Showing 1 - 10 of 14
The Year of Great Reckoning
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/12/2020
» For filmgoers, it was a year of mortal dread. The screen went dark, like a coffin nailed shut, and is still like that in many places. Faith in cinema as we've known it was rattled, challenged, and endangered with a Biblical overtone; it's a plague we're dealing with, after all. It was a year unlike any other we had seen before in the 125 years since cinema was invented. And while that sounds dispiriting, 2020 has also been a "Year of Great Reckoning" during which the equilibrium was recalibrated and the idea of moving images continues, as it should, to evolve.
Revisiting Wong's dance of desire
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/10/2020
» Drenched with desire, Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood For Love feels like a plush, vivid dream lodged in the deepest recess of a lover's heart. Now, the heart is beating again and the dream is being projected on the big screen some 20 years after the film first stunned audiences at Cannes and launched a wave of copycats around Asia.
Through the looking glass
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/02/2019
» Tish Rivers, the woman in James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk, muses to the reader in the book's first pages: "I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass."
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.
Sometimes transcendental, always relevant
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/05/2018
» The American films were on short supply this year at Cannes -- which in turn deprived the assembly line of red carpet material -- but nobody seemed to mind that except, well, some American media and fashion bloggers. That superfluous caveat aside, the recently wrapped 71st Cannes Film Festival was nearly unanimously praised as one of the best editions in recent memory, with a string of good, sometimes very good, titles playing night after night -- and even the bad films weren't so offensively bad, as was often the case. In the midst of soul-searching following the question of relevance (the world wants Avengers), the rise of streaming (the world watches films on phones), the decline of arthouse popularity, Cannes insists on the sacredness of cinema, on the future of the art, and this year it paid off solidly.
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.
An enigmatic, carnal pilgrimage
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/04/2016
» Terrence Malick's Knight Of Cups opens with a solemn passage from the 17th century text The Pilgrim's Progress, and right from the start this enigmatic film lays its cards on the table and yet withholds what they really mean. The pilgrim's progress was "delivered under the similitude of a dream". He set out on "a dangerous journey" before "a safe arrival at a desired country".
A poem in motion
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/09/2015
» From the first shot to the last, when the assassin leads a group of peasants into the majestic wilderness of Tang Dynasty China, this is likely to be the most ravishing film you'll see in a long while. The swift tumult of fabric, the heart-bleeding colours, the luxuriant verdant of the forest -- The Assassin, shot on 35mm at a time when almost every film in the world is shot on digital, is also a martial arts drama that compels us to rethink the essence of the genre. Historically regarded as a cheap, sweaty form of entertainment, the wuxia film has reached the pinnacle of high-art in this Taiwanese production -- and some audiences will certainly feel baffled, if not exasperated.
Romance among the ruins
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/09/2014
» Love is a crumbling currency in the wistful, strangely affecting Pavang Rak (Concrete Clouds). Set in 1997, during the economic meltdown that burst our bubble and left urban carcases of unfinished skyscrapers, the film remembers the emotional inertia of that year and watches its characters drift like ghosts as they realise that even love — of all the catastrophes — can't give them salvation. There's voluptuous despair. There's a full cabinet of 1990s pop-cultural reminiscence, and there's the filmmaker's awkward strive to reconcile the narrative flow with his experimental impulses — and yet here's a Thai film that's as tender as it is bold. It's also a film about the mood (and not necessarily the actualities) of that fateful, uneasy moment of 17 years ago when the market crashed and our sense of the future dashed.
Picks of the year
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/12/2013
» Like ravenous hunter-gatherers, we forage the thick forest of cinema and emerge with our pickings. Or maybe: like a mental patient, we plunge into the dark asylum of movie theatres in search of sanity, of light, of secrets. Most of the times we come out empty-handed, but the point, for madmen and women out there, is to keep looking.