Author: Quentin Lee

Released in 1977, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer remains a classic thriller that still holds up nearly five decades later. It is a masterclass in filmmaking, proving that true craft is timeless. Cinema is literature in motion—just as a great novel can endure across generations, so can a great film. Well-crafted images, like well-chosen words, do not fade; they stand as lasting testaments to our history and humanity. Released just one month after Star Wars in 1977, Sorcerer faltered at the box office, grossing $9 million worldwide against a $21 million budget. Yet as filmmakers, we cannot control a film’s commercial fate. What we can control is the quality of the work itself—creating something so well made that future generations may rediscover it and recognize its worth.

In Japanese, meaning “golden repair,” Kintsukuroi refers to the traditional art of mending broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum—and it’s…

In my final two years of high school in Montreal, I made a private curriculum of the local repertory circuit—seeing everything that played, determined to absorb as much cinema as possible before heading to college and, eventually, film school in America. One winter afternoon, on the eve of leaving the city, I wandered into a nearly empty theater and discovered Dead of Winter, directed by Arthur Penn. I fell hard. I went back—once, then again—lingering over the sly menace and savoring the performances, especially Mary Steenburgen’s controlled unraveling and Roddy McDowall’s deliciously eccentric menace. Decades later, while idly scrolling through streamers, I stumbled upon a new title bearing the same name—Dead of Winter (2025), this time starring Emma Thompson. Nostalgia did the rest. Curious, a little wary, and more than ready to test memory against reinvention, I pressed play.

In a hip-hop class at Millennium Dance Complex, I met Diane Paloma Eskenazi, a veteran animator who casually mentioned that she founded her company, Golden Films, in the 1990s and has been producing and directing animated films for more than three decades. Her remarkable career instantly caught my attention, and I knew there was a story worth telling. Inspired and intrigued, I reached out to Eskenazi for an in-depth interview with CHOPSO.

Veteran actor and comedian Jason Stuart shared with me the final cut of his short film, Redlining, which he wrote, directed, and produced. Exploring race and LGBTQ+ identity with wit and bite, Redlining is a compact gem that truly sparkles—and one you’re likely to encounter on the festival circuit at upcoming LGBTQ+ film festivals. I took the opportunity to sit down with Stuart to discuss the film and catch up on what’s next for him.

A friend introduced me to Mark Bernstein, who worked at the Clinton White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and recently founded their own…

On Facebook, I saw my director friend Yusaku Mizoguchi win Best Director at the City of Angels Film Festival for his feature Sae, a touching drama about a Japanese student who decides to overstay her student visa in the U.S. in order to pursue a life as an artist. As an international student myself, I felt deeply connected to Sae’s perspective and reached out to Yusaku for an interview.

When I was making my feature The Way You Dance in Vancouver earlier this year, I was invited to a Royal Bank of Canada event in partnership with the Whistler Film Festival. There, I bumped into Cassandra Naud and Emily Tennant, the two leads of Influencer, a thriller feature I had caught on Shudder. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was a Canadian production shot in Vancouver—and that both lead actors were Canadian as well. I remember Influencer as a smart, character-driven thriller centered on a psychopath (played by Naud) who takes over the identities and assets of her victims, all of whom are influencers.

Having done extensive cultural criticism work when I was a graduate student at Yale and Berkeley in the early 2000s, I lament that film critics…

As I was programming and moderating a Q&A for Yale in Hollywood Fest, I asked Arnold Setiadi, director of Something Good Going On, whether the…