Best film directors

Every year, the Cannes Film Festival is packed full of some of the most notable films of the year, and this year’s slate, which included entries from directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Terrence Malick, and Bong Joon-ho (and even a TV series from Nicolas Winding Refn), was no exception to the rule. The films showing at the festival — and all of its different sections, including the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week — were a thrill to take in, acting as something of a harbinger for a wonderful year of movies to come. To help you keep an eye out for the best of the fest as they hit theaters in the coming year, we’ve put together a list of the five best films at the festival, as well as one honorable mention, and and the full list of competition winners. As a slight entry in a festival sidebar during a stacked year, Deerskin can’t quite compete with the big films in the Official Selection, but it’s so singular that it can’t be … [Read more...] about The 5 best films we saw at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival

The task of exploring “Asianness” in cinema falls on a variety of shoulders. In America, “Asian” usually means you’re Chinese or Japanese, or occasionally Korean, regardless of where in East Asia you’re from. In the UK, it means you’re Indian or Pakistani. In reality, it’s a much wider umbrella, yet at the same time, a reductive pigeon-hole. Such is the burden of post-colonial identity, the idea that even as filmmakers, one’s outlook as an immigrant — or as the child or grandchild of immigrants — must, at once, adhere to certain ideas of what constitutes “Asian” while simultaneously transcending them. “You are not Asian, you are Other,” I remember being told as a teen in Mumbai, India, Asia, while filling out an SAT form. At the time I was called this thing, this “Other” — a mere category on paper that now feels insidious — I hadn’t even made my way to America to … [Read more...] about The year’s 20 best films born from the Asian diaspora