106 minutes, opens on April 16
★★★☆☆
The story: Robert Pattinson and Zendaya star as Charlie and Emma, an engaged couple whose nuptials in the coming week are spectacularly derailed by a plot twist.
British expatriate Charlie, a museum curator, and American literary editor Emma share a trendy apartment in Boston and the promise of a happy future.
But at a drunken dinner, she elects to also share a transgression from her teens. The act is one of particular political sensitivity in the United States.
Her maid of honour (Alana Haim) is revolted, and The Drama is an American relationship cringe comedy about the catastrophic fallout.
The cinema of Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick Of Myself, 2022; Dream Scenario, 2023) leans into discomfort: Charlie’s, as he processes the bombshell confession; and the viewer’s, watching him endure the wedding industrial complex of photographers and florists, his awful misgivings setting in all the while.
The camera jump-cuts anxiously like his flinches and averted eye contact, and the audio further unsettles by undulating between sound and silence: Emma is partially deaf. Not to mention bewildered, stung and stunned by Charlie’s overreaction.
Pattinson is very good as this handsome weakling who, in the light of his partner’s past, is doubting his commitment and whether he even knows who she is.
Does anyone really? It may be best that way: Some love cannot survive the truth.
The flighty screenplay is both incapable of and uninterested in resolving the debates on trust, honesty, acceptance and forgiveness.
But the movie is a naughty conversation starter that lives up to its title as the tense farcical crisis climaxes in wedding-day horror. There will be projectile vomiting (hers) and paranoid visions (his).
Hot take: Daring and darkly funny, this anti-romance on the limits of unconditional love is no date flick.
124 minutes, opens on April 16
★★★★☆
Bai Xiao-ying in Girl.
PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION
The story: Taiwanese actress Shu Qi won Best Director at the 2025 Busan International Film Festival for this story of generational trauma based on her growing-up experience.
Since her 1990s start in Hong Kong Category III soft-core porn, Shu Qi has transitioned into an art-house muse of Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien (Millennium Mambo, 2001) and international blockbuster star.
The 49-year-old turns writer-director with her debut feature Girl in a career trajectory all the more remarkable if her childhood was indeed as depicted in this semi-autobiography.
Hsiao-lee (Bai Xiao-ying) is her alter ego, a fearful and withdrawn schoolgirl from a wretched family in 1988 Keelung, Taiwan.
The deadbeat father (Roy Chiu), a garage mechanic, staggers home drunk each night to physically and sexually assault the mother (hip-hop artiste 9m88). Hsiao-lee hides cowering in the closet: her petrifaction at his approaching footsteps suggests she is not spared.
The mother is an exhausted salon assistant who, in turn, vents her bitterness in her cruelty towards Hsiao-lee, though never directed at her younger daughter (Lai Yu-fei).
Hsiao-lee is cheerless even when a rebellious transfer student (Lin Pin-tung) wheedles her into cutting class for a day of carefree gallivanting.
The city’s vibrant colours are a contrast to her squalid apartment, this oppressive household tense with the constant threat of violence.
The cycle of poverty and abuse is a brutal watch: There are intermittent flashbacks to the mother’s own unhappy youth in a patriarchal society.
Their clumsy insertions into the story are shortcomings easy to overlook because of how touching the movie is in Shu Qi’s unsentimental candour.
It may be her process of healing, albeit with wounds still raw.
Hot take: The damage of terrible parenting is painfully felt in this unflinching memoir.