misogyny, with a hilariously-crappy 'twist' ending to boot.

Rampart (USA, Oren Moverman): For all its supposed gritty realism, this tedious crooked-cop drama is actually built on scenery-chewing acting from dressed-down celebrities and some of the most comically-shaky camera gymnastics you'll ever suffer through.

The Red & The Black (France, Isabelle Prim): Twee piece of essayist experimentalism draws on the spirit of the nouvelle vague yet does little of interest with it; playing as a collection of spare threads desperately clutching together in hopes of amounting to a feature film.

The Sapphires (Australia, Wayne Blair): MIFF has a long and painful history of crappy opening night films, and The Sapphires does little to dent the rep; its broad caricatures and force-fed melodrama arming a pandering narrative that suggests Australian history is only meaningful when it allies with American pop-cultural imperialism.

That Summer (France, Philippe Garrel): This painfully-dated bourgeois drama finds the new-wave survivor serving up clichés of the artistic-class best abandoned: men as brooding poets and painters, philandering and commanding; women as muses, glamorous yet needy. It's an uninspired work whose late-picture tragedy sits uncomfortably on close.

Undefeated (USA, Daniel Lindsay & TJ Martin): The fact this won this year's Oscar for Best Documentary should mean something, until you remember Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her atrocious role in the Magical Negro monstrosity The Blind Side. There's comparisons to be had between the two, too: this another Inspirational True Story of virtuous Caucasian Christians inspiring poor black kids to be good at tackle football.

Warriors Of The Rainbow: Seediq Bale Pt. 1 & 2 (Taiwan, Wei Te-shang): Unending historical action barney finds the Noble Natives of the Taiwanese mountains staging a bloody uprising against their tyrannical Japanese overlords. It's big and dopey multiplex cinema out-of-place amidst the MIFF monolith.