Filmmaker, journalist and critic with bylines on: Cineuropa, FirstClasse, The Vibes, Malaysiakini, R.AGE + more. ✍🏽
@kalashndk
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
Modern Times 1936
Ulsan Ulju Mountain Film Festival: My first time seeing Chaplin on the big screen (how deprived my cinema experience has been).
Every Chaplin film deserves the largest screen possible, but especially this one: that massive factory set piece, razor-sharp comic timing by Chaplin & Paulette Goddard, that absurd feeding machine scene—a true body horror moment. I’d forgotten just how funny and political it is.
But the experience was dulled by the jazz-lofi live score by Sooyoung Chin Cinema Ensemble (honestly, they…
Translated from by -
Talentime 2009
“Watching a Yasmin Ahmad film in 2024, is not just a time capsule of what cinema looked like in decades past, when mid-tier budget family dramas were not an anomaly, and men in capes did not capitalise every screen, but also held the promises of what this imagined community or multicultural project that is Malaysia is capable of.
As a young Indian man, I still hold contradictory feelings watching a Yasmin Ahmad film. She started out as an outside figure,…
Translated from by
Popular reviews
More-
Deadpool & Wolverine 2024
the fundamental flaw here: they are both the EXACT same character?? the lack of contrast makes it extremely bland.
its toxic sludge,, highly recommend skipping this
Translated from by -
I Saw the TV Glow 2024
haunting, fixating. cinema expanded.
i’m welled up with emotions to grapple with what I just saw, but making this entry for the record that a major trans filmmaker premiered in malaysia to a full-house audience (i was seated the absolute front row, back slouched, neck tilted up, hooked to every frame the same way owen + maddy was)
that this passed through local censorship board (LPF) *unscathed, is historic, beyond mere representation politics, jane schoenbrun has expanded, or more accurately, mutate visual codes & tropes to ‘create’ a liberatory text of trans cinema.
*(5-7 seconds of projection was blocked during that redacted scene)
Translated from by
