Film buffs will be chuffed with this year's selection at Sydney Film Festival
Pick a number, any number. This year’s Sydney Film Festival has an embarrassment of riches. Here are 63 movies, talks and experiences you can’t resist.
The funny side of racism gets a fearless airing in Down Under, Abe Forsythe’s provocative, daring comedy.
Linklater’s Boyhood was the sensation of the 2014 Sydney Film Festival; now the festival gets Everybody Wants Some!!, in which Texas college freshmen enjoy a weekend of partying prior to the start of semester.
David Stratton presents a rare screening of this early (1974) work that earned an Oscar for Ellen Burstyn, playing a widow who sets out with her young son to change her life.
A prescient 1982 film has De Niro kidnapping a TV comedian (Jerry Lewis) so that he can perform his act on live TV. It’s an underrated gem, with a superb supporting turn from the hilarious Sandra Bernhard.
Based on Matthew Whittet’s play, Girl Asleep is a wildly imaginative coming of age story set in the 1970s. A 14-year-old girl (Bethany Whitmore) suffers the birthday party from hell and descends into a rabbit hole of surreal events.
Kiwi director Lee Tamahori reunites with actor Temuera Morrison for Mahana (aka The Patriarch), a melodramatic Maori family saga set in the 1960s.
From the director of Kill List comes an adaptation of JG Ballard’s sci-fi novel concerning an apartment tower which descends into tribal anarchy – an allegory for the class system with echoes of A Clockwork Orange.
Documentary Jheronimus Bosch: Touched by the Devil follows five Dutch historians around the globe as they unravel the secrets of Bosch (1450-1516), whose blackly funny scenes of heaven, hell and carnality befuddle and amaze to this day.
The festival is reviving an Australian classic: the tense 1998 drama loosely based on the 1986 murder of Anita Cobby. It stars Toni Collette, David Wenham, Lynette Curran and John Polson.
Julieta screens in competition in Cannes this year and sees the Spanish provocateur in a more serious mode, adapting three stories by Alice Munro into a mystery spanning three decades.
It was booed at Cannes in 1985 and shocked audiences with its sex and sheer craziness. But the epic film, directed by Ray Lawrence (Lantana) based on Peter Carey’s novel, is among the most daring and witty in the Australian canon. Stars Barry Otto.
Fraternity violence is the topic of Goat, in which Nick Jonas plays the brother of a freshman who sees and suffers the worst of college ‘hazing’.
Kiki looks again at the thriving vogueing culture for queer black youth in New York, dealing with prejudice, homelessness and illness.
Cast Away meets Weekend at Bernie’s as a marooned man (Paul Dano) whose solitude is broken when a flatulent drowned man (Radcliffe) is washed up on his island. File Swiss Army Man under ‘love it or hate it’.
Morris from America has an African-American teen adjusting to a new life in Germany where he’s misunderstood at every turn.
Refreshingly frank and real Indian comedy Angry Indian Goddesses has modern women exploring gender, sexism and harassment and is part of the ongoing conversation about women’s rights on the subcontinent.
Insiang is the 1976 film that screened at Cannes and portrayed a girl who is raped by her mother’s lover and exacts revenge.
With interviews wih Mia Freedman, Ricki Lake and more, Embrace by Adelaide’s Taryn Brumfitt explores how women feel about their bodies.
In documentary Strike a Pose, seven male dancers on Madge’s landmark 1990 tour speak out 25 years later about being gay and closeted while on the cutting edge of pop culture.
The Lure has sibling mermaid bloodsuckers performing as strippers in a seedy burlesque club. Kitschy, kooky and sexy, The Little Mermaid this ain’t.
Sonita tells the story of a YouTube sensation who raps against forced marriages even though it’s illegal for women to sing publicly in Iran without government permission.
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