Hola!

You need only look at the city's endless rows of Tapas bars to see Melbourne has a love affair with Spanish culture, and the La Mirada Film Festival offers audiences plate after plate of cinematic morsels. It's a Spanish festival, though, in language only; going from the mountains of Nepal (where Icíar Bollaín's Kathmandu Lullaby shoots for inspirational status as a Spanish teacher sets out to enrich the lives of lower-caste local kids) to the endless plains of the Argentine countryside (where Pablo Giorgelli's Las Acacias tells one of the most gentle, hesitant romances ever committed to celluloid).

The festival leans heavily on celebrity curators; Pedro Almodóvar co-programs, as ever, and this year there are movies selected by Wes Anderson, Gael García Bernal and, for some unknown reason, Howlin' Pelle Almqvist of Swedish garage rockers The Hives. But La Mirada is most interesting in its smaller, carefully chosen films, like Las Acacias, or The Last Elvis, a Wrestler-esque portrait of a down-and-out Elvis impersonator hitting rock-bottom and needing to decide whether he wants to live as himself or die as his adopted persona.

García Bernal's programming pick is Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala, a kinetic, white-knuckle crime movie in which a beauty-queen contestant is caught in a turf war between crims and cops in drug-riddled Tijuana. García Bernal also appears, as actor, headlining Pablo Larraín's No. The third film in a trilogy about life under Pinochet, it's a crowdpleasin' picture shot on fuzzed-out, early-'80s videotape, making for a change-of-pace from the black Tony Manero and the bleak Post-Mortem. Those wanting bleakness can check into Machete Language, a piece of prime punk provocation from México, in which punk starlet Jessy Bulbo is half of a trashy rock'n'roll couple who conceive of a suicide-bombing as a piece of performance art.

Sleep Tight is easily the creepiest La Mirada movie – essentially an inverted paranoia-thriller where, instead of siding with the woman (Marta Etura) whose home is being invaded and life is fucked with, we go along for the ride with the sick sociopath (Luis Tosar) himself. The Cat Vanishes marks quite the change-of-pace for Carlos Sorín; after a run of rural road movies, here he holes up in a shadowy Buenos Aires apartment with an aging married couple, making a Hitchcockian portrait of paranoia and cracking sanity. And White Elephant is an uncompromising Argentine drama that reunites the Carancho crew of writer/director Pablo Trapero and stars Martina Gusmán and Ricardo Darín. Darín and Jérémie Renier play priests out to transform a rough-and-tumble Buenos Aires slum in the '70s, and Trapero takes a big-picture view of their dreams, with politicians, church officials, crime cartels and crooked cops all having their own stake in the violent, vengeance-scarred, dog-riddled 'hood.

Those seeking lighter fare may turn to Cousinhood, but it'd be a mistake; this dimwitted brom-com was awful when it screened at the Spanish Film Festival and it hasn't gotten any better since. Instead, opening night flick, Extraterrestrial, is far-and-away the comic highlight. Using the spectre of an alien invasion – and the attendant paranoia it inspires in people – as a device against which to portray a high-comic love-quadrangle, with three gents dukeing it out for the attentions of Michelle Jenner. The pick of the whole festival, though, is a screening of Julio Medem's eternal The Red Squirrel, a rollicking, Hitchcockian identity thriller that doubles as a fervent critique of Spanish machismo.