Simran Hans

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Simran Hans

In Ang Lee’s 1993 film The Wedding Banquet, the conflict centred around Wai-Tung, a closeted Taiwanese-American man, and his sham marriage to a woman. Fashioned as a screwball comedy but sharply, sensitively observed, it wrung laughter from the awkwardness of navigating cultural and inter-generational differences. With its elaborate central bacchanal and a running joke about Wai-Tung’s live-in white boyfriend secretly cooking all the food, it was an international hit.

1 month ago | bfi.org.uk | Nicole Flattery |Ben Nicholson |Samuel Thomas Davies |Simran Hans

Close to the end of Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, a documentary by Sinéad O’Shea, the writer and critic Andrew O’Hagan forms an assessment of O’Brien’s work. Her strength, he tells us, came from her ability “to embrace ambiguity, to see all around her”. He is referring specifically to her 1994 novel about the Troubles House of Splendid Isolation, but he could be talking about any of her books, including her scandalous debut The Country Girls.

1 month ago | bfi.org.uk | Samuel Thomas Davies |Ben Nicholson |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel

Using the couple’s own tape recordings and a patchwork of archive clips, Kevin Macdonald takes an intriguing show-don’t-tell approach to the first 18 months of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s move to New York in late 1971. 11 April 2025When John Lennon and Yoko Ono left the stately pile of Tittenhurst Park outside Ascot to move into a modest tworoom apartment on Bank Street in New York’s West Village, they installed a TV at the foot of the bed, got in, and never turned it off.

1 month ago | bfi.org.uk | Ben Nicholson |Samuel Thomas Davies |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel

Uberto Pasolini trades a fantastic voyage for an intense portrait of a marriage as the long-suffering Odysseus, played by Ralph Fiennes, returns from the Trojan War. 11 April 2025Uberto Pasolini’s reworking of The Odyssey shuns spectacle to craft a potent, grown-up character study that mines the emotional core of Homer’s epic.

1 month ago | bfi.org.uk | Simran HansReviews |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel |Nick Davis

In France’s Jura region, a laddish 18-year-old becomes the family breadwinner when his father suddenly dies. While working on a local dairy farm, he devises a plan to win a cheesemaking competition with a cash prize of €30,000, learning important romantic and culinary lessons in the process. In rural France, on a sweltering summer’s day, a middle-aged woman dunks her bare arms into a vat of scalding milk.