Hugh Jackman’s dark and gritty Robin Hood plus nine other Sydney Film Festival standouts

The chill in the air is a sign. It’s time for the Sydney Film Festival (SFF) to get under way, with a packed 12 days of screenings from 80 countries – all the way from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

The 73rd festival opens at the State Theatre with director Selina Miles’ documentary Silenced, about Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson battling the weaponisation of defamation laws in the post #MeToo era, on Wednesday night.

In troubled times internationally, director Nashen Moodley says that “cinema help us make sense of the world, take us into the lives of people so far away from us, and sometimes instruct us on how – and why – to remain vigilant about our own rights and freedoms”.

The challenge is working out what to see from a jam-packed schedule. Here are 10 of the hottest tickets, including a hidden gem that Moodley recommends. Screening details are at sff.org.au.

Two weeks ago, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s drama, which has Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a devoutly religious couple who move with their five children to Norway, was just a promising selection in the festival’s $60,000 competition for “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous” cinema. That all changed when it won the Palme d’Or, the top prize, at Cannes, repeating Mungiu’s win with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007.

This intriguingly titled American comedy, from director David Wain (Role Models), is about a high-school cheerleader turned hairdresser (Zoey Deutch) whose former football captain fiancé has slept with his celebrity crush. She learns the only way to fix their relationship is to sleep with her crush - Jon Hamm. A Wizard of Oz style adventure follows.

Fans of such gripping adventure documentaries as Free Solo and The Rescue will be keen to see Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s account of what happened when a cable car gondola carrying eight people, including six teenagers on the way to school, became stuck high above a gorge in the Pakistan mountains in 2023. When two of the three cables snap, they are all left dangling.

Hugh Jackman plays an aged and grizzled Robin Hood, grappling with a murderous past, in this fresh take on one of the great folk heroes from Michael Sarnoski (A Quiet Place: Day One). It comes with the pedigree of being snapped up by buzzy American indie distributor A24 and starring Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgard and Murray Bartlett.

Actor turned director Olivia Wilde follows up the should-have-been-better Don’t Worry Darling with what’s been described as a highly entertaining comedy of bad manners with a side of pathos. It centres on a dinner party