Queen of the Ring: Sean Durkin’s great The Iron Claw, from 2023, opened the door for serious biopics about specific moments in the history of professional wrestling. The latest is Ash Avildsen’s Queen of the Ring, which adapts Jeff Leen’s nonfiction book of the same name about Mildred Burke, the pioneering figure in women’s pro wrestling in the mid-20th century. The film features decent performances and well-mounted period detail, and the in-ring action is fine. But it’s way too long, and hews closely to biopic and sports movie conventions (the director’s late father John directed Rocky). When it comes to stories from pro wrestling history that could conceivably inspire a biopic, I don’t get the sense this is one of the better ones.
Emily Bett Rickards plays Burke, a single mother in the wrestling business at a time when women getting into the ring was illegal in much of the country. Josh Lucas plays her loutish manager-turned-husband, while familiar faces from modern-day pro wrestling pop up, sometimes as real-life wrestling figures of the past. Walton Goggins steals several scenes as promoter Jack Pfefer, whose charge is Mae Young (Francesca Eastwood), who WWE fans will remember as an elderly lady used in sexual comedy segments in the late-1990s. The other scene stealer is Adam Demos as old-timey wrestler Gorgeous George, who probably deserves his own biopic at some point. But when wrestling manager Jim Cornette shows up, it’s more a distraction than anything else.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl: The sophomore effort from Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni (I Am Not a Witch) really snuck up on me. It jumps right into the premise: A professional woman named Shula (Susan Chardy) is returning from a costume party when she discovers a man lying dead in the road—only to discover that the dead guy is her Uncle Fred. The bulk of the film’s taken up by the complicated, traditional mourning ritual that follows, including occasional notes of dark comedy, especially as the protagonist, who it’s implied has moved away from this culture, clashes with such rituals.
However, something soon becomes apparent: The newly deceased made a habit of molesting all the girls in the family, covered up by a multi-generational conspiracy of silence that the women in the family had as much if not more of a role in than the men. It leads up to an infuriating kangaroo court proceeding in which the dead man’s barely-grown widow is vilified by the assembled mourners, with the family matriarchs leading the way. I’m not sure if the central metaphor about the guinea fowl works, but overall, this one’s a gut punch.
Seven Veils: Atom Egoyan’s film, a TIFF leftover from 2023 finally making it to theaters now, is one of those big swings that didn’t connect. The film’s a behind-the-scenes-intrigue-at-the-theater type of project, starring Amanda Seyfried as Jeanine, a theater director mounting a production of the opera Salome. Egoyan directed a production of Salome in 2023, and the film was filmed against the backdrop of that, using the same sets. This is a film of the #MeToo era, as well as the subsequent several years of entertainment in which everything was ultimately all about trauma. Jeanine comes to terms with bad events of the past, as her late former lover had directed a previous version of the same opera. Seyfried is strong, but the film’s trying to do too much while also getting to a lot of these ideas late.
Pomegranate: Considering how much attention was paid in the last election cycle to the voting habits of Arab-Americans in Michigan, here’s a movie that touches on something somewhat similar. Directed by Weam Namou and adapted from her book of the same name, Pomegranate is the story of Niran (Sam Rahmani), whose family are Muslim refugees from Iraq who’ve settled in a Michigan suburb, which has a large community of Iraqi refugees who are Christian rather than Muslim. The other difference is that while Niran’s a budding liberal, the Christian immigrants seem to be big Trump fans.
Politics isn’t the main thrust of the film, though, as it's instead about Niran’s coming of age and determining what it means to be a young woman in her exact position at that time in history, including deciding whether or not to continue wearing the hijab. On that level, the film’s very effective.
All the while, she’s dealing with her family, especially her overwhelming, frequently squawking mother (Zain Shami), a woman who makes George Costanza’s mother look subdued. It was such an effective performance that just about every time she started yelling at her daughter, it made me want to turn the movie off.