150 Word Review: 'The Wedding Banquet' (2025)

Modern family

May 15, 2025

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The Wedding Banquet is a sensitive, tender-hearted dramedy about two pairs of young-ish queer couples who live next to each other in Seattle—Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan's characters live downstairs, Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran’s characters live upstairs. The plot is gently madcap: the girls want a baby, and the boys are torn apart because one is afraid of commitment, and the other has an expiring visa and wealthy, Korean grandparents who don't know he's gay. What if he marries one of the girls? And in exchange, he'll pay for another expensive round of IVF! What if????

Director Andrew Ahn reinvents Ang Lee's 1993 hilarious, subversive classic. Youn Yuh-jung is a stern grandmother with a big heart. Joan Chen is a spitfire as Tran's character's flamboyant mom, a super ally. The leads are all relatable, not too quirky, not too sappy. Yang is the funniest, Tran the most soulful.