From Vertigo to Showgirls, where would some of the world’s most beloved films be without critics to champion them? To celebrate the 10th edition of MIFF’s Critics Campus – and the vitality of great screen criticism – this retrospective of forgotten gems, cult oddities and misunderstood masterpieces turns its lens on films whose reputations were resuscitated by critics, applying the cultural defibrillator to overlooked, underrated and divisive work by heavyweight auteurs, shapeshifting mavericks, queer hacktivists and genre alchemists.
Critical Condition
Fresh Kill
Radical lesbians, radioactive fish lips and toxic cat food collide in this sci-fi – a transgressive landmark of anarcho-satire and queer hacktivism.
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Golden Eighties
Chantal Akerman puts love and capitalism in the crosshairs in this acidly funny, vibrantly coloured musical set entirely within a shopping mall.
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Lord Shango
Christianity clashes with African spiritualism when a mother summons a tribal priest to avenge her daughter in this oddity of 70s Black cinema.
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Querelle
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s iconic final film is a ravishing adaptation of Jean Genet’s homoerotic classic about a deadly sailor on shore leave.
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Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
William Greaves’s once-forgotten countercultural masterpiece about a beleaguered New York movie crew turns the conventions of filmmaking inside out.
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Trouble Every Day
Claire Denis’s divisive, seductively erotic horror film rises again, with Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo in all their grisly, sensuous glory.
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