(This review originally appeared on We Live Entertainment)

Andrew Ahn’s “The Wedding Banquet” is a generational remix of Ang Lee’s 1993 classic, taking its foundational concept—a fake marriage arranged to satisfy cultural expectations—and layering it with a fresh set of complications: queer partnership, reproductive pressure, and the intricacies of chosen family. The film had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and opened in U.S. theaters on April 5, 2025. Distributed by Bleecker Street and produced in partnership with Participant and Gook Productions, Ahn’s latest continues his careful, character-first storytelling that marked earlier projects like “Driveways” and “Fire Island.”

The film opens with a bustling community fundraiser in Seattle—part lion dance, part drag show, part gallery auction. It’s here we meet nearly all the key players: Angela (Kelly Marie Tran, “Raya and the Last Dragon,” “Star Wars”), her partner Lee (Lily Gladstone, “Killers of the Flower Moon”), their longtime friend Chris (Bowen Yang, “SNL,” “Fire Island”), and Chris’s boyfriend Min (Han Gi-Chan, “Where Your Eyes Linger”). Bobo Le’s Kendall, a self-assured presence with razor-sharp timing, joins the group at the same event. Angela’s mother May (Joan Chen, “The Last Emperor,” “Twin Peaks”) also briefly jumps onstage during the fundraiser, inserting herself into the spotlight with a flourish that feels more about social positioning than celebration. It’s a cringeworthy moment that hints at the complex dynamic between May and Angela—one rooted in love, image, and expectation.

Later, back at their shared Seattle property—where Angela and Lee live in the main house, and Chris and Min occupy the ADU—the personal unraveling begins. Min, ever the romantic, proposes to Chris with a Cartier ring. Chris declines. We don’t yet know why, but it leaves Min crestfallen. That night, Chris and Angela find themselves drinking together, their old college friendship rekindled by mutual disappointment. (Bobo’s Kendall helpfully reminds us the two once hooked up, which feels like exactly the kind of detail she’d never withhold.) When they return home, they stumble upon Lee and Min—and that’s when Min, with a dash of theatricality and perhaps more than a little alcohol himself, proposes a new plan: he’ll marry Angela, securing his green card and funding her next IVF cycle with Chris’s rejected engagement ring. The delivery is half-sincere, half-desperate—but compelling enough to set the rest of the film in motion.

While not every joke lands, “The Wedding Banquet” delivers several standout comedic moments—some loud, others more layered. Han Gi-Chan earns one of the film’s biggest laughs with a perfectly timed line about Google Sheets, and the sequence involving the “dequeering” of the home before Youn Yuh-jung’s surprise arrival is both painfully funny and sharply observed. There’s a rhythm to the comedy that often leans into awkwardness and restraint, in keeping with Ahn’s tonal instincts. And though the romantic chemistry between couples occasionally feels subdued, the ensemble never falters. Each actor delivers a strong, committed performance that builds out a world of personalities shaped as much by what’s unsaid as what is.

Kelly Marie Tran has rarely been better. Her Angela is bone-tired—not just from IVF or family pressure, but from the constant negotiation between who she is and who she needs to be, depending on the room. She plays it all with remarkable subtlety, letting emotion bleed through in micro-movements and silences rather than big moments. Lily Gladstone offers a kind of quiet resilience as Lee, though she’s far from stoic. There’s a vulnerability and despair that creeps in during the film’s most emotional turns, and Gladstone delivers those moments with clarity and grace. Bowen Yang dials back his usual comedic energy for something more internal. His Chris is filled with doubt—not just in his relationship, but in himself—and Yang leans into that discomfort without overplaying it.

Han Gi-Chan is likely a fresh face for many Western viewers, but his performance is one of the film’s biggest standouts. As Min, he brings a perfect balance of theatrical charm and emotional sincerity, handling both the comedic beats and the heavier moments with impressive agility. Some of the film’s funniest lines and most vulnerable moments belong to him, and he navigates both ends of that spectrum without ever feeling out of sync with the rest of the ensemble.

Bobo Le nearly steals the show in just a few scenes as Kendall. She’s the rare character in this film who seems fully at ease with herself, and her presence—funny, grounded, and effortlessly cool—offers a glimpse of what life could look like when you’re no longer performing for anyone else.

Youn Yuh-jung, in a limited but pivotal role, delivers the film’s most commanding presence. Every scene she enters shifts the tone—sometimes gently, sometimes with a jolt. Her character’s silence holds more weight than many monologues, and her quiet scrutiny lingers long after she leaves a room. There’s an authenticity she brings that deepens the emotional and cultural stakes of the story.

If “The Wedding Banquet” has its limitations, they’re mostly in structure and scope. Ahn is juggling a lot—intergenerational drama, rom-com rhythms, immigration logistics, and fertility timelines—and not every storyline gets the space it deserves. But those constraints pale in comparison to what the film achieves: honest, layered storytelling that centers queer and AAPI characters not as symbols, but as full, complicated people.

In an industry still hesitant to fund stories like this, “The Wedding Banquet” is a welcome and necessary entry into a library that’s far too thin. At a time when both LGBTQIA+ and Asian American communities continue to face backlash and erasure, films like this remind us why visibility matters—not in a surface-level sense, but in the deeper work of showing lives, contradictions, and relationships that feel real. These stories deserve to be told. And they deserve to be told well.

★★★½ — A film best seen in a packed theater, where every laugh, gasp, and quiet moment of recognition can ripple through the crowd. “The Wedding Banquet” earns that space—and so do we.