Asian and Asian American cinema in 2022 was decidedly uncategorical. As monoliths crumble and new ways of being Asian in the diaspora are revealed on screen, audiences this year were treated to intimate personal stories as well as the thrill of breaking barriers we barely had words for. There will always be a cultural gulf […]
This article contains minor spoilers for Ms. Marvel. It’s been over three years since Avengers: Endgame, the climactic event of the Marvel Cinematic Universe ten years in the making, premiered. Since then, some fans have felt that the MCU has been… stumbling, more or less, or at least struggling to maintain the hype since Endgame’s […]
When we talk about nature today, it’s often loaded with visions of some bygone, unspoiled era where plants and animals lived in interwoven harmony. What follows is the palpitating guilt of human nature and how humanity has extracted so much from the natural world that we are now hurtling towards cataclysm. To an extent, both […]
Do you ever get roped into a film with certain expectations about what you’re going to see… only to be met with something completely different? I would safely file Japanese director Shinzo Katayama’s Missing under that niche marketing category. At first glance, it’s a film that promises a paint-by-numbers revenge thriller given its fairly generic […]
Right at the beginning of South Korean director Syeyoung Park’s The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, a young woman tells her narcoleptic boyfriend about a shocking discovery she made in a nearby river. She and her team, she recalls, found an unusually high number of dead “dolphins” there, which bewildered the group. But when they conducted further […]