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.
Fall in love with three beautiful podcast hosts; fumble the bag with all three. To prepare for our upcoming interview with director Mary Stephen, we study her work editing Éric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale . Almost five years following our initial series on the French auteur, have…
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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.
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?
★★★★★
A friend and I were discussing how you'd react to just knowing a film's runtime recently, and we both concluded anything above 2.5h is either a shit movie or has a really good reason to be that long.…
★★★★
Pretty incisive with digs at everyone, and pretty much doesn't let anyone off the hook. When it goes a little twee, you can be sure it's about to let things swing the other way. Liked it most when…
★★★
Definitely would've been more "authentic" to not have all the Singaporean characters not speak just in English but do sorta see the difficulty of exporting our hodgepodge.. don't really know what the…
★★
Not really sure what people are seeing in this. The thing that's supposed to be good, the action, is fairly rudimentary, and after the first act, becomes very repetitive, never finding any new…
★★★
While the characters surely feel and sound like their Looney selves, it feels like in trying to be the type of family friendly we expect today, they feel less absolutely insane as they used to be.…
★★★★
Pretty iconic in many ways, Michelle Chong sends me with every line read, and unfortunately a marker of a bygone Singapore and a bygone sense of filmmaking. Did we let this die?
Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island
★★★★
Damn Chiikawa really said "let god sort them out" Kindness, complicity, or condemnation? Who even knows
★★★★
Really cool ethnographic record of this place in time in which home, work, and family is smashed together, boundaries blurred, and when you start crossing narratives, realising that there's no normal
★★★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers. Actually very very cute movie that also happens to have scenes of cattle slaughter, self-harm, and hardcore anal; Enyedi is so iconic for that
★★★
Fairly slight in its aims, but interesting nonetheless with regard to how we remember, how we self identify, and what we choose to forget. Had me reflecting on actually how damn hard it is to act in…
★★
I very desperately wanna give Chen a chance because I think he has an ear for Singaporeanness and he captures Singapore well and has some sense of the kinds of themes people want to dance around but…
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time, a place, and the people that move through it.
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