The 63rd Sydney Film Festival is under way, opening on Wednesday night with  Ivan Sen's Goldstone,  and festival director Nashen Moodley is "very, very happy" with ticket sales so far.

While it must have been tempting to hope the recent torrential rain might continue during the festival given industry wisdom that wet weather boosts movie-going, the festival director had other things on his mind. "I was thinking mostly of my ceiling leaking," Moodley says.

"Over the last four editions, in really rainy, cold weather, people have come. And in quite sunny, pleasant weather people have come. So I wonder how much of a factor it is."

The festival kept expanding almost up to opening night, with nine films that debuted at Cannes added to the program.

Among them are Jim Jarmusch's drama Paterson, with Adam Driver playing a bus driver, Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper, the Kristen Stewart drama that divided critics but tied for best director at Cannes, Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann, the well-received German comedy, Park Chan-wook's erotic thriller The Handmaiden and the newly restored version of the western One-Eyed Jacks, which Marlon Brando directed and starred in.

Hidden gem revealed

So is there a gem hidden away in the Sydney Film Festival program that might be overlooked among the bigger-name offerings? Nashen Moodley has nominated one for Short Cuts readers – the Sarajevo drama Our Everyday Life from director Ines Tanovic.

"It's a family drama that really is so filled with emotion," he says. "It has some tough stuff in it but is so beautifully made – and convincingly made – that you really grow to feel like part of this family and you hope very much for their happiness."

Our Everyday Life, which was Bosnia and Herzegovina's official entry for best foreign-language film category at the Oscars, screens as part of European Cinema: 10 Women Filmmakers to Watch program at the festival.

Last Cab to New York

Michael Caton stars in The Last Cab to Darwin, which is receiving a US release this weekend. 

It was a hit in Australia cinemas last year. Now Jeremy Sim's Last Cab to Darwin, a warm-hearted drama with Michael Caton as a dying taxi-driver heading to the Northern Territory to take advantage of the euthanasia laws, starts a boutique run in the US this weekend.

After opening in New York, it will spread the following weekend to Los Angeles then six other cities.

"It's fun having a film that people like for 12 months," says Sims who is presently directing two episodes of the Nine Network drama series Doctor, Doctor .

"The US release is exciting in that if we can get some recognition for the film – enough reviews and enough love for it – then we start to sell online in America and that means we'll recoup [for investors]. So it's very important to get into that market."

Once his TV drama commitments are over, Sims will direct a feature documentary on 1987 motorcycle world champion Wayne Gardner.

"I stayed up late like nearly everybody did in the late '80s and watched him win the world championship at three in the morning on SBS," he tells Short Cuts. "He was a huge celebrity at that time: Wayne Gardner was up there with INXS, Dame Edna Everage, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, that whole late '80s explosion of self-confidence. That's really what the doco is about as much as anything else."

Alien: Covenant update from Fox executive

Prometheus director Sir Ridley Scott (right) with Michael Fassbender.

"It's going great," says 20th Century Fox executive Fred Baron of Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant, which is filming at Sydney's Fox Studios and on location at Potts Hill near Lidcombe.

"The director and our producer love it here, not just living in Sydney but they're loving working at the studio and the technicians and the actors," Baron says.

As well as being hard at work shooting the sci-fi thriller, with two more Prometheus-meets-Alien instalments planned, Scott is also executive producing Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner sequel, which starts shooting in Hungary next month.

Plot details are scarce but the sequel is apparently set several decades after the classic 1982 movie and will star Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright and now The Martian's Mackenzie Davis.

While he has had no shortage of honours over his career – though surprisingly no Oscars despite four nominations – Scott will get a new one after the Alien shoot finishes.

The director of the original Alien, Thelma and Louise, Blade Runner, Gladiator and The Martian has been announced as the 30th winner of the American Cinematheque award, which will be presented in Los Angeles in October. Previous honourees include Tom Cruise, Al Pacino, Reese Witherspoon and Matt Damon.

Magic thriller conjures a result

Daniel Radcliffe plays a scheming tech billionaire in Now You See Me 2. Photo: Jay Maidment

If we are getting weary about the number of Hollywood sequels landing in cinemas, that did not affect Now You See Me 2 last weekend.

The magician thriller opened on top of the box office, taking $2.8 million with a surprisingly strong cinema average of almost $11,500. It pipped Jodie Foster's George Clooney-Julia Roberts thriller Money Monster, which took $2.2 million with an average of $7200.

Taika Waititi's Kiwi charmer Hunt for the Wilderpeople actually increased its box office by 6 per cent on the second weekend as it widened from 113 to 117 cinemas. New Zealand's biggest ever homegrown hit has now taken $2.6 million.

But there was little love for Nicole Kidman in Werner Herzog's bio-pic Queen of the Desert. It took just $99,700 on its opening weekend, with a weak average of just $1400.

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