At The Movies: Dreams (Sex Love) a Nordic Bridget Jones’s Diary, Heads Of State is cheerfully insane

Dreams (Sex Love) (R21)

110 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on July 10
★★★★☆

The story: Seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Johanne (Ella Overbye) falls badly for her very cool female teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) and pours her passion into a memoir.

Dreams (Sex Love) capped Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud’s 2024 Oslo Trilogy on queer relationships by winning the Golden Bear top prize at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival.

To be clear, Johanne bridles at the “queer” label for this engaging dramedy, the third standalone feature following Sex (2024) and Love (2024). What she is experiencing is simply first love, wryly comical in its innocence: She believes she and her crush are bonded because of their shared names, and to get close to Johanna, she visits her at home after class for knitting lessons.

Johanne’s voiceover narration of her confessional has the interiority of a novel. Writing is her way to make sense of, as well as preserve, the intense emotions. And such is the candour, vulnerability and sensual lyricism of her transformative personal essay, her grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen) and single mother (Ane Dahl Torp), upon reading it a year later, are so awed that they suggest publishing it.

Nan, a jaded feminist poet, is not a little jealous, and mum worries the girl might have been exploited, given the intimacy of her prose. Still, both wish they had lived their lives feeling so fully.

The story compares the three generations of women, while asking how much of the manuscript is a besotted adolescent’s fantasy and how much fact, and where do the two overlap?

The movie maintains a light touch, gentle and patient in the young heroine’s journey to find herself through her literary voice.

Hot take: This Nordic Bridget Jones’s Diary is a layered and humorous account of sexual awakening worth writing home about.

Heads Of State (NC16)

116 minutes, streaming on Prime Video
★★★☆☆

The story: British prime minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba) and American president Will Derringer (John Cena), two polar opposites, must set aside their bickering rivalry to survive a terrorist attack. Nothing less than Western democracy is at stake.

The formulaic plot is that of any mismatched buddy comedy, but the buddies – Elba and Cena from The Suicide Squad (2021) – are a fun pairing in the title roles of the entertaining straight-to-streaming Heads Of State.

Sam is a Cambridge alumnus devoted to public service despite his sagging polls. He is scornful of Will, a Hollywood action hero, who has recently leveraged his box-office success for the Oval Office.

Sam is the serious statesman to Will’s celebrity he-man, the latter defenceless when his Air Force One jet with both of them on board is hijacked by mercenaries of an arms dealer (Paddy Considine): He has only ever used prop guns.

The Brit is fortunately an ex-commando equipped to extract them from the Belarus wilderness, where they become stranded.

And Priyanka Chopra Jonas kicks butt as an MI6 super-agent in the value-added supporting cast that includes Jack Quaid’s Central Intelligence Agency station chief.

She arrives to escort the middle-aged commanders-in-chief across Eastern Europe, in a race to get them alive to the Nato summit in Italy. There is a conspiracy to destabilise the alliance, and they have to unmask the traitor via explosions and wild chases, plus a fair amount of intrigue.

The action carnage under director Ilya Naishuller (Nobody, 2021) is cheerfully insane, and the message of international cooperation the greatest escapist satire conceivable in today’s world.

Hot take: The co-stars strike up an antic bromance all leaders should aspire to.