The Wedding Banquet is quite fun in exploring what found family means in a practical context, especially in the intersection of queer and Asian-American communities. The rom-com premise is appropriately ridiculous - gay man and lesbian woman get married for a green card and financial stability - but doesn’t follow the expected narrative paths, hitting beats that are more refreshingly mature and intelligent. (Although there is one plot point that kind of kicks us back a few spaces in that…
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The Electric State 2025
The best thing I can say about this film is that I hope Ke Huy Quan and Stanley Tucci got big enough Netflix bags to do more meaningful work for the next five years.
While not the worst film I’ve ever seen, it might be the most cynical and full of contempt for its audience. This is a film that shamelessly steals from 80s era Spielberg without any semblance of a POV on how to use it, thinking that it’ll…
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Plainclothes 2025
Plainclothes is stunning, zeroing in on a young closeted police officer’s journey of self-acceptance while participating in sting operations to entrap gay men in upstate New York. Carmen Emmi uses clever visual language to communicate both the dangers of being gay in the 90s and the anxiety that can create inside closeted men. Tom Blyth conveys that anxiety, and the subsequent elation of finding someone he thinks can love, beautifully, his face and body practically vibrating as he’s confronted with…
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I'm Still Here 2024
A soul-crushing film about a Brazilian family whose world is shattered by the army’s brutal and fascist capture of their patriarch. Fernanda Torres is titanic as Eunice, a woman who must navigate the tricky waters of brutal authoritarianism while trying to maintain a happy home. Eunice’s first interrogation by the army is one of the most terrifying scenes of the year, and casts an overwhelming pall over the rest of the film. Watching it genuinely hurts, but feels necessary, at least to see Torres at the top of her, and every other, field of performance.
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