The ninth episode of Catalyst and Witness, a podcast devoted to personal explorations of the New York Film Festival hosted by Dan Molloy and me, can be found on iTunes here.

"Correspondingly, although it doesn’t approach the cruelty found in some of Hong’s early features, there’s a definite intensity here, perhaps purely by dint of emotional outbursts that arrive in rapid succession. Hong’s hallmarks are still here (if in shorter form), but what’s unique about Lost in the Mountains is the sense that nearly every line is barbed or bitter in some way. The most pleasurable part of the film, though, is seeing how Hong pares-down and distills his approach to its fundamental elements."

Made my In Review Online debut, as part of their Hong retrospective.

"Crazy Rich Asians otherwise has no time or inclination to explore anything traditional in Asian culture unless it is explicitly related to the plot in a way intended to draw out the nigh-villainous qualities of the Youngs. The movie’s most fundamental and detrimental demerit is its frequent flattening of characters and centuries-old practices into one-dimensional stereotypes, conflating so many different attributes so as to create something muddled and more than a little offensive."

Reviewed this repulsive, shallow film for The Film Stage. I got a little mad.