The Wedding Banquet — Rent or buy from Apple TV+
Oscar-winning director Ang Lee’s 1993 breakout film gets a queer-positive reboot courtesy of director Andrew Ahn in this heartwarming tale of family, friendship and identity. Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone star as a gay man and his lesbian best friend who agree to marry for his green card and provide in vitro fertilisation treatments for her in an arrangement of convenience. When a traditional Korean grandmother offers them a wedding banquet to celebrate, things take some surprising turns.
Unspoken War — Showmax
Director Nikki Comninos was born in Zimbabwe, where her SA father had fled to avoid conscription into the army fighting the border wars; her American mother reported on the conflicts in the region for US media organisations. Growing up in the shadow of the apartheid regime’s secretive battles in Angola and Namibia, Comninos has now turned her attention to this complicated era to ask difficult questions of those who fought on both sides and the families and loved ones who fought their own psychological battles against PTSD-afflicted fathers, husbands and brothers. The resulting docuseries offers the first real attempt to provide a multi-faceted overview of “the border” and its legacy in SA, Angola and Namibia before and after apartheid.
Kinetta — Mubi.com
Before his 2009 breakout, Dogtooth, and his recent spate of acclaimed hits, including Poor Things and Bugonia, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos made his debut in 2005 with this typically surreal and elliptical rumination on modern alienation set in a desolate Greek resort town. A disparate group of angst-ridden characters stage re-enactments of a local serial killer’s murders in a macabre theatrical exercise that reveals more about themselves than the killer and his motives.
Love + War — Disney Plus
Oscar-winning documentary directing team and former married couple Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Free Solo) follow Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario as she balances the high-stress demands of frontline reporting with the pressures of her domestic life in this engaging documentary that examines “what it means to truly follow your calling when it threatens everything you love”.
Mrs Playmen — Netflix
A dark-humoured, dramatic adaptation of the true story of pioneering Italian feminist Adelina Tattilo. During the country’s infamous and tumultuous “years of lead” in the 1970s, after her husband’s betrayal, she established a homegrown version of Playboy that outraged religious conservatives and provoked furious debates about sex and censorship.
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