Showing 1 - 10 of 12
Cannes 2025: What's on our watch list
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/05/2025
» The 78th edition of Europe's biggest film festival starts today. We take a look at some notable titles across different sections -- Competition, Un Certain Regard, Directors' Fortnight and Critics' Week -- including a Thai film.
And the winner is...
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/02/2025
» The words and the verdicts on Oscars 2025.
Of Naga and political dissidents
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2021
» The Naga is real but the murder is not. Or is it vice versa? What history chooses to remember and relegate to oblivion, what it enshrines as story and what it buries as hearsay, is how the narrative of a nation is forged in a mould of clay or a furnace of fire. Or in this particular case, in disembowelled bodies stuffed with concrete blocks. The murder is real but the Naga is not. This sounds more like it.
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.
On the edge of sanity
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/01/2020
» In Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe is a demented Poseidon, or perhaps a crazed, ocean-battered ex-sailor on the run from a Melville novel. Playing one of the two lighthouse keepers on a wind-whipped rocky islet in the Atlantic, circa 1890s, Dafoe turns up his mad-uncle mode, feral hair, chronic farting and drawling speech, plus a possessive relationship with the lantern -- the source of light atop the lighthouse (he refers to it as a "she").
Glowing in the moonlight
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/02/2017
» The best film among the Oscar's Best Picture nominees, Moonlight glows like an iridescent animal, tender in touch and sensitive to the complexity of life -- black life, or masculine life, or black masculine life, or maybe just life. It's also a film about sexuality and identity, the two forces intersecting at the burning crossroads of race.
Journey to Middle Earth
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/06/2016
» It's the Earth not the Moon, I think. We are walking the path that skirts the pool of geothermal geysers at the Whakarewarewa site in the town of Rotorua, New Zealand. The moon-grey rocks are smothered in mud and pungent smoke, with sporadic hissing that suggests the chemical fury underneath. The scene is alien. The air is calm, a kind of nervous calm because we know there will be an outburst. Once every 40 minutes or so, the subterranean pressure pushes the heated, underground water through the crack and shoots up a jet of spray up to 30m, drawing cheers from fortunate visitors who happen to be present at the moment of thermal activity.
Claws of cyber bill have your name on them
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/01/2015
» The men are itching to pry, to take a peek into your Line chats, your Facebook inboxes, your email history, the bread crumbs of your digital life. Naturally, you cover your screen and say no. Naturally, in the age of Snowden-Manning-Assange, we're conscious of the fact that the sphere of online privacy is not fair game, or at worst it shouldn't be.
The dark side of wife
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/10/2014
» In Fight Club (1999), David Fincher dishes out a mockery at male machoism, the sweat-soiled, hyperbole manliness manifest through smug violence and Brad Pitt's swagger. What happened, however, was that Fincher's stylish film somehow became a trophy movie for those he aimed his sarcasm at — the macho type adores the film, which isn't that surprising given how cool it is. Flash forward to what we have this week in cinemas worldwide, Gone Girl, a thriller that's probably replicating that curious logic in pop-culture destiny. The film about the absurdity of married life, a dark warning against the cost of domestic bliss, is perhaps a perfect date movie for happy or unhappy couples, since the film's extreme satire takes cover under the sharp, highly engaging narrative and storytelling heft. It's a film worth showing at every wedding anniversary, for entertainment, yes, and to remind the participants of their parts in their own personal movies.
A crack in the foundation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/06/2014
» The idea that, in horror films, you can smuggle poor storytelling under the cloak of the night is silly, unless you are Dario Argento or Andrzej Zulawski (or recently, Under The Skin’s Jonathan Glazer). More nails are driven into the coffin when that darkened mood, that low-key lighting of the long night, those contrivances for sultry spook, don’t pay off with a few good scares. People go to the movies for three reasons, said The Exorcist director William Friedkin — “to laugh, to cry or to be frightened”. Without those, I add reluctantly, a cinema is a cemetery not worth visiting.