Omnibus films have never rocked my boat – most are uneven, fractured affairs. Take the high-profile but lopsided Eros (yet to be released here), an all-star triple team that began elatedly with Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand, before deteriorating from bad (Soderbergh’s Equilibrium) to excruciatingly worse (Antonioni’s Il filo pericoloso delle cose). Tickets, the latest tri-directorial effort to hit the festival circuit, managed to buck my extreme prejudice against all odds: it’s one of the more satisfying and succinct takes on the omnibus in recent memory. For once, it also feels like a collaboration.

Past disjointed, piecemeal attempts at shoehorning visionary filmmakers into a three-volume feature could’ve learnt a thing or two from this Ermanno Olmi/Abbas Kiarostami/Ken Loach trifeca: it succeeds, in part, through continuity by locating its trio of stories on the same Euro-train line headed from Austria to Rome. Olmi’s third captures, among other things, the contemplative zen of commuting on public transport, and how the momentum of travel has a tendency to coax the mind into wandering far, far away. Kiarostami’s contribution unearths a real bitch of a passenger mixed with some pretty shrewd human observations, while Loach rounds out the triptych with a piece of typically loutish revelry that begins obnoxiously, and ends rather movingly. There isn’t a hell of a lot aesthetically to distinguish one director’s piece from the next, but that all three stories are allowed to intersect seamlessly makes Tickets more of a complete narrative than a mere thematic device to the power of three.—Tim Wong