Sam Rockwell in Moon.

Let’s face it; many films at the Melbourne International Film Festival will be on general release, so the only reason to spend your hard-earned on them now is to give you bragging rights.

The wonderful 3D animation Coraline, for instance, is out in cinemas on 6 August, Balibo on 13 August, Inglourious Basterds on 20 August, Van Diemen’s Land on 24 September and Moon on 8 October. Fashion lovers take note: Valentino: The Last Emperor will hit cinemas on 17 September, while The September Issue is out on 20 August.

So take MIFF as an opportunity to watch some gems from the vault, interesting documentaries or rarely screened international delights.

Away We Go
Mel Campbell: That said, I’m seeing Untitled Sam Mendes Comedy. (This was an Enthusiast office in-joke last year, when Away We Go was listed thusly in Universal’s release schedule.) Thanks to the politically motivated last-minute yanking of several Chinese films from the program, MIFF has hurriedly scheduled this much-hyped hipster road movie about altbros and altbroads finally growing up into cool dads and free-spirited moms, scripted by husband-and-wife team Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. I’m guaranteed to find this immensely irritating, but it’ll be like scratching a mosquito bite – for just one instant, it feels really, really good.

Andrew Tijs: Ah, the office in-joke I forced upon you all. I don’t know why I found that phrase so hilarious but I doubt I’d find this whim-com as delightful. That said, we must steel ourselves against the indie hateability of a bearded John Krasinski and macramé-clothed Maya Rudolph and hope that this can be a shot of reality against the glossy propaganda of parenting.

Dead Snow
AT: I’ve already written about this Norwegian Nazi zombie shocker and it’s good to see it move out of the Nordic ghetto and into the world’s cinemas. Judging by the trailers and press, Dod Sno feels like a much more honest pulp genre film than the pseudo-blaxploitation effort Black Dynamite, which is also screening at MIFF.

MC: I know you were skeptical about Black Dynamite, Andrew. But then I saw it on Saturday and it was actually very funny – the blaxploitation pastiche is played dead straight. Very lowbrow, too. But it ticked all the genre boxes – grainy film stock, continuity errors, soul soundtrack and trash-talking one-liners – and any movie that ends with a nunchucks duel in the Oval Office between Black Dynamite and Richard Nixon is okay by me.

Red Riding trilogy
MC: This March, David Peace’s cult novels on the notorious case of the Yorkshire Ripper were turned into a trilogy of noir telemovies for Britain’s Channel Four. They’re set in 1974, 1980 and 1983. In the first film, a rookie journalist tries to solve the case; the second film focuses on police corruption while in the third film, the real serial killer can’t resist trying again. The Yorkshire conjured by these films is utterly grim and corrupt – like Underbelly with West Riding accents. The Daily Telegraph (UK) said the trilogy “has already laid a strong claim to being one of the most darkly powerful dramas of the year”.

The Girlfriend Experience
AT: I know. I can witness Sasha Grey performing all manner of unspeakable acts on the internet, so why would I want to see her perform in a supposedly tame exploration of the high-class hooker business by Steven Soderbergh? Well, because I think it’s an interesting area to explore. And The Girlfriend Experience has been dubbed “experimental” which, slotting into the already hugely diverse catalogue of Soderbergh, should bring some surprises. Maybe it’s also due to some latent misogyny on my behalf, because I’ve read that Grey’s performance is execrable and I expect more from someone posing as a intellectual hipster porn star.

MC: Personally, I’m not expecting much from The Girlfriend Experience and I’m almost annoyed with myself that I’m buying into the hype by going to see it. But then MIFF has a nasty habit of seducing you into picking zeitgeisty films – such as Inglourious Basterds, Moon and Antichrist – out of some mysterious feeling that if you don’t, you’re missing out.

Moon
AT: Speaking of ze zeitgeist, this was reviewed back-to-back with the Transformers sequel on The AV Club. They posited that Duncan Jones’s feature debut with Sam Rockwell playing the equivalent of a lunar janitor and Kevin Spacey voicing his HAL-esque robot companion is the polar opposite of Bay’s blam-fest: quiet, thoughtful, eerie, humane science fiction. That’s enough for me.

$9.99
MC: This stop-motion puppet animation has the distinction of being the first ever Australian-Israeli collaboration. It’s based on the short stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret, who co-wrote the film with Australian director Tatia Rosenthal. The title refers to an ad for a mysterious pamphlet that promises the answers to life, the universe and everything. It proves to be the start of an amazing adventure for 28-year-old unemployed slacker Dave Peck (voiced by Samuel ‘The Burgers Are Better’ Johnson). Dave discovers the postmodern meaning of life while meeting various oddball characters in his Sydney apartment block. Stars the cream of Australian talent, including Claudia Karvan, Geoffrey Rush, Ben Mendelsohn, Anthony LaPaglia and Joel Edgerton. Now I’ve written this, I realise it’s basically The Secret Life Of Puppets.

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
AT: Those who saw Tony Jaa’s astounding physical heroics in 2003’s Ong Bak should be salivating for this prequel. In the meantime, Jaa found massive success with 2005’s Tom-Yum-Goong. It was “presented” by Quentin Tarantino in the US as The Protector, quickly becoming the highest grossing Thai film ever to screen in the US. Ong Bak 2 promises to be nothing more than a Thai kickboxing take on the regular guy-kicks-the-shit-out-of-cartoonish-villains-to-save-his-village actioner but Jaa’s eye-popping skills should make it worth it.

The Romanian fable Silent Wedding.

The End Of Europe
MC: MIFF has a ripper program of new Balkan cinema and it’s not all Communist-era kitchen-sink dramas. I like the look of The Tour, a black comedy road movie about a Serbian acting troupe who get caught in the civil war. Box-office smash Tears For Sale is a screwball black comedy/fantasy about a village where all the men end up dead and women get pissed on enchanted brandy. And Silent Wedding blends melodrama and farce as a Romanian wedding banquet must go ahead in absolute quiet. It apparently boasts “the longest fart joke in history”. Win!

In The Loop
AT: This British political satire has been getting grand reviews, as it follows the UK prime minister and the US president leading up to a war in the Middle East. It’s a spin-off of the BBC series The Thick Of It, described as a 21st-century Yes Minister. Might be a bit too cynical for the post-Hope bandwagon. The presence of James Gandolfini and Steve Coogan has me intrigued.

Post-Punk Mixtapes
MC: Most people will be going to see the digitally remastered Dogs In Space and nostalgia doco We’re Livin’ On Dog Food, but for my money, the most interesting part of MIFF’s “Punk Becomes Pop” stream is this collection of five “mixtapes” of video clips, short films and experimental media fragments. Post-punk in Australia was especially fascinating because it was so ephemeral – these intensely creative but short-lived bands made very few recordings, although Guy Blackman at Chapter Music has done a sterling job in preserving the ones that remain. But in MIFF’s mixtapes, you’ll see Essendon Airport wishing Clifton Hill a merry Christmas in 1982, video clips shot in St Kilda’s fabled Crystal Ballroom, early interviews with Nick Cave and Rowland S Howard, and plenty of Super 8 Swinburne student films – including one by John Hillcoat (Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead, The Proposition).

Food Inc.
AT: Following Richard Linklater’s well-meaning but misguided fictionalisation of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation it’ll be great to see Schlosser’s work in documentary form as Food Inc. Although there’s a to-be-titled Michael Moore project about the Wall Street collapse on its way, one of the things I miss most about the beginning of this decade was idea of the blockbuster documentary. This probably won’t be it, since people don’t like to be lectured about what they put in their mouths in general. But it’s about big agribusiness, and if we can’t rage against corporate fatcats anymore, what machine can we rage against?

MC: I was really agonising over Food Inc. I’ve read Fast Food Nation and seen the movie (featuring Avril Lavigne as a teenage animal rights activist!), so what else would this film offer? Its reviews so far tend to emphasise that it’s an “urgent”, “unmissable” polemic, but personally I don’t think it will offer anything new for people who are already familiar with the evils of corporate agribusiness.

We’re also curious about: Von Trier provocation Antichrist, vinyl doco I Need That Record, Zack & Miri gay-for-pay buddy-movie Humpday, epic biopic Che 1 & 2, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, art heist doco Stolen, Anna Kokkinos street-kid odyssey Blessed, convict period piece Van Diemen’s Land, boxing doco Tyson, internet fame doco We Live In Public, cocoa-fuelled Femme Fu flick Chocolate, and the tapdancing redneck shocker White Lightnin’.

Note: The MIFF website seems to be redirecting to the front page with every click. Hopefully it’s working again soon.