Monday new releases: 12 May 2025

The trail­er for The Wedding Banquet, Andrew Ahn’s remake of Ang Lee’s beloved 1993 romantic com­edy, fore­grounds the biggest name in the film, Saturday Night Live comedi­an Bowen Yang, and plays up the wack­i­er moments in order to make it seem like an uproari­ous queer com­ic romp.

Regular cinema goers may not be sur­prised to learn that it is not reflect­ive of the actu­al film, but it is rare to have the tone so mis­rep­res­en­ted as this one is. There are jokes, to be sure, and there are some cringe-comedy moments and humor­ous situ­ation­al mis­un­der­stand­ings, but the film is actu­ally pretty groun­ded in authen­t­ic human rela­tion­ships and sin­cere emo­tions. It’s actu­ally pretty moving.

Yang plays Chris, a gay man in Seattle, with prob­lems mak­ing com­mit­ments. He lives in a (nicely appoin­ted to be fair) gar­age belong­ing to his les­bi­an friends, Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), he has dropped out of grad school and makes a liv­ing con­duct­ing bird­watch­ing tours. His part­ner Min (Han Gi-chan) is a trust fund kid mak­ing his way as an artist but his grand­par­ents back in Korea are unaware of his art or his sexuality.

Min’s stu­dent visa is expir­ing and the fam­ily want him to return home to take up an exec­ut­ive role in the com­pany. Meanwhile, Lee and Angela are try­ing unsuc­cess­fully to get preg­nant via IVF.

In order to stay in the United States, Min hatches the match­less plan of a mar­riage of con­veni­ence with Angela. In exchange, he will pay for the next round of fer­til­ity treat­ment for Lee. There are only two (pos­sibly even more) prob­lems with this scheme – Chris’s fear of com­mit­ment and the pos­sib­il­ity that Grandma Ja-Young (Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung) might arrive unex­pec­tedly and dis­cov­er the ruse.

Which is, of course, what happens.

As you might expect with a film that is anchored by the star of Killers of the Flower Moon, the major­ity of it is under­played which allows the farce – when it appears – to burst into life and then retreat back to nor­mal­ity. There’s a very funny meta moment in the “de-gaying of the house” mont­age, in hur­ried anti­cip­a­tion of Grandma’s arrival, where Gladstone removes all the LGBTQ-themed DVDs from the shelf includ­ing a film that she appeared in.

Co-written by Ahn with James Schamus (the co-screenwriter of the ori­gin­al film), this Wedding Banquet brings the story into squarely into the present day and does a fine job of rep­res­ent­ing all the diversity – of thought, of atti­tude, of polit­ics – that exists in the Queer com­munity. Watching it today feels like a polit­ic­al ges­ture in its own right as almost every­one in this film is at risk of a one-way trip to an El Salvadoran pris­on in the cur­rent environment.

I reviewed the Irish goth­ic drama, Lies We Tell, for last year’s British and Irish Film Festival and, I’m sorry to say, I was not impressed:

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

I was less enam­oured by this goth­ic hor­ror – inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s nov­el Uncle Silas – in which a rich orphan is ter­ror­ised by the people who have been assigned to her guardianship.

It’s partly the stil­ted and self-conscious Victorian-style dia­logue and partly the per­form­ance incon­sist­en­cies from scene to scene, but I nev­er felt like this one let me in – or par­tic­u­larly wanted to.

According to the Otago Daily Times, Queenstown couple Jordana Stott and Lance Giles sold their Australian ready-made food com­pany for $125m in order to real­ise their dream of mak­ing a fea­ture film. Shooting last year in the Queenstown area, with a crew full of top kiwi and Australian tal­ent, the res­ult is Forgive Us All, a slick but deriv­at­ive horror-thriller set in a world where a vir­us has turned most of human­ity into flesh-eating zombies.

Lily Sullivan plays a griev­ing moth­er, liv­ing on a remote sta­tion in the moun­tains with her ex-special forces father-in-law (Richard Roxburgh). While most of the remain­ing pop­u­la­tion has been shipped off into camps by the gov­ern­ment, these two are “sur­viv­ing” (as Roxburgh’s char­ac­ter puts it) when a mys­ter­i­ous, wounded, stranger turns up car­ry­ing a vial of anti­dote to the virus.

Coincidentally, on the same day I saw Forgive Us All, we watched the new 4K restored ver­sion of Tarsem’s mas­ter­piece, The Fall. Like Stott’s film, it too was self-funded by the film­maker. Tarsem was a top com­mer­cials dir­ect­or in the 90s and early 200s and ploughed every spare dol­lar he had – as well as bor­row­ing the crews and loc­a­tions for his big budget TV ads – into real­ising his sin­gu­lar vision.

This might not be a fair com­par­is­on, but it’s the one that fate delivered to me, and I can’t help won­der­ing – if you were going to spend ten mil­lion dol­lars of your own money on a film, why you would make the same film that every oth­er bug­ger is mak­ing? There is very little that’s ori­gin­al in either con­cep­tion or execution.

For a while, I thought it was going to be one of those stealth Christian films – the title, the open­ing voi­ceover sug­gest­ing that the vir­us sur­viv­ors thought that “God had left us”, the graf­fiti on the road say­ing, “Hell is real”. But, if that was the motive, it thank­fully doesn’t fol­low through in any lit­er­al way.

But then there is the rela­tion­ship between a vir­us, an over­reach­ing state response – the vil­lain of the film is a psy­cho­path­ic gov­ern­ment track­er played by Aussie Callan Mulvey – and lots of talk about free­dom, prop­erty and tres­pass from Roxburgh’s char­ac­ter. Add to that, the fact that there’s a script con­sult­ant cred­it for screen­writer Dane Giraud, who hap­pens to also be a board mem­ber of the Free Speech Union (an organ­isa­tion that has argued that Nazis should be allowed to speak in publicly-owned ven­ues and advoc­ated for the right of a Holocaust-denier to vis­it New Zealand on a money-making tour) and the liber­tari­an con­spir­acy the­ory door is ajar.

Of course, I’m draw­ing a very long bow, but when the film itself is so unin­ter­est­ing, this is where my mind wanders. The per­ils of overthinking.