Film Picks: Writing With Fire, King Richard, Turning Red

Writing With Fire (NC16)

92 minutes, showing exclusively at The Projector, 4 stars

The journalists of the women-staffed newspaper Khabar Lahariya, based in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, put up with a lot. When they report on extremist politicians, corrupt mining companies, biased policing or the rapes and murders of low-caste women, they are treated as pests - or worse, seen as threats who must be bribed or intimidated into silence.

But the women keep at it - over the objections of their fathers and husbands, who see their activities as shameful because they think no decent woman should be outside the home, only to return at night.

All drawn from the Dalit ("untouchable") class, the reporters and editors speak up for their community because, as the women themselves say, nobody else will.

In the running for a Best Documentary Award at the upcoming Academy Awards, this portrait of an inspiring organisation comes from New Delhi-based husband-and-wife team Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh. As the couple show, the women see their work as a form of self-improvement - the segments showing the women training themselves to be digital journalists using mobile phones are especially interesting.

This sport biography could land actor Will Smith his first Best Actor Oscar later this month.

Through his tennis champion daughters Venus and Serena, Richard Williams achieved the American Dream - and in so doing, embodies everything uplifting and depressing about it.

As portrayed by Smith, an actor who specialises in making cockiness charismatic - see Ali (2001), biopic of boxer Muhammad Ali biopic - Williams is the wary, prickly man glimpsed in YouTube interviews.

That bellicose energy, through the magic of Smith's interpretation, segues into a salesman's jocular persistence when he has to persuade coaches and agents to put their faith in his daughters - girls with raw tennis talent but no country club credentials.

Credit goes to director Reinaldo Marcus Green and screenwriter Zach Baylin for resisting the urge to make Williams an emotionally nurturing modern dad. Williams is an old-school authoritarian who shows love by letting his children buy sweets or giving a hearty cheer from the sidelines.

Twitter was ablaze recently after a white American male film reviewer dismissed this Disney-Pixar work as "exhausting" because he found no one he could relate to in a movie about a teenage girl from a Chinese-Canadian family.

The Twitter crowd quite correctly shamed him into taking down his review. The furore highlights some dismal facts about Hollywood, such as the double standard whereby white families are normalised as main characters, and yet non-white people are still able to see themselves in such movies  – but not vice versa. 

In this tale of Mei Lee, a teen cursed - or perhaps blessed - with shape-shifting powers, the girls are never catty or form cliques. Their support for one another is unstinting.

Chinese-Canadian director and co-writer Domee Shi understands that while the teens might be boy-crazy, their crushes are confined to the realm of fantasy. The real boy himself is irrelevant. What is more important is the rich romantic lore they spin around the floppy-haired, baby-faced objects of their desire.

Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is a 13-year-old high-achiever and the pride of her Chinese immigrant parents. In the Toronto of the early 2000s, Mei - with friends Miriam (Ava Morse), Abby (Hyein Park) and Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, star of Netflix comedy Never Have I Ever, 2020 to present) - sing karaoke and dream about the boy band 4*Town.

Mei's mother Ming (Sandra Oh) expects her daughter to make the right choices. Most of all, she just wants to keep Mei safe. That drive becomes so intrusive it makes the girl the butt of school jokes. The shame Mei feels triggers a violent change in her body, magically transforming her into a giant red panda.