Sydney Film Festival 2026: 12 movies you should add to your list

It’s that time of the year again when intrepid Sydneysiders brave the cold and head out into their city to soak up some culture and stories.

The Sydney Film Festival saw record attendance last year, including very impressive growth in that elusive under-25s group (it’s true, young people don’t only watch vertical short videos on their phones!), and the organisers are hoping for another bumper event.

The program is a promising start, with a massive number of direct imports from the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, as well as buzzy titles out of Sundance and Berlinale earlier this year.

The great thing about film festivals is that it is an exciting selection of movies that you’re either not going to be able to see in cinemas later or you’ll have to wait sometimes up to a year for release.

Remember, the next time you hear yourself saying, “there are no good movies anymore, they’ve run out of new ideas”, it’s because you didn’t go to a film festival.

Here are some top picks to get you thinking. Happy viewing!

THE INVITE

Two words: sex comedy.

Three words: awkward sex comedy.

A few more words: Directed by Olivia Wilde and written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, this movie stars Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, Edward Norton and Wilde and sparked a bidding war after its premiere at Sundance.

Rogen and Wilde play a long-term couple whose marriage has become a little stale, but then one night, an invitation to the neighbours upstairs, whose loud sexcapades penetrate walls and ceilings, result in some interesting revelations.

FATHERLAND

Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s first feature in almost a decade is definitely something worth noting. You may have seen Ida and Cold War – and if you haven’t, remedy this – and his latest effort will be playing in competition at Cannes.

It stars Sandra Huller (Anatomy of a Fall, Project Hail Mary) in a story set during the Cold War about novelist Thomas Mann and his daughter returning to Germany for the first time since he fled before WWII.

Pawlikowski is incredibly adept at capturing a place and its vibe, and we expect no less from his lens on a country cleaved in half by two political philosophies and still haunted by the memories of the past and the sins of the present.

FJORD

Oscar nominees and A Different Man co-stars Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan reunite in this provocative drama from Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days).

They play a conservative, Christian couple who relocate their five children from Romania to a Norwegian village. They become immersed in community life but soon trigger questions about their parenting when their eldest daughter presents with bruises on her body.

PARALLEL TALES

Another movie playing in competition at Cannes, Parallel Tales is the latest work from acclaimed filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (A Separation and The Salesman, both of which won an Oscar for Foreign Language Film), and features an incredible French cast including Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, Catherine Deneuve and Virginie Efira.

Huppert plays Sylvie, an author in desperate need of inspiration for her next book. She starts spying on the neighbours across the street, but everything goes awry when she shares her observations with a young man she hires to help her pack up her apartment.

LEVITICUS

Australia has really built a global reputation for incubating great horror movies, so it’s no wonder Sundance went nuts for Leviticus, which comes from Adrian Chiarella.

Set in a small Victorian town, it’s centred on teenagers Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stracy Clausen) who discover their yearning for the other. But they live in a very conservative, Christian community and are forced into conversion therapy which unleashes an evil force that resembles the thing they desire most: each other.

DEAD MAN’S WIRE

What a combination: Gus Van Sant with Al Pacino, Bill Skarsgard, Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Myha’la and Colman Domingo.

This drama-thriller is inspired by the true 1977 story of a property developer who held hostage a mortgage broker he accused of betrayal in a land deal. The tense stand-off continued while a media circus assembled outside, and you’re asked to decide if the gun holding the gun is really the villain or the victim of a corrupt system designed to keep him down.

THE MAN I LOVE

No one can tell a story about queer New York like Ira Sachs, and with The Man I Love, he has crafted a tale set in the 1980s and in a community confronted by the AIDS crisis. The film is about a theatre actor challenged by a serious bout of illness who is readying for what may be his last-chance performance.

The Man I Love stars Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford and Rebecca Hall.

NO GOOD MEN

Yes, a political rom-com! There should always be more political rom-coms. This one by filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat comes from Afghanistan and is set in 2021, just before the US withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power.

Sadat stars in her own film and plays a camerawoman at a TV station in Kabul who has just left her abusive, philandering husband and is now fighting for custody of her son.

Just as she’s starting to feel that there are no good men (oh, hey, that’s the title) left in the country, she is put on a story with the station’s top reporter. There are loads of rom-com tropes, but in a distinctly different environment with frightening political shifts on the verge.

MINOTAUR

There are times when you fear for Andrey Zvyagintsev because critics of the Russian regime have a nasty habit of “falling” out of high windows. Not that Zvyagintsev is obvious in his indictment of Vladimir Putin. The filmmaker has previously said that what he’s doing is reflecting the world he sees around him.

In his previous films, including the stunning Leviathan and Loveless, Zvyagintsev paints insightful and scathing portraits of corruption and rot, but through intimate stories about families and communities.

Minotaur, which will be competition at Cannes, is his first film in almost a decade, and it follows a successful and politically connected Russian businessman who faces a reckoning when he discovers his wife’s affair.

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Hands up if you watched I Saw the TV Glow and while not exactly certain of the experience you had, you understood that its filmmaker, Jane Schoenbrun, was an exciting new voice who defied convention and categorisation.

Schoenbrun, who uses they/them pronouns, has taken slasher movie tropes and crafted something unexpected.

The film is about a filmmaker (Hannah Einbinder) who is hired to make a new, modern version in a slasher franchise and wants to cast the actor (Gillian Anderson) who was the “final girl” in the original movie.

SHEEP IN THE BOX

Japanese master filmmaker Kore-eda Hirokazu (Shoplifters, Like Father, Like Son) turns his sensitive and incisive lens on grief in this story about a couple who loses their young son.

To help them process, they are given a humanoid robot replicant of their dead child, who progressively picks up familiar behaviour and seems to have memories it shouldn’t have.

YESTERDAY ISLAND

Yesterday Island is an oddball Australian comedy whose high-concept premise is teased in the title.

The story is about a remote island where the day keeps repeating and the only way you can escape the loop is if you trick someone else to take your place.

Shot in Tasmania, Yesterday Island was directed by Sam Voutas and stars Ivan Aristeguieta, Florence Noble and Francis Greenslade.