The Persian Version (M18)
107 minutes, now showing at The Projector
Old-world values and modern problems collide in this comedy about a large Iranian-American family coming to terms with an emergency.
Patriarch Ali Reza (Bijan Daneshmand) is ill and the clan is summoned. Film-maker Leila (Layla Mohammadi) is the daughter trying to set boundaries with her immigrant parents, especially her mother Shireen (Niousha Noor). But Leila has a problem that threatens to strain family ties to breaking point.
Iranian-American film-maker Maryam Keshavarz had this film debut at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where it picked up the Audience Award in the US Dramatic Competition section.
New York Magazine says The Persian Version is an “affecting and painful story about what womanhood demands and imagines”.
Where: Cineleisure, Levels 5 and 6, 8 Grange Road; and Golden Mile Tower, 05-00 Golden Mile Tower, 6001 Beach Road
MRT: Somerset (Cineleisure)/Nicoll Highway (Golden Mile)
When: Various times
Admission: $10.50 for standard weekday tickets, $15 for standard weekend tickets
Info: str.sg/aRZ4
The Holdovers (NC16)
133 minutes, now showing at The Projector
4 stars
It is the 1970s and American actor Paul Giamatti is Paul Hunham, a grinchy professor tasked with staying on at a New England boarding school over Christmas to mind a bright but troublesome student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa).
The duo will, of course, find kinship after a string of comic misadventures.
But what an emotionally rewarding journey towards the obvious, watching Giamatti’s sweaty wall-eyed misanthrope Hunham, the academy’s most hated teacher, spark off against Sessa as the angry and hurting teen Tully, whose mother has stranded him for the winter holidays to honeymoon with her new husband.
Also on the snow-blanketed campus is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb, the cafeteria cook who is mourning her son killed in the Vietnam War.
This film is the latest in a series of scrappy character-driven dramedies that have established American film-maker Alexander Payne as a critics’ darling through eight features spanning Election (1999), The Descendants (2011) and Nebraska (2013).
Giamatti and Randolph earned Golden Globes earlier this week for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Supporting Actress respectively.
Abang Adik (PG13)
115 minutes, now showing
3 stars
This bleak neo-realist drama has been putting Malaysian cinema on the map since it began its year-long film festival tour.
The two characters of the title, which translates to “elder brother younger sibling”, are undocumented Chinese-Malaysian orphans in present-day Malaysia. Their bond is tested by a violent act that forces them to go on the run.
Malaysian film-maker Jin Ong’s debut feature has been a commercial success, notably in Taiwan, where Taiwanese star Wu Kang-ren won the Golden Horse Award for his lead performance of Abang opposite Malaysian Jack Tan as the younger Adik.
The brothers have no legal papers, hence no rights. Exploitation and persecution, having to hide from the authorities, are their daily injustices.
The melodramatic touches and uneven pacing are imperfections common among first-time film-makers, and they are especially easy to forgive for such a heart-on-its-sleeve socially conscious work.
