‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
Exploring #6: Paul Thomas Anderson
Author / Eternality Tan
Disclosure Day (2026)
Though bogged down by a talky and absurd screenplay that mechanises its ideas too rigidly into scene-to-scene plotting, this remains an interesting conspiracy thriller, where the outstanding technical craft and bigger thematic stakes help Spielberg make the landing somewhat stick.
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My Father’s Shadow (2025)
Set against a nation awaiting change, this Cannes-winning debut feature intertwines father-son bonding with the fissures of an angsty population through rich Malickian visual lyricism and sensorial montage, striking that rare balance between accessibility and artistic ambition.
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Touki bouki (1973)
Mambety’s iconic piece of African cinema showcases his talent as a rule-breaking filmmaker, marked by a transcultural soundtrack and brilliant use of associative montage, as a couple attempt to steal enough money to leave Senegal for France.
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To Singapore, with Love (2013)
A vital and deeply humane documentary about memory, exile, and the costs of political conviction, Pin Pin’s Singapore-banned film reminds us that history does not disappear simply because it has been redacted.
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Last Metro, The (1980)
The show must still go on in Nazi-occupied France in Truffaut’s elegantly mounted film that resists simplistic morality, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, as a theatre troupe attempts to keep art alive and unblemished in trying times.
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Blade, The (1995)
A delirious, nihilistic reimagining of the ‘One-Armed Swordsman’ tale, this is one of Tsui’s boldest achievements, as he disregards continuity and legible mise-en-scène for a whirlwind, impressionistic, and psychic wound of a movie.
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Exploring #23: Mike De Leon
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
How to Divorce During the War (2026)
A Lithuanian woman decides to divorce her husband the day before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in this realistic Sundance Directing Award winner that finds striking resonance in the collision between the personal and political, focusing on one (privileged) family in crisis.
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Useful Ghost, A (2025)
Dust, haunted technology, and political trauma mark this uncanny deadpan Thai comedy where the corporeal and supernatural coexist with grounded preposterousness, as a dead wife returns as a possessed vacuum cleaner to protect her misunderstood husband.
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