Nick Cave, Richard Linklater Movies Lead Melbourne International Film Festival Program

The Melbourne International Film Festival has announced the first taste of its 2014 program, unveiling over 30 features that will be screening at the event this year.

Big local debuts come from films co-financed by the MIFF Premiere Fund, including the event's Centrepiece Gala standout, Kriv Stenders' Kill Me Three Times, as well as Tony Ayres' Cut Snake, Robert Connolly's Paper Planes, and Mark Hartley's latest documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story Of Cannon Films.

The youth-oriented Next Gen strain includes Mexican punk film We Are Mari Pepa, animated titles Patema Inverted, Anina, and Aunt Hilda!, and Julie Bertuccelli's documentary School Of Babel.

20,000 Days On Earth

And, amongst international features and documentaries are a host of titles coming straight from Sydney, including Taika Waititi's What We Do In The Shadows, Lukas Moodysson's We Are The Best!,  Steven Knight's Locke, Xavier Dolan's Tom At The Farm, Ira Sachs' Love Is Strange, Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves, David Gordon Green's Joe, Frank Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune, Frederick Wiseman's At Berkeley, Florian Habicht's Pulp, and Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard's Nick Cave-starring 20,000 Days On Earth.

The full MIFF program will be launched on Tuesday 8 July, with tickets on sale Friday 11 July. The festival kicks off on Thursday 31 July with a screening of Michael & Peter Spierig's near-future thriller, Predestination.

Of the films thus-far unveiled for the 63rd Melbourne International Film Festival, here's The Music's picks:

BLACK COAL, THIN ICE

Director: Diao Yinan

A decade after his impressive debut, Uniform, Diao's third feature has been a huge success: winning Berlin's top prize, the Golden Bear, and attracting crossover audiences in Mainland China. It's a thoughtful riff on noir tropes, in which Diao approaches the procedural with an artful minimalism, and a symbolic eye on the cost of doing-business in China.

BOYHOOD

Director: Richard Linklater

With his 'Before trilogy', Linklater showed himself to be one of cinema's great chroniclers of the passage-of-time; but Boyhood redefines how time passes on screen. Linklater's groundbreaking latest was shot, episodically, over 12 years, and shows lead Ellar Coltrane actually aging from 6 to 18.

BREADCRUMB TRAIL

Director: Lance Bangs

Bangs' documentary chronicle of the making of Slint's legendary Spiderland LP is as unassuming, austere, and humble as the band who made it; dodging the myth-making tendencies of rockumentaries for a real look at how four teenagers for the US Midwest minted such a singular, mysterious sound.

GOD HELP THE GIRL

Director: Stuart Murdoch

After turning its songs into a 2009 God Help The Girl LP, the frontman of fey-pop heroes Belle & Sebastian delivers his directorial debut, a bona fide screen musical starring Emily Browning, Olly Alexander, and Hannah Murray as a trio of Glasgow cuties starting an indie-pop band. B&S fans will duly flip out, but it's charming, silly, and sentimental enough to please any fans of melancholy whimsy.

THE GRANDMASTER

Director: Wong Kar-wai

After screening in various edits in various countries, Wong's long-awaited latest finally lands on local screens. It stars long-time Wong leading man Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Zhang Ziyi, and Chang Chen, and finds Wong's dreamy style and elliptical storytelling intersecting with the mythos of martial arts.

HARD TO BE A GOD

Director: Aleksei German

When Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's sci-fi opus Hard To Be A God was published in 1964, iconoclastic Russian auteur Aleksei German wanted to make his debut adapting it. He tried to mount a production in 1968, but it took until 2000 for him to start filming, and the shoot spanned over six years. As time progressed, the saga started to resemble a legend: the film was rumoured to have been finished in 2010, and, myth has it, German deliberately dallied near the end of his life so that Hard To Be A God could come out posthumously. He died in 2013, and it's finally here: three hours of smeared medievalism and philosophical morality that plays like the feverdream of Tarkovsky's obnoxious, flatulent brother. Sure to be one of MIFF's most divisive films.

LISTEN UP PHILIP

Director: Alex Ross Perry

Perry's previous picture, The Color Wheel, was a profound piece of micro-budget mumblecore, and with Listen Up Philip he gets a bigger stage on which to show his talent. It stars Jason Schwartzman as an obnoxious, misanthropic author, with a cast including Krysten Ritter and Mad Men/Top Of The Lake's Elisabeth Moss.

PREDESTINATION

Director: Michael & Peter Spierig

MIFF's opening night film is the latest work for local genre-thinkers the Spierig twins. Working, once again, with leading man Ethan Bubblegum Hawke - and flanking him with Noah Taylor and Sarah Snook - they've made a near-future thriller with a time-travellin' gambit.

STRAY DOGS

Director: Tsai Ming-liang

The 10th film for the master Taiwanese minimalist - high on any shortlist of the greatest filmmakers of the last 20 years - is another stilled, symbolist portrait of the fractured notion of family in the modern metropolis. It won the Grand Jury Prize in Venice, and marks a long-awaited return for a filmmaker last seen at MIFF in 2007 (with I Don't Want To Sleep Alone).

WHITEY: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. JAMES J. BULGER

Director: Joe Berlinger

Berlinger's best known as either the guy behind the Paradise Lost documentary-franchise, and/or the Metallica stooge who unintentionally undermined Lars Ulrich for eternity with Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. But he's a documentarian with genuine journalistic chops, and before the Hollywood take on Whitey Bulger - with Johnny Depp winning out over Ben Affleck for the chance to play him - arrives, Berlinger digs into the contradictions of criminal made both hero and villain.