Built for the Open Road

TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) is running right now, and I keep thinking back to last year's edition, when a scrappy debut at the festival called Obsession turned into the film everyone wanted to talk about a year later. That’s the beauty of these annual events. Hidden gems like Obsession get discovered early and catapult their directors and actors into sudden, but well-deserved stardom. 

So I’ve been paying attention to the news again, and this time it's Drifter, Sung Kang's directorial debut, which premiered at TIFF on September 12. Most people know Kang as Han from the Fast & Furious franchise, so a car-focused project from him tracks, even if this one is smaller and more personal than the famous franchise he was in. Interestingly enough, he once wanted to make a live-action version of Initial D (one of the best mangas on car racing) before landing on Drifter instead. 

That’s how I came up with the theme for this week: car chases, and car culture more broadly, depicted in some of Asian cinema's most memorable action sequences.

Hope these movies get you to go out and just drive.

— Yubin

Most of The Raid 2 plays out in hallways and other tight spaces designed to trap both the characters and the audience. Its most cited sequence however happens somewhere else. Rama, the undercover cop at the center of the film, gets behind the wheel as his cover collapses around him, and what follows is one fast-paced, fast-cut pursuit through Jakarta. Cars bump each other at speed, spin out and pile into one another. In the middle of all the chaos, you can still tell where everyone is: which car is chasing which, how close they've gotten, which street they're actually on. That's rarer than it sounds. A lot of car chases in movies get chopped into so many quick cuts that you lose track of the cars' actual positions, and the crashes end up feeling like noise instead of something happening in a real place.

The director Gareth Evans is Welsh, not Indonesian, which sets The Raid 2 apart from this newsletter's usual pattern of native-director picks. But the film itself is unmistakably shaped by its setting. Jakarta's traffic, its narrow lanes, the way its streets fold into each other, dictate the chase as much as the stunt choreography does. The sequence has become a reference point on its own terms, cited well outside Indonesia whenever the conversation turns to what a car chase in a film should actually feel like: not smooth, but chaotic the way it actually looks when someone panics behind the wheel.

The Raid 2 is best remembered for its fight choreography, an escalating series of one-on-one and one-against-many brawls that made the main actor Iko Uwais's name outside Indonesia. But this is the scene people bring up first when the conversation turns to cars instead, and it holds up well even on multiple watches.

Stream on Prime Video (Trailer)

The Yellow Sea (황해) — Na Hong-jin (Korea, 2010)

A taxi driver in a Korean-Chinese border town takes a contract killing job in Seoul and ends up caught in a three-way betrayal between rival crime syndicates. The film's centerpiece chase starts on foot, shifts into a car pursuit through Seoul's outer streets, and ends in a collision with a container truck, shot with real vehicles rather than digital doubles. It runs longer and messier than most genre films would risk, and critics singled it out specifically for that.

The detail that gives the chase its characteristic: the protagonist is a taxi driver by trade, so the film's whole car thread traces back to his actual job before it becomes the mechanism of his survival. The Yellow Sea holds an 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Ha Jung-woo won Best Actor at the Baeksang Arts Awards for the role, and Na Hong-jin (who later directed The Wailing and Hope) won Best Director at the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival.

Stream free on Tubi ad PLEX (Trailer)

Thunderbolt — Gordon Chan (Hong Kong, 1995)

Jackie Chan stars in this film built entirely around illegal street racing rather than a single standout sequence. Chan plays a junkyard mechanic and amateur racer pulled into the underground circuit and eventually forced into a climactic race at Japan's real Sendai Hi-Land Raceway, driving a specially built Lancer Evolution. 

Thunderbolt won Best Action Choreography at the Golden Horse Awards, and its racing scenes lean on Chan's own driving wherever the production could manage it rather than stunt doubles. It's the loosest and most straightforwardly fun of the three picks here, a reminder that car culture in Asian cinema doesn't only show up as tragedy or tension.

Stream on YouTube and Apple TV (Trailer)

Filipino artists have been finding international footing across very different genres for over three decades now. The three picks below span Broadway, R&B, and arena rock, and are great examples of that, both old and new.

By the time Lea Salonga signed to Atlantic Records in 1993, she had already won a Laurence Olivier Award for originating the role of Kim in Miss Saigon on the West End in 1989, becoming the first Asian performer to win it, and a Tony Award for the same role on Broadway two years later. Atlantic signed her on the strength of that theatrical breakthrough, making her the first Filipino singer ever signed to an international record label. Lea Salonga, her self-titled debut for the label, is where that recognition first showed up outside a theater.

The album sits apart from the work most people know her for. It isn't Kim, and it isn't Jasmine or Mulan, the two Disney princesses she'd go on to voice later in the decade. It's Salonga simply as a pop vocalist on a major American label, working in adult contemporary and R&B-inflected arrangements rather than show tunes, years before streaming made global reach a given rather than an achievement to be won market by market.

The album arrives back in the conversation this month for another reason. In early September 2026, Salonga became the first Filipina to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It's a fitting frame for this section: she opened a door in the early 1990s, first on stage and then on record, that Filipino musicians are still walking through today.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Sweet Nothings (Chapter 2) — Denise Julia (Philippines, 2024)

Manila-based, English-heavy R&B and Soul with clear Mariah Carey, Aaliyah, and Beyoncé influences. Sweet Nothings (Chapter 2) is billed as an EP but plays like a full album at nine tracks and 26 minutes, and it's Denise Julia’s most complete released project to date. 

Singles "Nvmd" and "B.A.D." went viral on TikTok and were picked up and covered by K-pop idols, well outside the audience Denise started with. She's since moved from Sony to Empire Distribution, released the new single "Changes," and relocated to New York in November 2025 to push further into the US market.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Freedom — Arnel Pineda / Journey (Philippines/USA, 2022)

Arnel Pineda grew up homeless as a teenager in Manila's Tondo district after his mother's death, then spent two decades fronting bar bands and karaoke circuits before Journey guitarist Neal Schon found YouTube videos of his cover band in 2007. He's been the singer of the band ever since, debuting at Chile's Viña del Mar Festival in 2008 and eventually taking lead vocals on nearly every track of Freedom, Journey's 2022 album. 

At 15 tracks and 73 minutes it's the band's longest release, arriving after an 11-year gap between albums, also a band record. Pineda has a co-write credit on "Don't Go." Freedom charted higher in Switzerland (#2) and Germany (#7) than in the US (#88), a reminder that "global" reach gets distributed unevenly even for a band this established.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Chen Wei started in experimental music before moving into photography in the early 2000s, and that background shows in how deliberately staged his images are. Nothing in his frame is found or organic; it's built with intention. Working from a studio outside Beijing, he constructs entire dioramas from scratch, down to the texture of a dancer's skin and the tint of a single laser beam, and assembles his lighting rigs by hand rather than adjusting them in post. Across a decade of work, his recurring subject has been the alienation running underneath contemporary Chinese urban life, staged rather than observed, which sets him apart from most of the documentary photographers this section usually covers.

Noon Club is his best-known project. Over 2011 to 2013, Chen rebuilt Chinese nightclub interiors referencing the 1990s inside his studio, then photographed young clubgoers directed to perform exaggerated ecstasy: arms raised, eyes closed, mouths open mid-shout. The resulting expressions read as vacant and isolated rather than joyful, and the more deliberately the subjects perform pleasure, the more clearly the images show its absence. It was published as a 224-page bilingual photobook by the Italian publisher Skira in 2014, with essays by Francesco Bonami, David Campany, and Venus Lau.

This is a departure from the documentary, street, portrait photography this section usually favors, and worth naming directly: nothing here is candid. Chen builds these scenes so carefully that the fakeness itself is what he's trying to address: nightlife turned into a show staged for other people's consumption, and a generation photographed acting out a happiness they may not actually feel.

Follow his work on IG @chenweichenwei

Lee Chang-dong returned to Venice this year, 24 years after he first won there.

In 2002, Lee took home the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival for Oasis, the film that led off this newsletter's very first issue. This year, he returned with Possible Love, his first film in eight years since Burning (2018), and won another Silver Lion, this time the Grand Jury Prize. The film centers on a couple whose life is upended by corporate mass layoffs, and in his acceptance speech, Lee framed it explicitly as a response to disappearing labor and severed human connection, asking what cinema can and must do about it.

Lee has had a career that took an unusual route to filmmaking. He graduated with a degree in Korean Literature in 1981 and taught high school Korean before publishing his first novel, Chonri, in 1983. Director Park Kwang-su recruited him to co-write To the Starry Island (1993), and Lee worked his way up from assistant director on that same production. He wrote the screenplay for A Single Spark (1995) next, and made his own directorial debut with Green Fish two years later, in 1997.

Teacher, then novelist, then screenwriter, then director, each stage feeding directly into the next rather than replacing it. It's the reason critics have consistently described Lee's films as literary and naturalistic, allergic to surrealism or visual spectacle for its own sake, in a way that traces back to a classroom and a little-read first novel decades before Oasis, let alone Possible Love, existed. Twenty-four years is a long time to hold onto the same argument, but Lee appears to be making it again anyway.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com