Ten Films To Watch At Sydney Film Festival

Aquarius (France/Brazil, D. Kleber Mendonca Filho)

Mendonca's 2012 debut Neighbouring Sounds is one of the decade's quiet masterpieces, a portrait of metropolitan living — of class, property, architecture — that doubles as searing exploration of Brazilian society. Aquarius, which comes to Sydney direct from Cannes, promises something similar. Sonia Braga plays an elderly woman whose refusal to sell her seaside apartment stalls a proposed new development — a richly symbolic story for a country that went building-crazy for the World Cup and Olympics.

10 & 11 Jun, State Theatre

Barakah Meets Barakah (Saudi Arabia, D. Mahmoud Sabbagh)

He's a petty bureaucrat from the wrong side of the tracks, she's an Instagram celebrity/manic-pixie rich kid. And when they meet, there's no love lost! These sound like creaky rom-com cliches, but Sabbagh's wry debut uses romance's universal currency to explore life on the ground in the Saudi state, where individual desires are either socially shunned or legally outlawed, and where even going on a date requires the kind of subterfuge usually seen in spy-movies.

16 Jun, Event Cinemas George Street; 17 Jun, State Theatre

Certain Women (USA, D. Kelly Reichardt)

Reichardt's unhurried, unglamorous, unwavering films are the antithesis of most American cinematic exports: filled with rural realism, telling silences, and — gasp! — stories of women. Her sixth film — and follow-up to the so-so eco-terrorist thriller Night Moves — comes adapted from short stories by Maile Meloy (sister of Decemberists leader Colin), and stars Michelle Williams, Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart as characters all grappling with their place in frontier Montana/small town America.

9 Jun, State Theatre; 17 Jun, Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace

Chevalier (Greece, D. Athina Rachel Tsangari)

On a yacht moored in the Mediterranean, a group of Greek men stage an Alpha Male contest; testing themselves in increasingly idiotic fits of strength and stubbornness, and measuring hair growth, cholesterol levels and penis size. Following up 2010's daffy Attenberg, Tsangari has made a Greek Weird Wave classic. Chevalier plays its insecurity-laced pissing contest as both deadpan farce and pitch-perfect satire, mocking male vanity, the patriarchy and the arcane rituals of fraternities.

12 & 13 Jun, Event Cinemas George Street

Evolution (France/Belgium/Spain, D. Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

The interminable wait for a follow-up to Hadzihalilovic's luminous 2004 debut, Innocence, is forgotten by the end of Evolution's opening reel. It's another social parable as surrealist fairytale, consisting wholly of astonishing, dreamlike images. And, again, it involves a children being groomed for sinister purposes: an island's population of boys sent off to a shadowy hospital. There's hints of Cronenbergian body horror awaiting, but Evolution is never a work of genre, just pure cinema: a weird, wild work from a singular artist.

12 & 19 Jun, Dendy Newtown

High-Rise (UK, D. Ben Wheatley)

Adapting JG Ballard's dystopian parable, Wheatley doesn't set it in sci-fi's obligatory 'near future', but when the book was written: 1975. So, there's sideburns and shag-carpets, flared trousers and honking-big moustaches in, certainly, SFF's most wood-panelled film. Marshalling a game cast — Tom Hiddleston, Luke Evans, Sienna Miller, Elisabeth Moss, Jeremy Irons — Wheatley goes for broke, descending into a wild orgy of theatrical depravity and decadent debauchery so utterly, unabashedly over-the-top its ridiculousness becomes sublime.

10 Jun, Skyline Drive In; 11 Jun, Event Cinemas George Street

Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World (USA, D. Werner Herzog)

While his Nicole Kidman-starring failed Oscarbait matinee Queen Of The Desert stinks up regular cinemas, SFF allows us to forget such a misstep, and see Herr Herzog where he shines. Here, the iconic auteur tackles the topic of our times — the motherfucking internet! — as only he can: with a mixture of sincerity and absurdity, with tiny details and sweeping themes, and, of course, existential philosophising in his inimitable narration.

8 Jun, Event Cinemas George Street; 9 Jun, State Theatre

No Home Movie (Belgium/France, D. Chantal Akerman)

Akerman died late in 2015, the legendary iconoclast leaving behind a final film whose signature study of mortality finds profundity through banality. Through long takes — from trees blowing in the breeze to kitchen table conversations — she watches her frail mother inch slowly towards death. It's a style she minted with her 1975 masterwork, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a fictional depiction of a housewife's horrifying tedium that's also screening at SFF.

12 Jun, Event Cinemas George Street; 18 Jun, Dendy Opera Quays

Suntan (Greece, D. Argyris Papadimitropoulos)

A depressed, balding, chain-smoking, chubby, pasty-skinned middle-aged doctor (Makis Papadimitriou, who's also in Chevalier) takes a job as the local MD on a tiny Grecian isle. In winter, its locals lie in collective hibernation, but, come summer, there's a Dionysian orgy of thumpin' clubs and exposed flesh. Falling in with a cadre of young revellers, our good doc grows increasingly obsessed, Papdimitropoulos' Wasted Youth follow-up at once hilarious, heartbreaking, and darkly disturbing.

11 & 15 Jun, Event Cinemas George Street

The Treasure (Romania/France, D. Corneliu Porumboiu)

While it's too dry, deadpan and unhurried to be comfortably called a 'crowdpleaser', Porumboiu's modern-day, post-Communist fable is a quiet a delight. Here, a hangdog father (Cuzin Toma) and his prickly neighbour (Adrian Purcarescu) go off on a modern day treasure hunt, the latter sure that a fortune was buried by Nazis in his old family farmhouse's backyard. It's a wild goose chase whose absurdist, quixotic quest taps into the local resentment at the vanishing of riches from Ceausescu's Romania.

15 Jun, State Theatre; 19 Jun, Dendy Opera Quays