Showing 1 - 10 of 105
The politics of taste in our election season
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/12/2025
» Hell is other people's tastes. Hell is when we passionately hate what people unconditionally love. Hell is when we can't fathom how anyone on the face of the earth can like someone or something we find revolting -- a food, a film, a style, an opening ceremony, a politician, a president.
Where the struggle begins
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/11/2025
» Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36 reminds us that the question of Palestine didn't begin two years ago but generations before that. Showing at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the film is set in the aftermath of World War I as the European powers carve up the Middle East like a spoiled child slicing his birthday cake: gleefully, arbitrarily, jabbing their fingers on a map with no regard of history or the need of local inhabitants.
Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Morte Cucina shows off killer Thai cuisine at Tokyo film festival
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/10/2025
» Pen-ek Ratanaruang's new film features a protagonist on a quest for culinary retribution -- a triglyceride revenge trip that gets greasier and weirder along the way.
Cinema of resistance wins at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/05/2025
» In a year full of richly textured stories about female trauma and painful personal growth, the Cannes jury, led by Juliette Binoche, took the noble route and gave the Palme d'Or to the most political film in the 22-title competition.
The long and brutal voyage
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/05/2025
» In 1521, when his galleon finally cut through the treacherous Pacific Ocean, when the island of Cebu first appeared in his sight at the edge of the horizon, when its slender coconut trees and thatched huts and maybe its half-naked inhabitants came into view, when he lays eyes on all of these, what went through the mind of Ferdinand Magellan?
Agents of change
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/05/2025
» Awash with saturated colour and steeped in Brazil's history of authoritarianism, Kleber Mendoça Filho's The Secret Agent has emerged as a serious contender for the Palme d'Or. A former film critic, programmer and now a leading voice in Brazilian cinema, Mendoça Filho's fourth feature -- and his third in Cannes Competition -- is a political thriller, a tribute to disappeared dissidents, and a deft ode to the way memory is passed through time and technology.
Woman directors fare strongly at Cannes this year
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2025
» Cannes 2025 features seven films by female directors in the main competition, equalling the record set in 2023.
Paradise lost
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2025
» In Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes' beguiling travelogue set in 1917, a British diplomat in Burma journeys across Southeast Asia, hopping from country to country, to avoid an encounter with his fiancée. Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is a colonial officer who, struck by an inexplicable premonition or a case of cold feet, decides to flee Mandalay just before his sweetheart Molly (Crista Alfaiate) is due to arrive. He boards a ship to Singapore, then a train to Bangkok -- it derails on the way, but still makes it -- and onwards to Saigon, Manila, Osaka and Chongqing. Molly, pursuing him, would repeat a more or less similar route.
And the winner is...
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/02/2025
» The words and the verdicts on Oscars 2025.
Macondo encountered
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/12/2024
» Ideally, good books should be left alone, even if they sit enshrined in a cobweb after a thousand years of solitude. In the reality of today's content industrial complex, that is unacceptable. Every good book can be and must be adapted. To watch is to live, to binge is to breathe. Literature is not a paradigm of text but fodder for algorithm. So here it is, with an air of inevitability, the much-touted, long-awaited, rigidly respectful and adequately decent Netflix series One Hundred Years Of Solitude -- the first eight parts, with the remaining eight coming next year.