Annual Top Films Lists

Top 200 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2023: #14. Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel

Published on January 19, 2023

The Royal Hotel

A favorite of ours amongst working female directors always surprising us with her ingenuity, originality and formal rigueur as witnessed in the Ukraine Is Not a Brothel (2013), Casting JonBenet (2017) and The Assistant (2019), Kitty Green mounted her fourth feature this past summer. The Australian outback The Royal Hotel sees Green reunite with actress Julia Garner – along with Jessica Henwick, Hugo Weaving and Toby Wallace. This was produced by See-Saw Films, Emile Sherman, Iain Canning, Liz Watts, Kath Shelper.

Gist: This follows American backpackers Hannah and her friend Sydney, who resort to a working holiday at the Royal Hotel, a bar in a tiny, male-dominated mining town deep in the Australian Outback. The hotel is notorious for cycling through young female employees every few months, and it isn’t long before they are subjected to mind games and manipulation, trapped in the middle of nowhere, unsure who to trust.

Release Date/Prediction: For the longest time we’ve had this tagged as a Cannes film – but we’re sure where’d this end up being slatted. For us its a toss up between Un Certain Regard and the Quinzaine – really depends what film category this falls into.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).