CHRISTY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 10

Writer-director David Michod (THE KING) returns to our screens with a crisply told and powerful biopic of the first female boxing star in America, Christy Martin.  The directorial style is unflashy but we feel every punch and blow of the boxing matches. But the point here isn’t so much the drama inside the ring as the peril outside of it.  Because in her early twenties, Christy confirms to the expectations of bigoted early 90s West Virginia and marries a man who coercively controls her. He is a man 25 years her senior, her boxing trainer, and a total sleazebag. He lures her into the relationship with false promises of meeting Don King, and the offer of cover. They both know she is gay, and that the world won’t accept her for being gay.  This makes Christy uniquely vulnerable to Jim Martin’s predation. 

Over the course of the film we see Christy train and win, usually with a knock-out punch. When she finally does get that meeting with King she starts earning big and can afford a flashy lifestyle.  The film captures the awful haircuts and shoulder pads brilliantly.  But the pressure from her husband is unrelenting, and while I won’t say more at the risk of spoiling the story if you do not know it, the final half hour of this film is harrowing.

This is a film centred on two superb performances. The first is by Ben Foster, who I have always admired, and last saw in the London Film Festival playing the psychopath Lance Armstrong in THE PROGRAM. If anything, he is even more chilling here. But the performance than really anchors the film is that of Sydney Sweeney. I was first truly impressed by her acting in REALITY, and she announces herself as an actor of real intelligence and sensitivity in this film.  She bulks up with 35 pounds of muscle and is utterly convincing in the ring. More importantly, she manages to capture both Christy’s vulnerability and bravado.  I truly hope the prejudice against Sweeney does not preclude her from awards contention as this is a monumental performance. In the supporting roles, I really liked Merritt Weaver (The Bombing of Pan Am 103) as Christy’s bigoted, insidious mother, and Katy O’Brian as Christy’s boxing rival turned love interest Lisa Holewyne.

CHRISTY has a running time of 135 minutes. It played Toronto and London and will be released in the USA on November 7th.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING**

British writer-director Rose Glass (ST MAUD) returns to our screen with a Tarantino-esque GRINDHOUSE movie where romance and violence sit together in a film in which earnest emotions, comic-book stylings and laugh-out-loud absurdism sit uneasily together. For me, the film was less than the sum of its parts, but there's no doubt that the BFI Flare crowd loved it, laughing uproariously throughout. My question is whether they were laughing at, or with, a film that seemed to waste Kristen Stewart's earnest performance.

Stewart stars as Lou - a gay woman who works at a gym in a dusty desert border town seemingly run by her gun-running badass father (Ed Harris in comedy hair extensions). Lou only sticks around to protect her sister (Jena Malone) from her abusive husband. This doesn't sit well with Lou's new lover Jackie (Katy O'Brian), who dreams of winning a body building championship in Vegas and driving to the coast with Lou for a new life. 

What could've been a deeply felt emotionally intense relationship drama becomes a nasty little crime movie when Jackie goes Hulk-Smash on Lou's scumbag brother-in-law and we discover Lou's talent for cleaning up murders. I love a grungy scuzzy crime caper, but what made this a bit frustrating is that I was being asked to take the central relationship with Hulk seriously. It felt like every tonal shift was pinging me about and what was so bad it's good finally just became it's bad.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated R. It played Berlin, Sundance and BFI Flare 2024 and is currently on release in the USA. It opens in the UK on April 19th.