Each year, the Sydney Film Festival offers a chance to see many films from industries that have mostly avoided the banal moral economy of Hollywood in the 21st century. Here are my top five from the 2026 festival .
1. The Good Boy
The Good Boy is a stunningly strange film from Polish director Jan Komasa. The narrative follows the kidnapping of 19-year-old chav Tommy (Anson Boon) by dysfunctional couple Chris (Stephen Graham) and Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), who bring him back to live with them and their son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen) in the British countryside.
They keep him chained up in the basement, torturing him as part of his retraining as “good”. Gradually, he acquires more freedom as he becomes an integral, trusted member of the family.
The grotesque, farcical energy of the opening dissipates with the film becoming, by the end, a kind of beautiful meditation on the sacrifices required to belong to a family. We become as integrated as Tommy into this deranged family, and end up loving it too.
This is enabled by all the great lead performances, including Riseborough as the anaemic matriarch, and Graham, brilliant as ever, as the father keen on replicating what he imagines to be a conventional family life.
Abel Korzeniowski’s score, which recalls a 1990s domestic thriller, is similarly masterful. The Good Boy is an arresting melodrama punctuated by some side-splittingly funny moments – a true masterpiece, and my pick for the best film of the festival.
2. Dawning
Dawning, from writer-director Patrik Syversen, follows three sisters, Kristine (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen), Cecilie (Silje Storstein) and Esther (Marte Magnusdotter Solem) as they holiday in rural Norway following the attempted suicide of Kristine. They bicker with each other about things minor and not so minor, while Esther’s husband Even (Sigurd Myhre) does his best to keep the peace.
But things begin to unravel when a mysterious stranger (Thorbjørn Harr) shows up claiming to have car trouble, and proceeds to stalk and slash them one by one. The sisters’ attempts to evade the murderous figure are intercut with memories of earlier domestic events and footage of the characters talking to camera.
The narrative is sustained by Andreas Johannessen’s masterful cinematography – a combination of black and white and colour images – and Øystein Greni’s immersive score. The performances are excellent. Harr in particular shows remarkable restraint as the killer, a stoic figure as grimly impenetrable as death – as unperturbed as the surrounding woods.
Dawning is existential horror at its best. The slasher element plays as a counterpoint (and complement) to the film’s exploration of family dynamics and machinations, even as it drives the narrative. It doesn’t sit comfortably within any particular genre, but lingers, unsettling, in one’s consciousness long after the credits have rolled.
3. Red Rocks
Coming-of-age tale Red Rocks follows hyperactive five-year-old urchin Geo (Kaylon Lancel) and his friends as they scurry about the red rocks of the French Riviera. They launch into the Mediterranean at will, and at times look perilously close to drowning.
Geo develops a romance with Eve (Kelsie Verdeilles), and a kind of eternal triangle develops between Geo, Eve, and her friend B (Alessandro Piquera).
Director Bruno Dumont obviously provided scenarios for the non-professional child actors, and kept his camera close as they acted these out as they saw fit. What emerges is a feeling of genuine intimacy with the actors. This especially comes through in moments of non-performance, such as when one of the kids glances into the camera, or takes 20 seconds to say a line while the others smirk and fidget.
These profoundly awkward, stilted moments seem to reveal some of the core truths of being a kid: slowly coming to terms with an environment that seems eternally unmoving, living in a sense of time that unfolds much more slowly than it does for the busy adult, and trying to understand the emerging interpersonal relationships around one.
I can’t think of another film that captures the experience of childhood so well, in its whimsy, amorality, sensitivity and random cruelty. It’s a remarkable achievement for Dumont.
4. Lomu
Anyone who had even a remote interest in rugby in the 1990s would remember when Jonah Lomu appeared for the first time playing for the All Blacks – a move that would change the position of wing forever. But Lomu, an exceptional film made by Gavin Fitzgerald and Vea Mafile'o, is far more than a simple sports documentary.
It’s a heartbreaking story about what it means to live with greatness, and how people both thrive and perish under the conditions of alienation and pressure that attend it.
It plays as an intimate portrait of Lomu, intercutting archival footage with contemporary interviews with key figures in his life, such as his mother, Hepi. At the same time, it offers a socio-cultural analysis of the relationship between Tonga and…
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