Film reviews: Alistair Harkness on Broker, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Joyland

Broker (12) ***

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (12A) **

Joyland (15) ***

The great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda follows up his French bourgeois family caper The Truth with Broker, a sweet-natured, somewhat whimsical South Korean-set drama about human trafficking. If that sounds incongruous – how exactly does one make a sweet film about horrifying exploitation? – that’s part of Kore-eda’s way: he frequently makes fabel-like films about people on the margins whose struggle for survival would make grim viewing if approached in strictly social realist terms.

Like his 2018 Cannes-winning Shoplifters – about a family dealing with the fallout from kidnapping a child from an abusive situation – Broker is fuelled by well-meaning characters naively making bad decisions. Or perhaps that should be naive characters with poor judgment eventually revealing their well-meaning natures.

It begins with a desperate young woman leaving her infant son outside a church in Busan, next to the so-called “baby box” – a controversial dropbox for unwanted children. As she runs off, two female police officers, who’ve been staking out the church, place the baby in the box, where he’s promptly picked up by two volunteers. The volunteers discard the mother’s anonymous note promising she’ll return and proceed to delete all video evidence of the baby’s arrival so they can sell him on the black-market to a couple desperate for a child of their own.

The baby’s temporary custodians, Sang-hyun (Parasite star Song Kang Ho) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong Won), aren’t as ruthless or as heartless as that makes them sound. Sang-hyun runs a struggling laundry and is in deep with some loan sharks, but there’s an ache deep within him that Kore-eda incrementally teases out as Sang-hyun becomes more and more invested in the fate of the child (Song’s hang-dog stoicism really anchors the film). Dong-soo, meanwhile, is a former orphan himself whose own abandonment fuels his self-righteous quest to find baby Woo-sung a good home.

Kore-eda approaches this unlikely set-up with a deceptive gentleness, even introducing a rascally, football-mad eight-year-old boy from Dong-soo’s former orphanage into the mix by having him stow away in their van as they embark on a road trip to meet potential buyers. Also accompanying them is the baby’s mother, So-young (Lee Ji Eun), who’s changed her mind about her son, but only for as long as it takes them to convince her to let them broker a deal for a cut of the fee. On the run together, however, this rag-tag group of misfits become a de facto family, lost souls unified by their misguided efforts to save Woo-sung from the sort of limited future they’re all currently living.

That this is all going on under the gaze of the aforementioned female police officers (played by Bae Doona and Lee Joo Young) adds an additional layer of implausibility. But again, Kore-eda doesn’t feel the need to adhere to the harsh reality of this world, something he makes clear with an allusion to the musical interlude in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, a film full of emotional truths but not exactly bound by the conventions of a realistic narrative. That might throw some viewers, and there’s definite sugariness to the film that’s a little hard to take. But Kore-eda isn’t trying to make some laboured point about systemic exploitation; he’s more interested in exploring his characters as they see themselves, which makes for a much more humane film.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania launches the latest phase of the increasingly creaky Marvel Cinematic Universe with a derivative looking sci-fi fantasy set in the so-called quantum realm. That’s the sub-atomic world briefly explored in some of the previous instalments, but now home to a brand new planet-destroying villain called Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), a tear-scarred villain who’s being set up as a tragic, Thanos-style bad guy unduly burdened by his skewed powers of perception.

As the film opens, Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man is coasting by on his post-Avengers fame, trying to keep his activist daughter out of trouble as she berates him for not doing enough to help others. Father-daughter theme re-established, some broadly sketched scientific jiggery-pokery soon sees them sucked into the quantum realm alongside Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp and her newly re-united parents (once again played by Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfieffer). The ensuing plot is mostly gibberish, full of universe-threatening stakes that are too easily overcome. The quantum realm, meanwhile, is a visually bland amalgam of the Star Wars prequels and various Star Trek films, with the most distinctive thing about it a villainous henchman that looks like Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put this broken movie back together again though.

Set in modern-day Lahore, the Cannes-winning Joyland revolves around Haider (Ali Junejo), the youngest son of a traditional Pakistani family who covertly takes a job as a backing dancer in an erotic stage show and falls for its trans female star (Alina Khan). What follows isn’t a standard coming-out drama, though, but a knotty family saga, one complicated by Haider’s strong-willed wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), a beautician whose position as the main breadwinner for the couple is now threatened by the expectation that she’ll stay home to help her macho brother-in-law raise his children. On paper this sounds melodramatic, but on screen writer/director Saim Sadiq lets the drama unfold in tender close-ups that allow his characters to respond in realistic and tragic ways to the messy complications life throws at them. What follows is a subtle critique of the damaging effect strict adherence to outmoded patriarchal attitudes have on everyone.

Broker and Joyland are in cinemas from 24 February; Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is on general release

Film reviews: Broker | Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania | Joyland