Even if the standard of the competition was down on past years, there was no shortage of standout moments at the 63rd Sydney Film Festival.

On closing weekend, there was a rousingly warm reception for the Irish comic romance Sing Street, about a Dublin schoolboy who forms a band to impress a girl in the 1980s.

In a loosely autobiographical story from writer-director John Carney, 14-year-old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) draws on such musical and fashion influences as '80s chart-toppers Duran, Duran, Spandau Ballet and the Cure as he tries to win over Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a local beauty who is desperate to leave depressed Dublin to work as a model in London.

Carney's third film about the power of music to transform lives – after Once and Begin Again – features winning performances from an unknown teenage cast. An acoustic song on the State Theatre stage by Walsh-Peelo and co-star Mark McKenna added to the entertainment at the festival.

In stark contrast was the final film in the competition for "courageous, audacious and cutting-edge" cinema that followed – the Indian thriller Psycho Raman from Indian director Anurag Kashyap, who had the gangster epic Gangs of Wasseypur in the festival competition four years ago.

It centred on a cat-and-mouse game between a psychopathic serial killer (the eerily convincing Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and style-conscious young cop (Vicky Kaushal), whose less-than-endearing qualities include murder by sledgehammer, coke addiction and habitual brutality to women.

As upbeat and cheerful as Sing Street was, even being set in depressed Dublin, Psycho Raman was a bleak, violent and cartoonish look at corrupt Mumbai.

The two strongest films in the competition remained Ivan Sen's outback drama Goldstone on opening night and the tense Danish drama Land of Mine, about young German prisoners forced to clear landmines from a beach after the end of World War II.

The best of the rest were Aquarius, the surprise competition winner about a Brazilian woman battling to keep her much-loved apartment out of the hands of developers; Notes on Blindness, a dramatised documentary from the UK about an Australian theologian who loses his sight; Certain Women, an American drama about three women whose lives intersect in Montana; and Viva, an Irish drama about a troubled youth in Cuba who wants to become a drag queen.

Outside the competition, there were other films that will be well worth catching when they are released.

The old-school American thriller Blood Father has Mel Gibson as a worn-down ex-con, living in a trailer park and inking tattoos for a living, who has to protect his daughter from drug-dealers.

The Australian film Down Under tells a blackly comic story about two cars of hotheads heading out for retaliation the day after the Cronulla riots in  2005.

And the comedy Elvis & Nixon is an entertaining account of the day Elvis Presley (Michael Shannon) visited President Richard Nixon (an excellent Kevin Spacey) at the White House to request becoming a federal agent at large.