Top Ten Movies From Sydney Film Festival

God Help The Girl

(Scotland, D. Stuart Murdoch)

5 Jun, 8.45pm, Event Cinemas George Street & 14 Jun, 8.45pm, Event Cinemas George Street

The frontman for twee-pop legends Belle & Sebastian makes his filmmaking debut with a sentimental, spiritual, all-too-personal musical about a trio of cuties (Emily Browning, Olly Alexander, Hannah Murray) starting a band. There's countless indie music references, B&S cameos, and lines (“you're a bloody tea-drinker, pal, you shouldn't be in a band”) Murdoch himself probably heard 20 years ago.

God Help The Girl

11 Jun, 7pm, Event Cinemas George St & 13 Jun, 12.10pm, Event Cinemas George Street

Catherine Breillat is no stranger to turning herself into a character in her own films (see: 2002's Sex Is Comedy), but her 14th feature is profoundly personal. With Isabelle Huppert as Breillat stand-in, it coldly, cruelly chronicles her recovery from a 2004 stroke and her relationship with a con-man (rapper Kool Shen), who grifts her of €600,000.

7 Jun, 9.30am, State Theatre & 8 Jun, 4pm, Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace Cremorne

Cousins, the laconic cinephile behind The Story Of Film: An Odyssey, employs his encyclopaedic cinematic knowledge to author a fabulously free-form portrait of children as portrayed in cinema history.

12 Jun, 6pm, State Theatre & 13 Jun, 4.35pm, Event Cinemas George Street

Mokri's audacious, singular, single-take film marks the arrival of a vital new cinematic voice from one of the world's great cinematic nations, and smells like an early favourite for the Sydney Film Prize.

6 Jun, 8.30pm, State Theatre & 7 Jun, 11.30am, State Theatre

One of 2014's most anticipated films, Linklater's landmark movie was filmed across 12 years, and finds star Ellar Coltrane aging from six to 18. With his Before... trilogy, Linklater showed himself to be one of cinema's great chroniclers of time passing, and Boyhood captures that in astounding fashion.

13 Jun, 6.15pm, Event Cinemas George Street

Debutante Australian documentarian Kitty Green spent 14 months living with infamous performance-art protest group FEMEN, a Kiev-based collective out to challenge patriarchy by way of high profile topless protests. Green peers beyond the blonde façade and sees the troubling politics at Femen's core.

10 Jun, 6.15pm, Event Cinemas George Street & 15 Jun, 3.30pm, Dendy Opera Quays

Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Laboratory was behind 2009's sublime Sweetgrass and 2012's mind-altering film of the year, Leviathan. Manakamana is every bit as amazing: 12 single-take shots of 'pilgrims' ascending to a Nepalese mountaintop monastery via a cable car, a journey juxtaposing mundaneity with divinity.

Manakamana

9 Jun, 7.15pm, State Theatre & 10 Jun, 12.15pm, Event Cinemas George Street

Fresh from its acclaimed Cannes premiere, the Dardennes' latest piece of poignant socio-realism stars Marion Cotillard as a downsized factory worker who must convince her co-workers to sacrifice their bonuses in order for her to keep her job. As always, in the Dardennes world, money is the cruellest of currencies, and emotion is slowly, surely earned.

10 Jun, 6pm, State Theatre & 11 Jun, 12.10pm, Event Cinemas George Street

Courtin-Wilson is by far Australia's most interesting filmmaker, and he furthers that status with this lyrical, beautifully photographed piece of pure cinema, about a pair of lawless lovers fleeing from Phnom Penh along the Mekong.

5 Jun, 6.30pm, Event Cinemas George Street & 8 Jun, 4.15pm, Event Cinemas George Street

Morris's companion piece to 2003's The Fog Of War is another thoughtful portrait of a suit-wearing man with blood on his hands. Sitting down the W Bush-era villain, Donald Rumsfield, before his 'interrotron', Morris pins down another snake-oily subject wrestling with the burden of being the architect of bellicose American imperialism.

Click here for a more comprehensive Film Carew rundown of the Sydney Film Festival program!