​Eric Khoo's sophomore effort 12 Storeys is a safer more accessible effort than his subversive debut, Mee Pok Man, but it shows more precision in its intentions while generating a strong balance between piercing melancholy and genuinely enjoyable moments of levity. An ensemble film in which none of the three main story-lines intersect - their connection being strictly spatial (and thematic) as they live in the same government housing block - 12 Storey's uses its structural design to inform its thematic intentions. Strangers, despite occupying the same space, the three principal storylines never converge as Khoo's film aims to enunciate the diaspora and despondence of Singapore, exhibiting a society made up largely of strangers and a culture that lacks any form of identity.

More subversive than I was expecting even when considering the conceptual framework which involves a sex doll that comes to life and begins to experience the world through a human lens.  There are moments in this film, particularly through use of montage, which evoke the often inexpressible pathos of urban life - densely populated but desolate, a sea of disparate souls in motion who've forgotten, in many ways, what it's like themselves to live.  This juxtaposition with that of our central characterization - the sex doll who herself is learning affect - provides ample terrain for Koreeda's portrait of loneliness, one which is utterly compelling, intimate, and relatively unique.  While the conception itself is rather familiar - particular throughout genre cinema - Koreeda's treatment is far more rooted in intimacy and naturalism, navigating in many ways the socially constructed dichotomy between sexual desire and mutual affection.  The edifice of love as an idea is deconstructed in a way which posits that any meaningful pursuit of connection without  internal-reflection is a failed endeavor.  A portrait of humanism which is rarely didactic, Air Doll never expounds its intent, crafting instead a meditative portrait of urban living in which the search for connection feels insurmountable despite abundance, driven in part by the personal enclaves we create for ourselves internally

​Ryutaro Ninomiya's understated sensibilities may project a languidness to some yet quietly smoldering underneath the enigmatic narrative schematics of his latest feature - Minori, On the Brink - lies a pensive and affecting portrait of ennui.  The title character Minori is introduced as a maelstrom of youthful angst and feminist fervor, a character whose frustrations about the performative nature of social exchange and the implicit normalization of masculine privilege in Japanese culture has left her rightfully combative. Minori's discursive strategies  are rooted in forthrightness and bitter honesty, finding herself consistently at odds with the cultural norms rooted in politeness and subversion of conflict. She is simply unwilling or incapable of putting on a performance about her own epistemological experiences, fearful of becoming complacent and thus complicit in the cultures normalization of feminine passivity. Never interested in expounding meaning, Ryutaro Ninomiya's latest film quietly observes and slowly excoriates its central characterization to reveal a poignant portrait of repressed emotions and the fear associated with socio-cultural-personal stagnation, illustrating in its understated naturalism the symbiotic relationship between truth and action and its counterpart deception and stagnation

​An ode to cinema which concurrently manages to contextualize the art form as an essential document of cultural historiography and tool for eliciting change while also wrestling with the mythmaking intrinsic to any medium of artistic expression.  This film is really a gift in many regards, Nobuhiko Obayashi's final film is bittersweet but poignant, a grand anti-war film with the technical vibrancy and creative exhibition one would expect from the great filmmaker. Synthesizing  its cynicism about humankind's repetitious penchant for violence and oppression with a formal construction that is embedded in jubilation, Labyrinth of Cinema is a deeply personal reflection that is elegiac to those before him while also looking towards the future and the dream for peace and harmony through the symbiotic bond between cultural-historical education and youthful idealism.

Kim Bo-ra's House of Hummingbird is a coming-of-age story with a lot to admire, particularly how it traverses the commonality of its archetype to enunciate the fissures in the social fabric of society caused by South Korea's rapid industrialization and push towards modernity in the 1980s. The impressionable and transient temporal space of adolescence works well with the film's understated grammar, exhibiting through its narrative rhythms how the grand implications of modernization often distort and strain the familial unit and the social arrangements of society under the push for economic progress. Despite the film's narrative falling victim to over-dramatic moments, which are wildly unnecessary and somewhat out of place given its understated formalism, House of Hummingbird is a quietly affectionate story which touches on a litany of social issues while remaining steadfast in its over-arching message of self-love and self-worth for its young protagonist caught in a sea of change she cannot comprehend. The social transference of emotional and physical violence is displayed throughout House of Hummingbird, detailing how larger societal transformations subjugate and strain the social and familial cohesiveness, incubating violence within the communal spaces. While the film remains relatively empathetic to the acts of violence carried out by members of the family, fully recognizing these characters themselves are struggling to make sense of the world around them, the impressionably young woman at the center of our story becomes increasingly despondent given the conditions of her upbringing, bottling up her emotions and becoming passive towards any sense of injustice. It's through an encounter with a teacher at her school, who herself never quite fit into larger societal expectations, that this young child learns notion of self-worth, a notion which is fundamental to mental and physical health not only in a time of larger cultural transformation but to anyone who themselves may see the world differently.

Prescient in its depiction of post-war trauma, Bob Clark's Deathdream remains one of the greatest explorations of the effects of post-traumatic stress on the homestead long after the last bullet is fired. Traversing the horror genre in its biting commentary of the familial scars caused by Vietnam, Deathdream enunciates the coercive effects war-induced trauma has not only on the individual suffering but on the familial collective psyche, filtering it through a raw b-movie aesthetic in which Clark's use of blocking and framing is a under-appreciated highlight. Through a steadfast interplay between intimate close-up compositions and more voyeuristic aesthetic constructions that linger on a moment, Bob Clark's film grammar synthesis these two elements into a formalism that is poignant and penetrating, demonstrating an intimacy in its imagery while exposing the psychological and physical violence distributed across the collective spaces of family and locality. Through a horror film facade, Deathdream distributes a biting critique of the psychological casualties of war, deeply humanizing its characterizations despite the near finality of their trajectory towards inevitable doom. The family members who slowly succumb to their son's violent, heightened supernatural persona do so through largely through actions which are highly recognizable to anyone who has loved another, making their inevitable deaths all the more heart-wrenching and empathetic. From the father who struggles to find a sense of closure - feeling somewhat responsible for his Son's fate in Vietnam, to the deeply maternal mother characterization who refuses to see her son in any pejorative light, Deathdream traverses its horror genre construction emphatically to become of the best and most prescient films about War and the externalities it distributes on those in the periphery who never once fired a shot.

Messy and contemplative, much like any meaningful act of societal-based introspection, Edmund Yeo's River of Exploding Durians employs the malleable nature of late adolescent psyches to examine the milieu of the native Malaysian community, one which feels stuck in a perpetual state of stasis despite the abundance of transnationalism all around them.  Yeo's formalist designs and stylistic sensibilities encapsulate this sense of stagnation through use of static composition and minimal camera movements, evoking the loss of identity and cultural diaspora felt by a small rural community in the era in which the monolith of transnational exchange moves forward unimpeded, encroaching on their way of life through crude notions of progress tied to industrialization.  Resting at the fulcrum between historical native text and modernity's assurances related to material progress, River of Exploding Durians details the discovery of injustice and uncertainty purveyed through the impressionable eyes of youth. The historical record often obfuscates facile notions of progress brought by modernity, and the central characters of this story find themselves awakened through education yet struggling with their identity due to the cultural homogeneity brought by transnationalism.  Melancholic and contemplative yet tinged with polemic outbursts - mainly driven by the spiraling and increasingly unhinged psyche of a history teacher whose been in this fight for far longer - River of Exploding Durians is messy narratively but piercing in the atmosphere and mood it evokes. The lower classes of society -disjointed and displaced by the cultural and economic homogeneity forces of neoliberalism - are static or despondent, their own polity offering no reprieve, as it too has been  firmly assimilated into modernity's crude notions of progress in which often the lower-class and under-privileged are pushed to the periphery for the gains of the ruling class and those privileged to be a part of it.

​David Chung's Royal Warriors is a memorable 1986s Hong Kong action film largely due to its more grim tonal treatment than much of the output of the time-period in which a heavy dose of levity supplemented the dangerous action and acrobatics of the cop-criminal dichotomy. The film's central heroine played by Michelle Yeo effectively rubes the insecurities of masculinity, signaling a female ethos which is entirely independent and largely an affront to the masculine-embedded notions of efficiency often associated in tales of crime and punishment. While this treatment of the female ethos was becoming more commonplace at this point in HK cinema, Royal Warriors' moments of levity remained scarce, and when these moments do arise, they are largely circumvented by the films grim tone, one in which the cold finality of death is presented as absolute and a real danger to the three main characterizations of the film - Yeoh's aforementioned Hong Kong Cop, Hiroyuki Sanada's displaced Tokyo Cop, and Michael Wong's happy-go-lucky Air Marshall. The car bomb sequence early on in the film in which the Sanada's wife and child are eviscerated sets the stage for the film's more grim treatment, but it's the death of Michael Wong's character - who sub-textually was an avatar for positivity and goodness- where the film really signals its intentions, effectively eradicating any notion of a strict binary between good triumphing over evil. The stakes of this film are heightened by this presented fragility of the body, leading Michelle Yeoh's soft-spoken but world-weary characterization down a path of reparatory justice.