SANTOSH*****

British-Indian writer-director Sandhya Suri (I IS FOR INDIA) has created a beautifully nuanced, quiet and disturbing film in her debut feature SANTOSH.  The film stars Shanana Goswami (RA.ONE) as the eponymous protagonist. She is a young widow with few choices: live with the in-laws who resent her love marriage to their wealthier son, or return home to her parents to a life of domestic labour.  Improbably, but apparently this really exists, thanks to a government scheme that allows low-income widows to take their husband's old job, Santosh becomes a policewoman instead. Imagine the sudden transition from powerless to powerful, with your own house, a uniform and the ability to abuse power just as the men do.

There is little time for such contemplation as Santosh is soon investigating the rape and murder of a Dalit/low caste girl - the very same girl that her chauvinist and caste-superior fellow policemen refused to look for when she went missing. In the eyes of her boss, the girl was "asking for it".  It comes as no surprise that the investigation is similarly corrupt, scapegoating the girl's muslim boyfriend Saleem. For a moment we think there might be respite when Santosh is paired up with an older, more experienced, and deeply impressive female cop called Geeta (Sunita Rajwar).  But as a near-final scene in a  diner will show, whatever narratives Geeta spins for herself, she is as enmeshed in the corruption and bigotry as everyone else.   Case in point: is she being magnanimous and self-sacrificing in her final act, or merely preparing herself for the greater corruption of politics?

I love this film for its spare script, strong performances and avoidance of outrage and easy moralising.  The women take bigotry for granted.  There are no pure saviour characters.  We do solve our case. But we cannot solve personal or societal corruption. Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

SANTOSH is rated R and has a running time of 128 minutes. It was released in the USA over New Year and was released in the UK on Friday.

MICKEY 17*****

MICKEY 17 is Korean writer-director Bong Joon Ho's much anticipated follow-up to his Oscar-winning political satire, PARASITE. Once again, his concerns are with economic inequality and political hypocrisy, and as with PARASITE, MICKEY 17 contains moments of trenchant laughter.  But the mood here is lighter, zanier, looser, and altogether more.... gonzo than PARASITE.  The political satire is broad and crude, the violence is ultra, but at heart this is a gorgeous love story and a plea for humanity.

Robert Pattinson continues to make astonishingly good career choices and stars as the eponymous Mickey.  He's basically a harmless but feckless and aimless man in a near-future dystopia.  On the run from mafia loansharks, abetted by his supposed best mate Timo (Steven Yeun), Mickey stupidly signs up to be an Expendable.  He is basically an indentured slave to an exploitative space colonisation mission, put in harms way, killed again and again, and then just reprinted out.  As the film opens, we are on the seventeenth iteration.

Joy of joys! Feckless Mickey somehow falls in love and lust with Naomie Ackie's kickass space-cop Nasha and she loves him back! In fact, I would read this film as a love story most of all.  Improbable, hilarious, sexy, weird, but a love story nonetheless. But things get weird when Mickey 17 is somehow alive at the same time as his sassier, more mischievous reprint Mickey 18.  And both set out to rise up against the kleptocratic rule of a character clearly based on Trump, with a Macchiavellian wife modelled on Imelda Marcos.  Mark Ruffalo seems to be reprising his role in POOR THINGS here, but it's a no less fun turn for that.   But the star of the show is clearly Pattinson.  And the the Creepers. I won't say more for fear of spoiling the plot but I would pay a LOT of money for a plushy that looks like a baby creeper.

MICKEY 17 has a running time of 137 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

THE WEDDING BANQUET**** - BFI Flare Opening Night Gala

Writer-director Andrew Ahn (FIRE ISLAND) reimagines And Lee's THE WEDDING BANQUET in a contemporary Seattle setting.  With Ang and long-time collaborator James Schamus' blessing, Ahn has the freedom to truly update the film's central premise. In a world where gay people can now marry, the question is do they actually want to, and what should they decide about having kids? After all, as Ahn said as he introduced his new film at the BFI Flare film festival this week, they can't just oopsie-daisy a pregnancy - their choices have to have intentionality.  The result of these musings is a film that is hard to categorise, and that contains wild swings in mood, but that is ultimately rather moving and rewarding.  

The structure of the film is farce.  Min (Han Gi-Chan) is a Korean expat who needs a Green Card so he can avoid being yanked back to Korea by his super-wealthy but homophobic family. Min asks his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chis (SNL's Bowen Yang) to marry him, but once rejected moves on to his friend Angela (Kelly Marie Tran - STAR WARS).  She agrees to the sham marriage because Min will fund her girlfriend Lee (KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON's Lily Gladstone) in her IVF attempts.

So, two gay couples, two halves of each reluctant to commit, and two maternal figures.  We have Angela's mum (the ever-beautiful Joan Chen) who is making up for lost time and past hurt with her aggressive and somewhat narcissistic allyship. And we have Min's Korean grandma, whose surprise visit sets off the events of the film, and whose eventual softening ends it.  She comes to see that despite the foursome's stupid decisions, they truly are a wonderful found family.  Her wisdom is complemented by that of Chris' young cousin Angela (Bobo Lee in a really beautiful cameo).  Nobody is good enough to be a spouse or a parent alone, but our friends and lovers can make us good enough.

There are some hilariously funny moments in this film - and while I know Bowen Yang can be funny it was Han Gi-Chan that really made me crack up with his naive, sweet Min.  But the overwhelming tone of this film is one of contemplation, and grappling with really intense issues. I loved how deftly Ahn and Schamus' script balances all the different storylines.  Even smaller characters such as the grandma and Angela had depth and a story - even if only hinted at or lightly referred to. I also appreciated just seeing things on screen that I have never seen before - a woman's IVF journey, or a traditional Korean wedding ceremony. This film broadened my perspective.

More than anything, I feel this is a film from a rapidly vanishing America. Inclusive, sensitive, vulnerable, not scared of laughing at itself, but also dripping in humanity and love. It's a film that genuinely moved me, but also made me laugh and applaud.  That's a rare feat.  My only wish is that audiences meet it on its own terms and go with those genre or tonal shifts as they come.

THE WEDDING BANQUET is rated R and has a running time of 102 minutes. It played Sundance and opened BFI Flare 2025. It opens in the USA on April 18th.

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU**** - Berlin Film Festival 2025

Rose Byrne finally gets the starring role worthy of her talent in writer-director Mary Bronstein's scabrous dramedy IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU.  It's the film that Marielle Heller's NIGHTBITCH could have been if it had only had the courage.

Byrne plays a woman struggling to reconcile herself to what is effectively single motherhood of a child with a severe eating disorder.  Her apartment has been flooded, she's living in a crappy motel, she is condescended to by her daughter's therapists, and pretty much every man she encounters is demanding that she "just handle it" because THEY have work to do. No matter that she herself works full time.  

Naturally, Byrne's character turns to self-medication and occasionally screaming into pillows to get through both day and night. But there are no easy answers. Even as we build to a dramatic spontaneous medical intervention we know that the daughter isn't suddenly cured, and just because the husband finally came home it doesn't mean that our protagonist is finally understood or supported.

There are many things to love about this movie.  The performances are uniformly superb, and Byrne deservedly won the Silver Bear at Berlin for hers.  In smaller roles I was genuinely surprised at how good both Conan O'Brien and A$AP Rocky were. Perhaps it's no coincidence that they both play the only men who show some empathy and put down boundaries.  Indeed A$AP Rocky's motel worker Jamie may well be the moral centre of the film, even as he's ordering a brick of cocaine.

Behind the lens I loved Mary Bronstein's script and most of her directorial choices. (She also plays the deliciously passive-aggressive Dr Spring.) She absolutely skewers the delusional myths that society pedals young girls and women.  The sick daughter hankers after a hamster because she has a vision of it being her fluffy best friend as is then horrified when it's as scared and anxious as she is.  One of Byrne's patients is a young mother who secretly started seeing a therapist when she fell pregnant and is petrified that she will do violence to her child.  And Byrne's character herself is a wide gaping hole of guilt and shame at her prior choices around motherhood and whether she is cut out to be a mother at all.  Society tells women that childbearing is inevitable and that the experience will be joyful. This film is about what happens when it isn't.

The only thing stopping me giving this film five starts is its running time. I think that when you have a film this deliberately claustrophobic in its concerns and shooting style - and so desperately, frustratingly, sad and angry - that there's a limit to what an audience can take.  If this film had been twenty minutes shorter it would have been perfect. That and taking out a final shot of the child which I found its only slight turn to mawkishness.

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. It played Sundance and Berlin 2025.

DREAMS aka DROMMER*** - Berlin Film Festival 2025 Golden Bear Winner

The third part of Dag Johan Haugerud's trilogy, DREAMS (SEX, LOVE), is a slippery, nostalgic and occasionally hilarious movie about a teenager's sexual awakening. 

Johanne is a 17-year old schoolgirl who falls desperately in love or in lust with her new French teacher and inveigles herself into Johanna with an A's life.  They hang out together at the teacher's apartment and for much of the film we are unsure of what exactly happening. Is Johanne with an E just a naïve schoolkid over interpreting every act of kindness or is she being groomed by a teacher who loves basking in her student's attention. This latter theory is given more weight when we meet another of the teacher's ex-students, though an adult, who says "there are many of us".  At this point one wonders how the schoolgirl will react? Mope and sulk or erupt into violence. And I love how quietly ambiguous the film is and for how long it refuses to give any clear answers.  Even in a final scene with the schoolteacher it is unclear just how complicit she was in what happened and how we should interpret this teenager's passionate and perhaps imagined love affair.

All of our uneasiness and questioning is given voice by the two older women in Johanne's life - her mother and her grandmother. Indeed, it's worth noting that men are almost entirely absent from this story except as a rather banal looking boyfriend or a rather banal therapist.  These scenes of inter-generational tussling are often hilarious but also signal how we, as adults, seek to pigeon-hole and explain and exploit the complex and sometimes unexplainable feelings of teenagers. 

These discussions are narratively induced by the fact that Johanne wrote her experience of her love affair in a book that is apparently preciously brilliant, and then gave the manuscript to her published poet grandmother and then to her mother.  At first Johanne's mother thinks her child has been the victim of sexual abuse.  But she quickly moves to thinking that the brilliant manuscript should be published as a queer feminist coming-of-age story.  And in some ways the disagreement between mother and grandmother over whether to publish is far more about their own tussles when the mother was a child than about Johanne at all.  I point you to an hilarious argument over the movie FLASHDANCE!

Ella Overbye gives a startlingly assured turn as 17-year old schoolgirl Johanne but all the female performances in this film are strong. I also loved the production design and directorial choices that show us cosy interiors with a romantic gauzy haze and feature endless beautiful architectural shots of staircases.

But this film is not without its flaws. I know that it needs to allow us into Johanne's experience of her love affair but the voiceover of banal teenage thoughts became rather tedious. I found myself clinging on for the comedy scenes between mother and grandmother. I also didn't find her voiceovers to be preciously brilliant (as described by them and by an editor) but to be the usual self-involved meanderings of a teenager.  Was this the point? Was it satire?  It was nonetheless boring for that.

DREAMS aka DROMMER has a running time of 100 minutes. It won the Golden Bear at the 2025 Berlinale.

BLUE MOON***** - Berlin Film Festival 2025

Ethan Hawke (TRAINING DAY) gives his career-best performance as the charismatic but despairing lyricist Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater's latest film, BLUE MOON.  

The entirety of the film takes place in the iconic Broadway restaurant Sardi's lending the film the air of a filmed play, but no worse for that.  This is because Hart's kinetic wit and a clever use of different sections of the restaurant keep us enlivened and riveted.

The entire movie also takes place on a single evening in the early 1940s.  Hart's old composing partner Richard Rodgers is debuting his latest musical with his new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II. Just this little thing you may have heard of called Oklahoma!  Hart is in despair because he recognises that the musical will be a smash hit - bigger than anything that he wrote with Rodgers - and also that it's not very good.  He is also in despair because both of his loves are unattainable.  

The first of these loves is the beautiful 20-year old college girl Elizabeth Weiland (Margot Qualley - THE SUBSTANCE).  Elizabeth uses Hart for his connections and basks in his flattery but has no real interest in him.  The idea that they could ever be a real couple is a delusion that Hart knows is a delusion but indulges all the same.  Their scenes snap and fizzle in the same way that gossip between young female best friends snaps and fizzles.  Hart feels more like a gay best friend than a putative lover. The inevitable blow is well telegraphed and (literally) pathetic.

The second, and more significant unattainable love is that of Hart's friend and long-time collaborator Richard Rodgers. Their scenes are far more delicate and heart-breaking  than those between Hart and Elizabeth because the love has lasted longer and the break-up was more devastating.  Andrew Scott's Rodgers is a man with incredible respect for Hart as a lyricist, and his evident love for the man is signalled in every look and line. But Rodgers is also a man who has lived with the pain of being let down and let down again by an alcoholic and who cannot bear to see Hart himself more.  It's a performance of rare subtlety. In the wrong hands their scenes could have been soapy and melodramatic.  But the genuine love and hurt and need for self-protection are telegraphed with a delicacy and tenderness that moved me greatly.

I cannot speak highly enough of a film that will has the confidence to sit comfortably within its single location, that allows Rodgers to be the quiet straight man to Hart's brilliant and performative showboat, and that trusts its audience with its Easter Eggs - the inspiration for E.B. White's Stuart Little, or a cameo from Little Stevie (Sondheim).

Kudos to all in front of the camera but most of all to Robert Kaplow (ME & ORSON WELLES) for a script of rare insight and humanity.

BLUE MOON has a running time of 100 minutes and is rated R. It had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.