When the now-annual celebration lights up the city once more from October 18-29, there’s a cinematic embarrassment of riches on offer. Stephen A Russell is here with some of the jewels in the fest’s crown, as well as a few of its hidden gems…
Artistic director Mat Kesting’s must-see-them-all program for this year’s Adelaide Film Festival is ridic. You could leap on Hugo Weaving and Phoenix Raei’s odd couple in aching-hearted Australian dark comedy The Rooster, or witness Natalie Portman go head-to-head with Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes’ wicked melodrama May December.
Or indulge in Aussie horror with You’ll Never Find Me, then catch Palme d’Or-winner Anatomy of a Fall plus Cannes’ deserving Best Actor pick Kōji Yakusho in Wim Wenders’ latest, Perfect Days. Music lovers will want to mainline the closing night gala My Name’s Ben Folds I Play Piano, pick off a few scabs with Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin, and hear from Nick Cave and co about Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party.
With so much to see, we’ve hand-picked ten choices we reckon will appeal to real movie lovers.
The Royal Hotel
Straight from Telluride, this film’s so hotly anticipated it’s opening the inaugural SXSW Sydney and this awesome AFF program. Kitty Green’s follow-up to #MeToo drama The Assistant once again features the remarkable Julia Garner. She plays backpacker Hanna, traversing the Australian outback with best mate Liv (Jessica Henwick). But when they pick up bar jobs in a mining town pub, dread-filled bedlam ensues. We’re here for the Wake in Fright-meets-Wolf Creek vibes.
Poor Things
There’s already Oscar buzz attached to The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos’ wild-hearted adaptation of Scottish author Alasdair Gray’s feminist novel, which stretches a new skin on the Frankenstein myth. There’s plenty of buzz, too, around Emma Stone’s fearless turn as Bella Baxter, reanimated by Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist but determined to make her way through this hectic new life without patriarchal restraints, including those of a caddish Mark Ruffalo.
Club Zero
Australian star Mia Wasikowska takes on one of the thorniest roles of her career with the latest from button-pushing filmmaker Jessica Hausner (Little Joe). It casts her as a private school teacher whose wild ideas about eating less wreak havoc with her impressionable students. Also featuring Borgen lead Sidse Babett Knudsen and A Haunting in Venice’s Amir El-Masry, its sharp-as-cut-glass social commentary and overt oddness divided critics at Cannes. Where will you land?
Housekeeping for Beginners
Picking up the Queer Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Macedonian-Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s rapid follow-up to lush Melbourne romance Of an Age goes back to the country of his birth to tell a beautifully chaotic story of found family set in Skopje. Re-teaming with You Won’t Be Alone star Anamaria Marinca, she plays Dita, a social worker living with her Roma partner Sauda (Alina Serban), Sauda’s kids and a bunch of blow-ins in this gloriously LGBTQIA+ story of togetherness.
Saltburn
Promising Young Woman writer/director and Barbie cameo Emerald Fennel’s sophomore feature casts Australian actor Jacob Elordi as Felix, a well-to-do Oxford University student who invites his fish-out-of-water classmate Oliver (The Banshees of Inisherin star Barry Keoghan) back to his stately mansion for summer. In pitch-perfect casting, this contemporary update on a very Brideshead Revisited tangle taps Rosamund Pike as Felix’ icy mother, Richard E Grant as his more welcoming father, and features a comic turn by Promising star Carey Mulligan.
Only the River Flows
Debuting at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Un Certain Regard Award, Chinese filmmaker Shujun Wei’s ’90s-set noir thriller sees a hard-boiled detective working out of a dilapidated cinema, in a nice nod to the film’s formally daring structure that drags the viewer kicking and screaming into the gruesome trail of a serial killer littering the riverbanks with bodies. More than a twisting mystery, this is as much social commentary on a rapidly changing nation.
Fingernails
Step into a strange new/old world not entirely like ours, where Men star Jessie Buckley plays Anna, one half of a supposedly happy couple with boyfriend Ryan (Jeremy Allen White). According to a machine-driven compatibility test, they’re perfect for each other, but when Anna takes a job at the Love Institute that insists they should be 100% head over heels, why is it that she instead finds herself inexorably drawn towards co-worker Amir (Sound of Metal star Riz Ahmed)? Is connection about more than a certificate, after all?
Scala!!!
Unspool former Scala programmer Jane Giles and co-director Ali Catterall’s loving documentary about the last days of London’s much-loved palace of weird and wild movies that drew a distinctly punk rock crowd and was a regular haunt of Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan. Hear from lauded filmmakers, including the perma-mischievous Pope of Trash, John Waters, Ben Wheatley (High-Rise) and Berberian Sound Studio auteur Peter Strickland, plus Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, all sharing why this long-gone cinema lives on in their memories forever.
Empty Nets
Iranian-German filmmaker Behrooz Karamizade’s profoundly affecting debut feature examines the reality of grinding poverty that should appeal to fans of the Dardennes or Ken Loach as much as Jafar Panahi. It casts remarkable newcomer Hamid Reza Abbasi as Amir, a desperate man who turns to illegal fishing, hoping he can keep his dreams of settling down with lover Narges (Sadaf Asgari) afloat. If you caught and adored Maltese gem Luzzu, this sounds like it will reel you in too.
The Exiles
This year’s AFF is presenting a spotlight on Indonesian cinema in partnership with the OzAsia Festival that we’re keen to check out, with actor-turned-director Lola Amaria’s spotlight on the dissidents who still feel unsafe to return home after the fall of Suharto’s New Order sounding fascinating. Billed as “a moving portrait of a lost though dignified generation, rendered with great compassion,” it was painstakingly shot across six countries and several years, shining a light on a dark chapter of the country’s history still covered in a shroud of silence.
