Showing 1-10 of 19 results
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A long crusade against healthcare woes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/04/2021
» Colectiv, a Romanian documentary film nominated for two Oscars, watches in terror as the Romanian healthcare system practically collapses before the camera. The film elicits a series of gasps, as one shocking revelation leads to another, and another: procurement frauds, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, nepotism, murder, mass bribery, healthcare mafia, maggots crawling on the head of a patient -- a living patient -- and finally, an election whose preposterous results ring too many familiar bells.
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All eyes on Asia
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/10/2018
» Asia's premier cine-event took off last night. The 23rd Busan International Film Festival once again draws all attention to the South Korean port city as it hosts the annual showcase of films, especially Asian films. One part to promote the South Korean film industry -- a formidable machine of creativity and commerce -- and one part to reign as a centre of filmmaking activity in this part of the world, Busan has gone through some bumps, political and managerial, but remains steadfast in being in the biggest in Asia.
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All in the family
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/06/2018
» You know you're walking into a horror movie, but the brilliance of Ari Aster's Hereditary is the way it deftly hides its cards and stacks up mystery upon mystery, secret upon secret, madness upon madness, until everything unravels in demonic hellfire. The film ticks all the familiar elements of a ghost story -- a dead grandma, a spooky house, a grave robbery, a candlelit seance where spirits are summoned, a sleepwalker roaming the dim corridor, an occult sign written on the wall, a couple of headless corpses, etc -- but Hereditary rises above the genre formula with its coolly composed formalism, its deliberate pacing, and its sly psychological manipulation that almost convinces us at certain points that this is more of a domestic drama than a horror movie.
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The skin I live in
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/01/2019
» The body is a temple. But it can also be a torture chamber, from which escape, while possible, is soul-crushing. Lukas Dhont's Girl is an emphatic, moving story about Lara (Victor Polster), a Belgian trans teen at an elite ballet school who's going through male-to-female gender reassignment. That she has to contend with her own hormones and pre-assigned biological specifics, as well as the fact that her chosen career mandates extreme rigour in how the body should bend and behave, Lara's fight is nothing short of heroic. And in that vein, the film is as well.
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The inciting incident
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/10/2017
» On Sept 24, 1976, two electricians were beaten and hanged to death from the top of a gate somewhere in Nakhon Pathom, victims of an escalating right-wing terror in Thai politics of that heady decade. Two weeks later, as protests against the return to the Kingdom of former dictator Gen Thanom Kittikajorn gathered steam, students at Thammasat University staged a play about the hanging of the two men. Soon the photographs of the play were used by nationalists to whip up anger and fear of communism, which led to the massacre on the morning of Oct 6 as police and militias laid siege to the university, killing, maiming and brutalising scores of people in one of the worst incidents of bloodshed in modern Thai history.
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'Boss', 'Pai' and the casino of (in)justice
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/07/2017
» Place your bets on what's going to happen first: Vorayuth "Boss" Yoovidhya being brought to court, or Jatupat "Pai Dao Din" Boonpattararaksa being granted bail.
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Horror film does double duty as social satire
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/04/2017
» Hot on the trail of the Oscar-winning Moonlight and half-a-century after Katherine Hepburn gasped at her daughter's black fiancée in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, here comes Get Out, a "social thriller" about a black man trapped in a white horror. These weird white folk voted for President Obama -- they keep repeating that to assure themselves and others -- but their exaggerated civility is more creepy and menacing than ever in Trump-ruled America.
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Once lost, now found
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/02/2017
» The 69th Cannes Film Festival begins today in southern France with its usual fanfare. Regarded as the world's most prestigious event of cinema professionals, the festival celebrates film as art, commerce, glitz and as cultural treasure. Fittingly, this year Cannes has invited only one Thai film to screen in the Cannes Classics programme -- the recently discovered 1954 Santi-Vina, which was once thought to be lost and has now been restored to its celluloid glory.
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For the days that remain
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/11/2017
» Challenging taboos, one of Thailand's most popular directors returns with a film that looks death in the eye
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Spotlight shines bright
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/01/2016
» Journalistic courage is a timely topic, and the example given by the team in Spotlight shows how legwork, doggedness and conviction can rattle the pillars of the establishment when society needs it.
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