Category: Culture

When I got into UCLA Film School in 1993, I set out to make a feature film before turning 25. Every short I created at UCLA became part of that larger vision—I was building toward something bigger. The result was Flow, which world-premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1995. It was the first major festival I ever attended—and where I met my doppelgänger, Adi Tantimedh, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor playing the fictional filmmaker in Flow.

While making my feature The Way You Dance, one of the great pleasures was working with Dhirendra, a Vancouver-based South Asian Canadian actor. A veteran character performer with a career spanning more than four decades since the mid-’80s, he remains remarkably accessible, collaborative, and—above all—an absolute joy on set. In the film, he plays Hanish Patel, the immigrant father of Angel, one of the story’s three central characters. It’s a role he brings to life with quiet depth and authenticity—qualities that reflect his enduring craft. So when I learned he had been nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for his voice performance in Crave’s Superteam Canada, I reached out to him for an interview with CHOPSO. Even after working together, I found myself increasingly fascinated by the arc of his career—and eager to explore the stories behind it.

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.