Melbourne international film festival 2025: the 10 movies you must see this year

The Guardian

10-07-2025

Director: Bi Gan
Country: China, France
Bi Gan's last feature, 2018's Long Day's Journey Into Night, became the subject of unlikely wrath in its home country when it was marketed as a sumptuous romance to Chinese filmgoers – who then showed up on its New Year's Eve premiere to watch an elliptical, esoteric odyssey that concludes with a 59-minute, one-shot dream sequence shot in 3D. The Cannes prize winner Resurrection sounds equally enigmatic: a 160-minute epic set in a future where humans no longer dream, though a group of fringe rebels defy the odds. The film traverses Chinese national history as well as cinematic lineage; by all accounts, it sounds suitably deranged. – Michael Sun
Director: Mary Bronstein
Country: US
Who doesn't have time for Rose Byrne? The Australian actor is a reliable and perhaps under-appreciated performer but rarely gets big, meaty, interesting, grandstanding roles … until now. In this year's opening night film she stars as Linda, a Long Island therapist caring for a sick daughter and navigating a series of intense crises. Byrne's performance has tongues wagging, attracting descriptors such as 'monumental', 'tour de force' and 'harrowingly brilliant'. – Luke Buckmaster
Director: Eva Victor
Country: US
Twee is good again! We are so back. Eva Victor's Sundance award-winning debut (produced by Barry Jenkins) follows a long legacy of arch, affected comedies that unpeel to reveal their base anxieties: Frances Ha, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Miranda July's entire oeuvre, and any American indie made circa 2010. Sorry, Baby might be twee's purest form: a New England pastoral following a twentysomething professor of letters (Victor herself) so full of blundering charm and jagged one-liners that the film's emotional centrepiece lands like a full-body tackle. – Michael Sun
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Country: Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, UK, Sweden
Joshua Oppenheimer is best known for directing gut-wrenching documentaries about mass murders in Indonesia (The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence). Nobody saw his first narrative film coming: a post-apocalyptic musical entirely set in an underground bunker, in a future world made uninhabitable by the climate crisis. Reviews so far have been mixed: Radheyan Simonpillai called it 'intermittently fascinating' while Wendy Ide pegged it as 'wildly ambitious' but 'catastrophically self-indulgent'. – Luke Buckmaster
Director: Constantine Costi
Country: Australia, UK
It's the film about making porridge you never knew you needed! Constantine Costi's charming doco unpacks the world's annual porridge-making competition, which takes place in the Scottish village of Carrbridge. As I wrote in my review, 'a pleasure to watch – with endearing salt-of-the-earth subjects, a lovely ebb and flow, and a tone that feels just right: neither overly serious nor tongue in cheek.' – Luke Buckmaster
Director: Charlie Shackleton
Country: US, UK
It's 2025 and everything is just true crime now. Every murderer has a six-part Netflix limited series. Every scammer has a podcast and a spot on Dancing With the Stars. Every TikToker is an armchair detective and every TikTok is CSI.
So what now? If you're British documentarian Charlie Shackleton, you try – and fail – to make a film about the Zodiac Killer. And then from the ashes you build something weirder: part send-up, part homage to the true crime genre, full of 'amusing comments on all [its] cliches and mannerisms', says our Guardian review. – Michael Sun
Director: Raoul Peck
Country: France, US
We'd all love to live in a world where George Orwell got it wrong, and none of his ideas came to pass. Sadly the great author's work continues to be terrifyingly prescient. Director Raoul Peck's documentary has unpacked Orwell's life and career while constructing a thesis that connects the ideas in Nineteen Eighty-Four to contemporary events, including the US Capitol attack and the war in Ukraine. – Luke Buckmaster
Director: Christian Petzold
Country: Germany
It can often feel masochistic to watch a Christian Petzold film in the depths of Melbourne winter; his most recent trio (this one included) have been devastatingly chic pictures of beautiful and willowy Europeans swimming, sunbathing and idling while slowly digesting some life-altering tragedy or heartache. Petzold's longtime muse, Paula Beer, returns here as a woman who's taken in by an older, genial stranger after her boyfriend dies in a road accident – though an eerie mist hangs over the countryside cottage like a haunting. At 86 minutes, it feels close to a novella: gauzy and elegant. – Michael Sun
Directors: Maggie Miles and Trisha Morton-Thomas
Country: Australia
The life and legacy of the inimitable David Gulpilil was unpacked in Molly Reynolds' superb 2021 documentary My Name Is Gulpilil – a very tough act to follow. This new film, narrated by Hugh Jackman and co-directed by Maggie Miles and Trisha Morton-Thomas, captures the final stage of Gulpilil's story, in which he was laid to rest in his homeland of Gupulul in Arnhem Land. Miff's program calls it a 'continent-traversing commemoration worthy of his transcendent talent'. – Luke Buckmaster
Director: Genki Kawamura
Country: Japan
As a fan of both the original version of The Exit 8 and its virtual reality spin-off, I kind of can't believe they made a movie out of it. It's essentially a spot-the-difference video game in which the player navigates a series of near-identical hallways in a Tokyo subway station and must decide whether each environment is exactly the same as the first hallway they encountered. So not exactly a production crying out for feature film treatment. Kazunari Ninomiya plays the tripped-out commuter who really should've caught the bus. – Luke Buckmaster
Melbourne international film festival 2025 runs 7-24 August in venues across the city and regional Victoria, as well as online through Acmi. Tickets sales open now for Miff members and will open to the general public on 15 July