​Wong Jing's City Hunter is perhaps the textbook definition of bubble gum cinema - a blissfully dumb, hopelessly endearing film that is self-indulgent in all the right ways, intent on eliciting a response from its audience at every conceivable opportunity.  Silly and self-reflexive, the film's cartoonish portrayal of machismo posits masculinity as a force of action over introspection, with City Hunter suggesting machismo shares a direct relationship with abject imbecility.  Features perhaps Chan's most bizarre performance, one that's so flamboyant and exaggerated that it feels like he is attempting to channel Jerry Lewis.  The results are middling, to say the least, and while City Hunter could be considered to feature Chan's worst performance, the film remains infectious due to Jing's style and aesthetic sensibilities which exude a vivaciousness from beginning to end. Colorful, dynamic, creative, and borderline problematic - the over-sexualization of teenage girls is something that stands out as uh, odd - City Hunter remains a silly, infectious action-comedy that is perhaps best described as Under Siege getting a screwball comedy treatment.

While it can be didactic and prescriptive in its sociopolitical aspirations, Residue remains a strong debut feature largely because of its quiet moments of introspection. These moments are imbued with a lived-in authenticity due to their personal nature, instilling the film with a raw emotional energy that ultimately provides far more credence and poignancy to the film's thematic intentions than its scripted dramatics ever could.  Residue at times doesn't seem to trust its audience, expounding its message through some artificial narrative devices which can be grating, yet in these more personal moments of introspection, which are beautifully rendered by immersive aural and visual aesthetics, Residue manages to contextualize the struggle for racial equality in a far more substantive way, through natural, emotional transference.  By incorporating identity and memory into its bold formalism, Residue, evokes instead of expounds the panoply of emotions which make up the African American experience in America - pain, guilt, anger, acceptance, etc. run congruent and incongruent, there is no singular way to quantify collective, heterogeneous pain.  With that in mind, Residue operates at its best when the personal and collective aspects of identity are interpreted and examined in unison, as the film emotes instead of instructs through its chief characterization.  Its message on gentrification is salient yet too forceful at times, unwilling to trust its audience to decipher the vicissitudes of fortune that disproportionately and negatively effect the minority community through its chief characterization alone.  Gentrification is merely a symptom of the ills of the larger state apparatus, whose authority under the current polity subverts socially ethical outcomes and displaces communities due largely to the promises of prosperity proposed by capital.  A beautiful mosaic at its best, Residue manages to overcome its more detrimental desires to message-make narratively thanks to an immersive formal structure and aesthetic style which signals a belief in the transference of affect.

Featuring a high conceptual framework that blends noir schematics with gothic horror dramatics, My Name Is Julia Ross is a tight, fun ride that only takes up 65 minutes o your time.  A story of mistaken identity by way of subjugation that through a sensationalist conception, and tight narrative structure, enunciates its underlying themes related to patriarchy and power.  One of the more lucid works on the oppression of feminine identity by way of high conception horror/thriller, in which a young, unemployed woman in need of a job finds herself coerced and her identity nearly erased by a man whose privilege is defined by wealth and gender.

​A polemic affront to intellectual hubris devoid of direct action, Govind Nihalani's Party is an astute examination of the relationship between action and observation, detailing the fragmentation and disruption of socio-political ideology when placed in contention with one's own economic prosperity.  Taking place over the course of one evening at a dinner party, where the ruling class of India has come to celebrate a literary award bestowed to one of India's most cherished writers, Party is a meticulously layered ensemble piece that slowly unravels and contextualizes its characters with grace and conviction, detailing the corrosive effect wealth can have on social prosperity while ruminating on the meaning and purpose of art itself.  Over the course of the evening performative pleasantries erode and competition and judgement seep out, revealing how even among individuals of the same status ego often supplants altruism - the pursuit of elevated social status and the potential for more social capital, and by proxy material wealth accrual, breeds competition which distracts and distorts larger societal progress. Through the film's intricate exploration of the ruling class, Party demonstrates the corrosive toll which this privilege and prosperity can have when not properly checked from within.  Hubris manifests through those whose affirmation of worth is tied directly to their own social status. Their means of cognitive exit are through guilt or dissonance, when stood up against the larger societal struggle for equality and justice.  In this fashion, Class itself can often create a divide between the individual and the collective, the art transcends such divisions while the artist themselves often falls victim to the allure of hubris and a heightened sense of worth. While some look at an unjust world and demand change, others merely accept their conditions, profiting off the inequalities of the polity to enrich themselves.  For Govind Nihalani, this is a passive & toxic act of political activism, nothing more than a performative romanticization of injustice for those who don't directly commit their time and labor to the struggle.  For the cultural elite who expound virtue without action, is their intent genuine, or merely rooted in personal elevation across social capital and economic gain?  Managing to be intellectually rigorous while also emotionally poignant in the way it skillfully extrapolates the ethos of its assorted characters, Govind Nihalani's Party is a pointed, persuasive attempt to elucidate the concept of art in a way in which it is tied directly to social obligation, inciting the idea that words without action are intrinsically egotistic in a market society

​Life is difficult, love makes it ultimately meaningful. The desire to quantify, interpret, compare, and contrast every experience through one's own epistemological lens is foolish, given the intangible nature of objective truth in a world of perception. Happiness is forged from within. Ryosuke Hashiguchi continues to astound me with his deeply affectual gaze. Earnest about the weight of existence, his characters are multifaceted vessels for his astute exploration of the human condition and the various modes in which people search for a sense of self. With All Around Us, the coercive effects of internalized pain are saliently expressed through the rocky but undeniably loving relationship between two individuals who consistently struggle to express their underlying emotions. The ability to let go of self-doubt is paramount for any meaningful pursuit of happiness, with the trials and tribulations of these two characters being largely constructed out of false pretenses such as emotional insecurities and at times, a lack of emotional intelligence, which distract them from their underlying love they share for one and other.  A film which doesn't deny the difficulties of life while recognizing that the shared nature of existence is ultimately what makes it all worth it.