While Werner Herzog guided New Zealand International Film Festival goers through the jungles of Laos, frequenters of the 2007 Melbourne International Film Festival could find the director extraordinaire as an Anglican priest in Harmonie Korine’s (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy) latest freakshow, Mister Lonely, a film our correspondent felt “had really just tossed scraps of Peter Greenaway, Disney and Michel Gondry in a blender and served us up a thick shake of awkward, contrived and phantasmagorical slop.” Reporting for The Lumière Reader across the Tasman, JESSICA BORRELLE discovered this, and other gorge-worthy films at a festival that admittedly steals a little of the NZIFF’s thunder every year (it straddles July and August), but also provides plenty of crossover and a chance to compare notes.

Set into motion by MIFF’s gala presentation (“Dogged by accusations of megalomania, manipulation and selective editing, Moore’s decision to edit down his quite dominating voice was highly regarded by the opening-night audience, those who were at the screening objecting only to the length and not the breadth of Sicko”), JESSICA’s festival sortie included Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace (“Kalin’s pet topics – decadence and depravity – were lightly surveyed, the film relying heavily on the telegenic Julianne Moore’s consummate acting”), Kim Ki-duk’s Time (“the dialogue... often surrenders to a kind of soap-operality that is a little distracting from the plot (completely cuckoo – yet not improbable) and though it is self-effacing and plucky it does hamper the Freudian hilarity of the plastic surgery love battle that occurs between a young modern moneyed Asian couple in pursuit of ul-jjang (a perfect face)”), and also seen by NZIFF attenders, You, the Living (“[Roy] Andersson’s wry, gloomy humour is consistent – with more emphasis on the fatalistic, tentatively hopeful despair of his players than the capitalist critique present in Songs”) and Radiant City (“Surburbia’s voracious consumption of the American landscape with its ‘zombie monoculture’ is magnified through this intimate yet calculated representation... swish and informative; a repository of good celluloid.”)

You’ll find more Notes from the Melbourne International Film Festival on The Festival Reader, as you will dispatches from our roaming associate abroad, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN, who’s filed his thoughts from the 75th Venice Film Festival; commentary that surveys Atonement, controversy in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and Brian De Palma’s Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, The Secret of the Grain, George Clooney in Michael Clayton, and new British material in Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World and Kenneth Branagh’s Sleuth.