Category: Culture

Coming home from dinner with my son, I just received a Facebook post saying that Nicholas Brendon has passed away in his sleep from natural…

While I couldn’t resist the curiosity of watching Melania on Amazon Prime for free—as anyone might be curious about what a well-shot documentary on the inauguration of an American president looks like—I found myself inevitably comparing it to Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s far more brilliant film about the rise of Adolf Hitler at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. I can hardly recall another feature-length documentary centered on the ascent of a world political figure since Riefenstahl’s artful and controversial propaganda masterpiece—one that won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival before later being widely denounced.

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…

Early this morning, Canadian Screen Award winning filmmaker Quentin Lee minted his viral short video #justiceforReneeNicoleGood on OpenSea, an NFT marketplace. A queer non-binary filmmaker and artist, Lee has pledged to donate 50% of all net proceeds from the sale of the NFT to the surviving partner and family of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. I took the opportunity to interview them for CHOPSO.

“How can I relax? You just killed my fucking neighbor!” screamed a witness after seeing an ICE agent shoot Renee Good and refuse to allow medics to help her. On January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good—an American citizen—was shot multiple times by an ICE agent. While federal authorities claimed that Good attempted to run over federal agents with her car, the city’s mayor stated that the agent acted recklessly and caused her death.

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…

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…

It’s no wonder that Weapons is a hit at the U.S. box office as the movie arrives at the perfect time when our political fears manifest every day in America where we feel helpless to talk about. Now there is a horror movie that answers to our worst nightmare—school mass shootings.

Jenifer Yeuroukis, a filmmaker friend I’ve met about a decade ago in my hip hop classes at the former Edge Performance Art Center in Los Angeles, has just directed her first feature film The Queerdos that I executive produced. The Queerdos also marks the first feature film of the film movement Dogma LA 25 that a collective of filmmakers and I have founded. Wrapping The Queerdos, I’ve taken the opportunity to have a conversation with her.

Last year, Colette Johnson-Vosberg’s Unusually Normal world premiered at Inside Out. This year, she is world-premiering her LGBTQ+ follow-up feature doc Unlabelled about three trans people from Toronto at the same festival. I caught up with my prolific collaborator after hearing the news of her film’s world premiere.