Discover Curated Film Festival Favorites You Can Stream at Home

A curated lineup of festival favourites – from arthouse obscurities to bona fide classics – may be the closest some of us get to a ticket to Cannes. Whether these movies have shone at film festivals in Europe, North America or Australia, they have acquired accolades for good reason and are ripe for rediscovery. And you can watch them without going anywhere, through the streaming platform Mubi. On the French Riviera The lineup at the Cannes film festival is always eclectic and electric. For lovers of The Substance, Raw director Julia Ducournau’s shocking sophomore effort Titane controversially took home the 2021 Palme d’Or and received a lengthy standing ovation. This David Cronenberg-esque nightmare fuses mechanophilia with bloody body horror to create a truly unique dive into the depths of the human psyche. Equally evocative, Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep from 1996 boasts exquisite performances by the Hong Kong legend Maggie Cheung and François Truffaut’s favourite leading man, Jean-Pierre Léaud. Screened as part of the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes festival, it’s a caustic, satirical meta-commentary on the French film industry in the 1990s. You cannot talk about Cannes without mentioning the French new wave. The 400 Blows opened the 1959 festival, winning Truffaut the best director award for his semi-autobiographical look at a misunderstood adolescent life in 1950s Paris. Worldwide favourites Shot in Denmark, Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round premiered at the 2020 Toronto international film festival. A booze-sozzled black comedy, it dissects the addictive tendencies in us all, with the Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen leading a drunken ensemble in an offbeat look at midlife crises. First Cow, directed by the American indie stalwart Kelly Reichardt, opened the Locarno film festival in Switzerland in 2020. Set in 1820s Oregon, this poetic revisionist western follows an unlikely duo who start a small business selling baked goods using milk stolen from the outpost’s first cow. Also shown at Locarno, in 1949, where it was awarded the prestigious special jury prize, was one of the greatest films of all time. Vittorio De Sica’s powerful Oscar-winning classic Bicycle Thieves defined a new era in Italian cinema, spearheading the nation’s neorealist movement with its powerful and humanistic portrayal of poverty and desperation in Rome after the second world war. Closer to home Nicholas Winding Refn has long been a Sydney film festival favourite, winning the Sydney film prize twice, for Bronson and Only God Forgives. In 2006, his exhilarating Pusher trilogy – three gritty, frenetic thrillers set in the aftermath of a botched drug deal – was screened in its entirety. Winning the Palme d’Or before getting its Australian premiere at the Sydney film festival in 2018, the poignant Japanese drama Shoplifters, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, focuses on a makeshift, impoverished family in Tokyo that survives through petty crime. The Melbourne international film festival is also no stranger to premiere screenings. Flow, the much-lauded animated feature from Latvia, premiered at Melbourne in 2024. The film follows a cat’s journey through a flooded and empty world. With not a human in sight, only the signs that they may have existed, this ethereal survivalist tale of camaraderie and our relationship with the environment went on to win an Oscar in 2025 for best animated feature.