Polite Society (PG13)

105 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on Feb 29
4 stars

The story: British-Pakistani schoolgirl Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) is desperate to rescue older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) from impending marriage, so that Lena, an art school dropout, can fulfil her creative potential. Moreover, she suspects wealthy groom Salim Shah (Akshay Khanna) is up to no good.

Nida Manzoor created the Channel 4 sitcom We Are Lady Parts (2021 to present) and its British-Muslim female punk band.

Polite Society, her first feature as writer-director, packs the same defiant feminist laughs and then some.

Ria, 16, is an aspiring stuntwoman. “I am the fury!” is her battle cry as she chop-socks against gender norms, cultural expectations and tsk-tsking aunties in enlisting her besties (Seraphina Beh and Ella Bruccoleri) to sabotage the nuptials.

No matter that Lena is genuinely smitten with genteel doctor Salim. There is something sinister about the mama’s boy.

The anarchic martial arts comedy is Bollywood meets Kill Bill (2003) by way of English novelist Jane Austen, with a dance number from the Hindi blockbuster Devdas (2002). There is even a macabre plot twist into allegorical body horror, where the mama (Nimra Bucha) is the deranged villain.

Manzoor, who based the story in part on her own experience as a second-generation South Asian immigrant, pairs zestful imagination with an empathetic understanding of sisterly bonds and the adolescent insecurities that underlie Ria’s melodramatic schemes.

What will become of Ria without her beloved lifelong soulmate Lena? Will she, too, grow up and surrender her independence and career ambitions to housewifery?

Not likely. The smashing performance by movie newcomer Kansara will see her through.

Hot take: Say “I do” to this loveable, giddily entertaining wedding caper. It is a genre masala of everything everywhere all at once that is like no movie before.

Inside (NC16)

105 minutes, available on HBO GO
3 stars

The story: An art thief is trapped alone mid-heist in a luxury high-tech New York City penthouse with nothing but priceless masterpieces when the security system malfunctions.

How bad do things get for burglar Nemo, played by Willem Dafoe in Inside?

He has no food, save for some caviar in the larder, and neither electricity nor water. The indoor pool becomes his makeshift toilet. Also broken is the thermostat that blows hot and cold.

The smart home’s billionaire owner is away indefinitely. Days stretch into months as Nemo uses his ingenuity to survive.

Only Dafoe, who essayed Jesus Christ in The Last Temptation Of Christ (1988) and suffering painter Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate (2018), can make so compelling a show of Nemo’s physical and mental unravelling.

Dafoe came up via experimental theatre, and this 2023 pandemic-lockdown psychological thriller is a single-location solo act of Nemo raging, soliloquising, hoping and despairing.

For entertainment, Nemo fantasises about a maid he sees on the building’s closed-circuit cameras.

Greek director Vasilis Katsoupis, a documentarian, quickly wears out the one-note premise, which intrigues without delivering.

In the absence of plot is a bleakly ironic satire on both the rich in their impenetrable citadels and the value of art to nourish the soul. What use is that now for even Nemo, an aesthete who prizes art above all?

The museum-sleek brutalist loft and every piece of designer furniture in it are laid waste over his multiple escape attempts. The biggest gag is his tool for hacking the front door: it is the £2.5 million (S$4.26 million) bronze Paper Hat by English sculptor Lynn Chadwick.

Hot take: Willem Dafoe is the best company should one be trapped in an apartment. The multifaceted actor animates this blackly comic survival drama.