The best Australian films of the year are a strikingly assured collection of works spanning many genres, from period pieces to science fiction, war drama and satire. If I had to pick a common trait it would be a tremendous sense of authorship; of bold and distinctive voices putting forward uncompromising visions. With that in mind it is hardly a coincidence that the majority of the films below were written or co-written by their directors.

As usual, this list comprises feature films that received theatrical releases (not just screenings at film festivals) with one exception: the explosive and philanthropically funded experimental movie Terror Nullius, which is almost certainly never coming to a cinema near you.

10. Cargo

Directors: Yolanda Ramke, Ben Howling
Writer: Yolanda Ramke

A zombie movie with soul and pathos? Yes, it can be done. Martin Freeman headlines the first feature film from Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling, stretching out their 2013 Tropfest-winning short of the same name. An infected protagonist (Freeman) wanders across outback Australia, with two days to find somebody to take care of his infant daughter before he turns into a flesh muncher. On a most basic level Cargo is about being a good parent, using an often under-contemplated genre to explore truly terrifying things: losing ourselves and our loved ones.

Review: Cargo – the living dead have us spooked, but in a painful way

9. Ghosthunter

Director: Ben Lawrence
Writer: Ben Lawrence

Coating his moody documentary in a musty and mysterious look, as if the very aesthetic of the film itself is sick, Ben Lawrence follows Sydney security guard and part-time ghosthunter Jason King. What begins as a supernatural-themed story about a person chasing spirits morphs into a story about how the scariest ghosts aren’t the ones in picture books or midnight movies, but things that dwell and fester in our pasts.

Read more: Who even am I? A ghost hunter investigates his own haunted childhood

8. Brothers’ Nest

Director: Clayton Jacobson
Writers: Jaime Browne, Chris Pahlow

Eleven years after Kenny, brothers Shane and Clayton Jacobson team up again for a rather different beast to the mockumentary about the overall-clad dunny scrubber. Brothers’ Nest is a stunningly depraved comedy, so black it stops being funny, and a wordy chamber piece about – as one character bluntly puts it – “family shit”. The story involves two brothers who break into the house they grew up in and execute a twisted plan, with terrible repercussions.

Review: Brothers’ Nest – a comedy-horror so black that it’s not funny

7. Jirga

Director: Benjamin Gilmour
Writer: Benjamin Gilmour

Benjamin Gilmour and a small crew shot this meditative war drama on location in Afghanistan, working in dangerous conditions. Stripped of cliches, Jirga has big questions on its mind, concerning the nature of compassion and what pursuing forgiveness demands of ourselves and other people.

Review: Jirga – contemplative war film with a powerful sense of purpose

6. Swinging Safari

Director: Stephan Elliott
Writer: Stephan Elliott

Stephan Elliott uses the outrageous behaviour of a bunch of rambunctious, beer- and goon-sipping characters to mask their desperately sad lives. More than an outrageous sex comedy (though it is that also), the under-appreciated Swinging Safari is a satirical period piece fingering whitebread Australia circa Sydney in the 1970s.

Elliott pulls off a tone that both celebrates and denigrates Australian culture, which is at the core of two of his best films: the veritable classic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and the kitschy satire Welcome to Woop Woop.

Review: Swinging Safari – Kylie Minogue and Guy Pearce in outrageous ode to 70s Australia

5. Gurrumul

Director: Paul Williams
Writer: Paul Williams

The late and great Indigenous artist Gurrumul Yunupingu gave his blessing to Paul Williams’ moving documentary three days before he died. Doing justice to an artist whose work seems to transcend space and time is, of course, no small task but against the odds Williams succeeded.

The director was clearly limited by the subject’s unconventional attitude to media representation (consult the film for more on that), but he spun that into a virtue, freeing the film from the sort of cliches – the tortured genius or the “lightbulb moment” – we often see in portraits of musicians.

Review: Gurrumul – stirring and soulful ode to Australia’s most important voice

4. Strange Colours

Director: Alena Lodkina
Writers: Alena Lodkina, Isaac Wall

Based in the outback New South Wales opal mining town of Lightning Ridge, Alena Lodkina’s wandering drama debut infuses an observational documentary-esque approach with narrative and cinematic elements. Strange Colours offers little in the way of narrative but the many interactions between the psychology student protagonist Milena (Kate Cheel) and a range of hard-yakka men come together in beautiful, mosaic-like ways, painting a powerful impression of a community.

Review: Strange Colours – a lyrical take on the opal mining town Lightning Ridge

3. Terror Nullius

Director: Soda_Jerk

This dizzyingly ambitious satirical work from two-person collective Soda_Jerk creates, in the words of the artists, “a form of rogue historiography” that exists “at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction”. The directors (Sydney-born siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro) re-edit scenes from dozens of (mostly Australian) films, chopping up compositions and rearranging audio tracks to create different and politically incendiary meaning.

History is up for grabs, they appear to be saying, and need no longer be dictated by the same vested interests and patriarchal power structures. It is a thrilling message packaged in the form of a punch-drunk, astral-projecting, bizarro rollercoaster ride through Australian cinema.

Review: Terror Nullius – dazzling, kinetic, mishmashed beast of an Australian film

2. Upgrade

Director: Leigh Whannell
Writer: Leigh Whannell

Leigh Whannell’s sassy science fiction flick about a quadriplegic who embarks on a violent AI-assisted revenge spree is the sort of film that has been underestimated by critics and awards bodies since time immemorial. Drawing inspiration from countless places, from Cronenbergian body horror to Verhoevenian schlock, Whannell uses genre thrills and spills to package big-thinking commentary on several technological and philosophical issues, including transhumanism and the boundaries of human and artificial consciousness.

Review: Upgrade – cornucopia of genre thrills more than the sum of its parts

1. Sweet Country

Director: Warwick Thornton
Writers: Steven McGregor, David Tranter

Riffing on the classic western theme of the doomed hero, the second narrative feature from Warwick Thornton – following his brilliant 2009 drama Samson and Delilah – is a sun-scorched morality tale set in the Northern Territory outback in the late 1920s. An Aboriginal farmhand (Hamilton Morris, who is unforgettable) kills a white landowner in self-defence and is chased far and wide by a hardbitten police sergeant (Bryan Brown).

The film’s political messages, fingering cultural erasure and Australia’s racist colonial foundations, are hard-hitting, to say the least, violently countering the grace and pared-back beauty of its visual construction – which is poetic and painterly. Thornton’s direction is exquisite, anchored on the truism that actions speak louder than words.

Review: Sweet Country – brutal Australian western soars with biblical starkness

Read more: Aactas 2018: Warwick Thornton hits out at offshore detention as Sweet Country wins big