Showing 1 - 6 of 6
The world is on fire, but we still have the Oscars
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/03/2026
» Tight races in several categories as two outstanding American films, Sinners and One Battle After Another, vie for glory with other international titles.
Melancholy and absurdity
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/05/2021
» Chaitanya Tamhane was 27 years old when his breakthrough film Court became a critical sensation and won the Lion of the Future Award at the Venice festival in 2014. A film of understated power about India's Kafkaesque judicial tribulation, Court announced the arrival of an exceptional talent from Mumbai, a proud cinema city usually associated with rambunctious Bollywood titles.
Cool Pattani
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/09/2019
» Last weekend, along an old street in Pattani, skater boys and Lambretta riders were hanging out with poets and activists. As the rain let up and the night cooled, jazz musicians hummed and strummed, while a DJ was spinning upbeat music next to a digitally-mapped, fashionably-faded brick wall.
An imperfect world
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/05/2019
» Even on the ground at the Cannes Film Festival, what people seemed to be anticipating most on Monday was, well, the final episode of Game Of Thrones. No, it wasn't being shown at the festival (how unbecoming that would be), but isn't it a sign of our times that a TV episode has the Valyrian-steel nerve to dominate global discussion and upstage the world's biggest film showcase?
Two grainy fists for resurrection
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/10/2018
» Shot mostly in Thai prison, with a fair number of ex-cons as extras, A Prayer Before Dawn dives headfirst into the unfiltered squalor of prison life -- not the sociological or political dimension of state incarceration, but the physical, uncooked-meat kind of life in jail, particularly the Thai jail.
Hear her roar!
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/04/2018
» Katy Perry, pixie-haired and ever ebullient, roared through her second appearance in Bangkok on Tuesday night with professionalism, humour and ease. This pop-spectacle is as much a visual experience as it is an aural one -- in fact, the visual overwhelmed our attention for the most parts of the 120-minute gig. The stage -- and wardrobe -- dripped with red at one point, shimmered with silver at another, and Perry's team deployed a full arsenal of wacky props, girlish delight and zany sight gags. We even had a fart joke at one point, perhaps the first I ever heard live on the stage from Impact Arena. Perry's appeal cuts a broad swathe across the demographic, and we had a rainbow of humanity thronging the hall: office types, teenagers, party animals, hipsters, Cosplay queens, the LGBT camp, celebrities, people who think they're celebrities, girls in candy-coloured wigs, parents and children -- I mean, first-graders and stuff, lots of them in fact, arriving in cheerful anticipation and looking tired when the proceedings advanced past 11pm. In all, it looked like a cross section between the crowd at a Madonna gig and Disney On Ice. Such is the strange pull of Perry.