Brief encounters at the Melbourne International Film Festival. By ALEXANDER BISLEY.

LE dysfunctional family! Like Kings and Queen, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is a truly outstanding film. Elegant and penetrating, A Christmas Tale grandly explores life’s messy unresolve. Desplechinian themes of family, art and mental illness are plumbed when Catherine Deneuve’s matriach Junon’s cancer demands a dysfunctional French whanau get together for Christmas’ ceremony.

This family is more colourful than a Demy extravaganza. Deneueve, who won a Special Prize at Cannes 2008, still nails both being a ferocious ice queen and outrageously attractive. Matthieu Amalric is again stellar as the mentally ill son Henri, while Jean-Paul Rousillon is splendid as patriarch Abel, and lovely Emmanuelle Devos revels in her insouciant je ne sais quoi as Henri’s woman Faunia.

Unlike Wong Kar-wai’s wildly overrated Ashes of Time Redux, A Christmas Tale does more than look pretty. New Zealand audiences must get a chance to watch this great film soon. It’s art like this that allows the world to tolerate the French!

No surprise that the music in Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story gets the audience’s respect. The groundbreaking Memphis studio put out artists including Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes (RIP bro) and the Staple Singers. You may know these artists, and their glorious music, but what about the hell of a story behind Stax? It’s recorded here, narrated by Samuel L Jackson.

Stax, led by wily, charismatic businessmen like Al “Finger Snap” Bell, was an unstoppable force in desegregating America. Wattstax, held in Watts in 1972 in response to the causes of the LA riots, aces Woodstock et al. Footage like long-haired Jesse Jackson leading hundreds of thousands of blacks joyously chanting “I am somebody” is a knockout. Ka mau te wehi, Stax Records.

Colder than Dear Landlord, Jar City taps into the disturbing vein of Icelandic film a la Noi Albinoi. The director of The Sea crafts an atmospheric police procedural, savvily employing Iceland’s unique landscapes and plangent Icelandic choral singing.

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A brickbat to the inexcusably exploitative, disgusting I Think I Am Alone Now. I can’t wait to see Werner Herzog’s stunning, cosmic Encounters at the End of the World again. Soon, please. The following foursome are four of the MIFF titles New Zealand audiences must get a chance to see on the big screen:

Battle for Haditha, Nick Broomfield’s exceptional “reconstructed documentary” about Iraq, traumatically conveying the frontline experience, both grunts and Iraqis, of the Washington elite’s monumental fuck-up. Brilliant like Waltz with Bashir.

Mother Mozambique’s Sleepwalking Land, the trauma of war and magic realism.

Everything’s Fine, the most poignant, (good) Van Santian, Quebecois youth suicide film.

Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, Barry Humphries’ bawdy, hilarious, subtitled Australian 70s classic.