Our pick of the flicks at Revelation Film Festival 2024

It’s one of the most exciting times of the year—the Revelation Perth International Film Festival is here! July is the month to check out some of the best and coolest new films and documentaries, as well as retrospective screenings. This year’s selection features films from across the world, from the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Cambodia, New Zealand, and a selection of homegrown Western Australian debuts. And for the retrospective screenings, Revelation will be playing the immense sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, the ‘70s paranoia-thriller The Parallax View (for its 50th anniversary), and the ‘90s cult hit Kids.

Here are a few of our picks that we’ve had a sneak peek at that you can check out at the festival. See you at the movies!

Lousy Carter
7/10

As dry a comedy as you can get, along with a wicked sardonic sense of humour. The titular character (David Krumholtz) may work in academia, but he’s a schlub, working the bare minimum as he’s been given the “six months to live” by his doctor. Hardly taking it as an excuse to truly live life, he continues with his bad ways as he has highly fractured relationships with his only friend, ex-wife, colleagues, and students. Lousy Carter is an amusing world to be enveloped in. With its clever self-reflexive jokes and hostile worldview that reflects that of Carter’s, this is a very angular comedy film with no soft edges or round corners.

Kim’s Video
7.5/10

The incredible true story of the most incredible video store. Kim’s Video was a boutique video store in Manhattan, appealing to arthouse hipster types with its range of obscure tapes (some of which were bootlegs). When the video store faced the inevitable and closed down in 2014, its archive of 55,000 tapes and DVDs was put on offer, which was taken up by the small Sicilian town of Salemi. So documentarian David Redmon travels to this town and really tries to barge his way into the local officials to gain knowledge of the archive’s whereabouts and condition, becoming braver and more gung-ho with discovering and reclaiming it. One of the more intense and exciting climaxes of a recent documentary.

So Unreal
8/10

Charting the portrayal of computer technology and artificial intelligence in the movies throughout the latter part of the 20th century, So Unreal is a captivating film for cinephiles and technophobes. Narrated by Debbie Harry, So Unreal presents itself like an essay on how we viewed future technology back then, now that we are in that future with that technology. This documentary looks at more serious works like The Matrix and The Terminator, but also the less serious ones like Computer Dreams and Weird Science, amusingly analysing how these films portrayed our potential relationships with technology, offering hindsight on their impact and perception.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN

Revelation Perth International Film Festival runs from Wednesday, July 3 to Sunday, July 14, 2024. For the full program and to buy tickets, head to revelationfilmfest.org