Return Of The BIFF

Ah, BIFF. It's one of Front Row's favourite times of the year. It's also the time we find the most tiring, but that's part of the fun. In fact, as exhausted as we get, each new BIFF we try and one-up the number of films we saw the year prior. Sure, that means less sleep, and more writing, but BIFF is an unmissable feast of the things that we truly love. For those two weeks, these films are the answer to all ills – the missing pieces, the hole plugged. 

OUR TOP PICKS

Amour
The new Haneke. See this, feel your bone marrow shift.

Paradise: Love
A surprising and truly exciting addition from one of our favourite working directors, Ulrich Seidl. Always seedy,  unflinching looking at our sad lives, mixed with real sex and real people, his films feel permanently fixed in a terrible stillness between boredom and nightmare. They're at once beautiful and ugly, and I've never seen anything quite like them.

The Sound Of My Voice
The 'two' of the one-two punch collection of sci-fi films by actress/director Brit Marling (Britta's 'lesbian friend' on Community!). Her last film, Another Earth, showed great promise, but ultimately fell a little short on emotion. The Sound Of My Voice is built on a premise that looks to utilise the natural steeliness of Marlin's acting to much better effect. From all early accounts, …Voice is the superior film.

God Bless America
Bobcat Goldthwait's new film will have you loving it from frame one. The ex-Police Academy actor turned director has for the last ten years been making some of the strangest and most compelling films around. His previous work, World's Greatest Dad, seemed to mark a real turning point for the director; it was Jody Hill-black, and it had Wes Anderson slo-mo. It was dark, and it was beautiful, and it was depressing and it was hilarious. He's back this year with God Bless America, a fierce and exacting criticism of celebrity culture. Come for the catharsis, the machine-gun attack on an American Idol stage, stay for his heroic use of non-didactic music.

Errors Of The Human Body
Fans of brooding and thoughtful horror should investigate this thematically rich horror film with a sensitive, thorough script; …Errors has atmosphere you'll want to sit and chew on for hours.

Ah, but then there's Rust And Bone. Vinterberg's redemption in The Hunt. There's Mongolian Bling. There's Maniac. There's Klown. There's Berberian Sound Studio, about a Giallo sound engineer. There's the 'likely-to-be-ridiculous' RZA-directed, Russell Crowe-starring The Man With The Iron Fists. There's Sinister. There's Cimino's new cut of Heaven's Gate. There's Compliance, about that poor girl who was falsely ordered through a strip search by a pervert at a McDonalds. There's The ABCs Of Death, a horror anthology. There's 360, the new film by Fernando Meirelles. There's The Angel's Share, by kitchen-sink dramatist Ken Loach. Opening night is the new Ray Winstone movie. Closing night is Anna Karenina, the Tolstoy epic, by jack-of-all-styles director, Joe Wright.

And still that's only about a tenth of everything in total. Hurry. GO. BIFF-ore you miss out.

WHAT: Brisbane International Film Festival

WHEN & WHERE: Wednesday 14 November to Sunday 25, various cinemas