Showing 1 - 8 of 8
Love, beauty, violence
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/05/2024
» Last year, the world embraced Barbie and Poor Things, two outstanding films that tapped into the state of female consciousness in the 21st century. At the 77th Cannes Film Festival, which ends tomorrow, women-driven stories of all stripes are pushed further up (or down) the emotional spectrum. A noticeable number of titles premiering at the influential festival feature female protagonists in varying states of joy and distress -- and to varying results. Powerful acting by female talent also injects life and spirit into those stories, hailing from all corners of the Earth.
Killer and victim
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/12/2017
» Sandome no satsujin (The Third Murder) -- which is way more gripping and finely-crafted than Murder On The Orient Express -- is a Japanese whodunit wrought with the dramaturgy of a Russian novel. Right at the opening, we see a murder being committed: Takashi Misumi (Koji Yakusho) is clubbing a man -- the owner of a factory where he works -- to death on a riverbank. But in its staunchly reflective storyline, The Third Murder is as much about the murder itself as it is about the killer's complex motif that underlines the elusiveness of truth, reason, justice and victimhood -- of crime and punishment.
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.
Sorry seems to be history’s hardest word
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/10/2015
» It doesn’t take much to say sorry, and yet sorry seems to be the hardest word. Ask world leaders, or just Dear Leaders everywhere. It takes a lot, politically, legally and morally, to admit mistakes, misjudgments, errors, arrogance, cruelty and guilt, especially when the consequences of such errors are the loss of so many human lives.
All he needs is Kill
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/07/2014
» Executioner. Murderer. Killing. Doing his job. The swirl of inner-conflict and the fog of moral dilemma must’ve accompanied Thailand’s “last executioner”, the man whose professional duty was to pull the trigger and dispatch death row convicts. Between 1984 and 2002, Chavoret Jaruboon executed 55 prisoners by gun, before the Thai law changed the execution method to lethal injection.
Open up to spur cultural revolution
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/06/2014
» Alarmed by the sight of zombies stampeding to get free tickets to see the film Legend of King Naresuan 5, former Culture Minister Nipit Intarasombat, of the Democrat stripe, lamented aloud about the need for a “cultural revolution”.
Cambodia, here I come
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/11/2013
» Searching for memories is hard when the past brings back nothing much but pain. Iv Charbonneau-Ching knows the feeling well. In his documentary film Cambodia, After Farewell, which will show tomorrow at World Film Festival of Bangkok, the French-Cambodian filmmaker brings his mother and aunt, who fled the Cambodian civil war 35 years ago to France, back to the place where their family were lost or perished in the dust of confusion and, later, the Khmer Rouge atrocities.
Director manages The Impossible
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/10/2012
» On screen, the monstrous waves roar and strike like liquid thunder. Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, playing a couple with three young sons vacationing in southern Thailand in 2004, watch in horror as the tsunami slams on shore like a titanic fist and sweeps them away in torrential whirlpools, shattering their peace and threatening to change their lives forever.