Hi, it's Ben. I like films (among many other things), and here are some places you can find me talking about them. I'm a podcaster, film critic/writer, and general swiss army man. Currently based in Singapore but you might find me lost in other countries. Open for writing collaborations/commissions, sidequest projects, and, honestly, almost anything you could think of.
Deep Cut is a director-focused film podcast featuring deep-dive discussions about international, art-house, and independent cinema. I co-host with my friends Wilson and Eli.
Eli sits down with friend of the podcast Russell Goldman (013. Zack Snyder's Justice League; 058. Sundance 2023 Dispatch) to discuss the making of his upcoming feature debut, Sender , starring Britt Lower, Rhea Seehorn, Jamie Lee Curtis, Anna Baryshnikov, and David Dastmalchian.…
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The Kinetoscope is a newsletter following my personal journey discovering and thinking about cinema.
The first time I saw Singapore Minstrel was in 2016, when it premiered at the Asian American International Film Festival. I was interning at the festival in New York City, unpaid but especially optimistic as I continued to undertake my Film Studies like it would be my life. In many ways it has been and continues to…
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I built and currently run filmbulletin.sg which aggregates film listings. Easily find showtimes and film screenings outside your regular cinema all in one place.
★★★★
Razor sharp, tight 90, a mix of neorealist and cyberrealist (i just made up this term) that absolutely makes a case for its adaptation
★★★
Have always thought of Hong films as having a sort of timeless quality, this one is interesting in his inclusion of explicit references that date it: YouTube, Israel/Palestine, the oncoming AI era.…
end of night, 2026 - ★
i am 12 and this is deep will just pretend this is a long ass hitsujibungaku music video
★★★
Very handsome and postcard pretty movie but was really yearning for something that would sink a little deeper for me. There's something far too bare bones about it, no wonder the vultures took so…
★★★★
Fairly well conceived metanarrative experiment, that uses it's repeated structure in a clear and confident way. I also really like the color grade in this, just a touch oversaturated that gives it an…
★★★
Found myself pretty amused by this even though it shows a lot of weaknesses in its construction but you can still see the effort in trying to figure out if any of this would work or make sense for…
★★★
I should be more in the bag for this, and yet I'm not. Am I looking for more bite? Maybe my faith in human kindness has been somewhat diminished in recent days, and, if that's the case, that's…
★★★★
There are no words capable of containing this; any frame grab from this film will misrepresent the film as a whole. As much visual collage as it is a temporal one, we must remember all films are…
★★★★
Really should've been a knockout for me but the film goes for the jugular in its final third in ways that I find to really diminish from what is great about the preceding sections. The earlier…
★★★★
This is sure to be a crowdpleaser, and plenty here have sung it's praises. It's well made generally and lived in but I find, as the film goes on, that it lacks any sort of tension. For a film about…
★★★★
Trigger warning for: anyone who has worked in an office, the bigger the company the bigger than warning Plays like satire, but 100% real shit. Corporations will always make you become like them, that…
Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors
★★★
Lav is cool af but I'm still iffy on the films I've seen from him. Are these images beautiful? Could we have some closeups? I get the desire to "dirty the digital image" but is fake film scratch…
★★★
Premise is interesting, but it tries too hard at poetics and doesn't reach it. And for a film about a girl whose name is amorphous, she can't remain unknown to us, whatever her name may be.
★★★★
hits really close to home in a lot of ways in the scenes and even choice of words people would use... mildly frustrating in good ways to avoid oversentimentality and also more mature than its…
★★★
It has a good idea of an ending but then doesn't really earn it unfortunately. Still somewhat novel in terms of the setting and period however.
★★★
It's not gonna knock your socks off (you might need to run a marathon for that) but it feels very Singaporean in a lot of ways that don't feel forced, and Jon takes his fairly simple story and makes…
★★★★
If you're not picking up all the friggin herbs lying around how are you going to heal yourself god damn is this your first time holding a controller?
Public Conversations is a site-specific podcast experiment, capturing the intersection of a
time, a place, and the people that move through it.
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