
Dane is scoffed at by Matt's friends as a loser who hasn't gotten his life together, and Dane even contemplates some drastic personal decisions, but he finds a purpose and definition with his servitude, even as it impacts his own outside relationships.
#Movies austin the tiger hunter movie#
The movie jumps around in time, for minimal effect, but does a fine job of laying out the three central characters and their core relationship of love and compassion. They rely upon their devoted friend, Dane (Jason Segel), for help during the months and years after the diagnosis. Our Friend is based on the life of journalist Matthew Teague (Casey Affleck) whose life is thrown into turmoil after his wife, Nicole (Dakota Johnson), is diagnosed with terminal cancer. While the top 20 only includes one Southeast Asian director (Ham Tran) and two South Asian directors (Mira Nair and Aneesh Chaganty), the rest of the list reveals broader ethnic diversity, suggesting that even within Asian American cinema are voices still demanding recognition.A sweet and heartfelt true story to friendship that also doesn't sugarcoat the hardships of illness and the elongating circle of grief. But after that are lesser-known titles - comedies, family dramas, documentaries - craving rediscovery: films like Spencer Nakasako’s powerful “Refugee” about Cambodian families on two continents, and Grace Lee’s “The Grace Lee Project,” about a Missouri director’s nationwide search to find Asian American women with her same name. Topping the poll is Justin Lin’s electrifying breakout “Better Luck Tomorrow.” Recent films with Sundance Film Festival pedigrees crowd the rest of the top 10.

The resulting list won’t be surprising to longtime fans, but it will be a marvel to the uninitiated. (Canada was bracketed off because while Asian Canadian cinema played the same festival circuit, its films were produced in a different political context surrounding issues of immigration, citizenship and national belonging all central to how Asian American cinema was first defined.) They were limited to films from this period (2000-2019) directed by and prominently featuring Asian Americans. To determine that canon, we invited more than 20 Asian American critics and curators who professionally observed and debated the scene for the last two decades to participate in a poll. The titles that fed this growing movement suggest the possibility of a canon that can coexist with Asian American cinema’s more anticanon impulses, which continue to this day. We invited over more than 20 Asian American critics and curators who professionally observed and debated the scene for the last two decades to participate. in San Francisco provided institutional support for feature films. Panels and funding opportunities organized by Visual Communications in Los Angeles, Asian CineVision in New York and the National Asian American Telecommunications Assn. However, following the so-called “Class of 1997” when an unprecedented number of feature films premiered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (including Rea Tajiri’s “Strawberry Fields” and Quentin Lee and Justin Lin’s “Shopping for Fangs”), a wave of self-consciously Asian American films with an eye on national audiences burst onto the scene.

In later decades, Asian American film and video explicitly explored image-making too experimental, too queer, too resistant to labels to comfortably assemble into a neat corpus.

In fact, early films, like those made by Visual Communications in the 1970s, existed to undermine the notion of canons altogether, agitating from the margins against a mainstream that could never understand or assimilate its cultures or politics. True, Asian American cinema has long had a testy relationship with canons. But surely, observers asked, there had to have been Asian American films since “The Joy Luck Club” even if Hollywood didn’t deliver them? The same tentative excitement surrounded Netflix’s “Always Be My Maybe” this year: If this wasn’t the first Asian American rom-com, then what was?Ĭlearly, it’s time for a canon, a set of films that fans can debate, but which make undeniable that Asian American cinema exists and elicit some consensus about their quality and cultural impact. “The first Asian American film from a major Hollywood studio in 25 years.” That was the mantle carried by “Crazy Rich Asians” when it arrived in 2018.
