From Cannes favourites to local newcomers making their mark, the Melbourne International Film Festival is a fixture in the Australian cinema calendar, with the 2026 entry in the loaded program having something for everyone. Whether you just want to get the jump on Oscar prediction morning or need to spend the last weeks of a brittle Melbourne winter in packed cinemas, the festival will provide. Below is part one of our resident festival obsessive Darcy’s notebook on what he’s seen and loved this year.
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning (2026) – Clio Barnard
One of the finds of the festival, a gorgeous and riveting tableau from Clio Barnard based on the novel from writer and poet Keiran Goddard, cramming what felt like a season of a revered BBC miniseries into 109-minutes with the best editing of the year by Maya Maffioli.
I’m a total sucker for Northern UK street poeticism, with its blue collar groundedness with a powerful north star of where to point the millennial finger of ennui and uncertainty at. The film with the title of the year (sharing the name with the novel) follows a tight group of young Gen Z friends growing together and apart, set amongst a constantly shifting Birmingham. With an honesty and clarity into youthful modernity and the crippling weight of housing pressure on individuals and a community. A must see.
Maddie’s Secret (2025) – John Early
There is something magical about watching a film with an extreme amount of conviction that brings a totally game audience to the edge of a cliff but still begs for more. John Early had already made a name for himself as an impressive comedian and actor, but in Maddie’s Secret (2025), we see the emergence of Early as one of the most impressive comedic filmmakers to come out of a decade struggling for cinematic laughs.
The Far From Heaven (2002) for the Bon Appétit content mill sounds like a difficult pitch to audiences, but the power and potency of the satire Early is operating from, performance to lighting elevates this to astonishing levels. Dealing with the underdiscussed world of bulimia and eating disorders with the maturity and understanding that allows it to remain as silly and extreme as it is with the knowledge the audience will never jump ship. In a just world Early and Kate Berlant will be in awards conversations.
Wicker (2026) – Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer
An incredibly well cast 19th Century small town fable about a fishmonger (Olivia Colman) who asks the local basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband, just to get her nosy neighbours off her back. The Weaver obliges, crafting her a perfect wicker husband — played wonderfully by Alexander Skarsgård, wrapped in an astonishing wooden body made by the Wētā Workshop — asking only for coin in return. The film is a riot. With a unique take on gender struggles with its bashful comedy and storytelling echoing the Brothers Grimm, Wicker comes by its fantasy matter-of-factly, with a lyricism that keeps you on the hook for where Wilson and Fischer want to take us.
Rose (2026) – Markus Schlesinger
All gender is performance, and can give you desires you didn’t think you possess if you live in the performance for long enough. Markus Schlesinger and Sandra Hüller are on a very targeted wavelength in Rose, a period film about the not uncommon situation of a woman assuming the role of a man to garner a level of respect and equity they see for themselves, particularly around wartime and, notably here, postwar time.
With a considered palette from Schlesinger and cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz, Rose at once feels both in command of her situation and burdened by its crushing weight. The film gains some real drama and tension akin to The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in its final act, with Hüller’s rugged demeanour giving out to an unkind world when the truth begins to leak out.
We Are All Strangers (2026) – Anthony Chen
A wide tapestry of a film on family, Anthony Chen’s compelling yet frustrating new work is a tale of almosts. A rare film set and filmed in Singapore and the first Singaporean film to screen in competition in the Berlinale’s 70-plus-year history, We Are All Strangers weaves in its setting well across its 157-minute runtime, even as it feels in a rush to arrive at its destination rather than ruminate and observe its surroundings. Centring a father and son trying to make it in the rapidly changing city flooding in with new money, characters come and go through their lives (in fascinating and infuriating ways) that propels you from scene to scene.
The Fox (2026) – Dario Russo
Dario Russo’s Adelaide set film The Fox is the hottest ticket of the festival. A charming and well cast comedy that would make a fascinating double feature with Obsession (2026), with its ideas on relationships, control, and gendered violence inside a gnarly and knowing bit of magical realism. With brilliant voice performances by Olivia Colman and the late great Sam Neill as a fox and magpie, respectively, in a quiet town, Russo’s ear for Australian idiosyncrasies make for a wall shaking cinema experience of locals, as the film raises its brow up at our culture of quiet contempt subdued by our heavy drinking tendencies. While not groundbreaking in any form, it is refreshing to have a proud Australian comedy making waves at the festival.
Lost Land (2025) – Akio Fujimoto
There is an overwhelming nature to docufiction that makes it a uniquely cinematic genre of storytelling, and Akio Fujimoto’s Lost Land (2025) is as good an entry point for audiences as you’ll find. The film approaches the stories of Rohingya asylum seekers through a pair of real siblings, Shomira Rias Uddin and Muhammad Shofik Rias Uddin playing nine-year old Somira and four-year old Shafi, as they have to journey from a Bangladeshi refugee camp to Malaysia to hopefully get confirmed asylum status, a necessity for a stateless people.
There are questions to be had about filmmaking ethics here akin to Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal (2022), but the power of docufiction comes from the blurred line of ethical artistry when a subject of such weight centres the work. Left with more ideas and questions than anything I’ve seen at the festival this year.
Mad Rush (2026) – Madellin McKenna
There’s nothing like seeing a hometown success story at the festival. At the premier of Madellin McKenna’s debut, the Capitol was buzzing with locals eager to wrap its arms around a film so invested in the city. A madcap rush of blood to the head pierces through Melbourne streets after Madisha (Senuri Chandrani), a struggling young person fresh out of work and potentially forced to return home, is targeted by an ATO phone scam trying to bleed her for everything she’s got.
Mad Rush attempts to walk a difficult thematic and narrative tightrope, as McKenna tries to blend a high-octane movement based thriller with a contemplative and lyrical exploration of modern life as a 20-something. Albeit in rare bursts, when the performances, editing, and narrative settles into a groove that has both tracks building together, the audience is quick to be swept up into Madisha’s world.
Rose of Nevada (2025) – Mark Jenkin
No one is doing it like Mark Jenkin. A truly singular artistic expression of the British community, wielding vintage Bolex cameras that capture no audio, giving the film a detached and mythic distortion, Rose of Nevada is a bitter, acquired taste. It touches on truly weighty subjects like the destruction of personhood for the benefit of those you may never meet through its jagged edges and abrasive storytelling, leaving the door slightly ajar to lose yourself in.
Indie film’s lynchpin weirdo, George Mackay plays wonderfully alongside the more laissez-faire partner in Callum Turner, giving the film a beating heart surrounded by the rust and the chains. The story is best left unsaid, as it is best to uncover the strangeness of Rose of Nevada alongside its characters, entering its brittle trance at the same pace.
Rating Frames 