Showing 1 - 10 of 75
Living in Thailand's age of impunity
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/01/2026
» There's no place like Thailand. Joyscrolling TikTok and Reels reveals dozens of clips made by international visitors lamenting having to leave our lovely country and return to dreary Europe or joyless America. "Nobody talks about how hard it is to go from this" -- insert a cut of a wonderful beach in Krabi -- "to this"--cut to a drab, damp suburban street somewhere in the West. Add a crying-face emoji. "I want to move here!" the traveller announces. True, everybody loves Thailand.
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.
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.
"A Useful Ghost" will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/04/2025
» An offbeat social satire "A Useful Ghost" (Phee Chai Dai Ka) will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next month, becoming the first Thai film in 10 years to be selected by the prestigious festival and the first ever to be programmed in Semaine de la critics (Critics' Week), a section dedicated to filmmakers with first or second films.
And the winner is...
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/02/2025
» The words and the verdicts on Oscars 2025.
2024 movie moments
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/12/2024
» The past year was surprisingly fantastic for Thai cinema, and a pretty good one for the rest of the world too.
A Thai actor takes the stage at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/05/2024
» In a dreary rural town in Taiwan, illegal Southeast Asian workers live a precarious existence toiling away in farms or homes while enduring tough bosses and prying authorities. Most of them are from the Philippines or Indonesia, but there are also a large number from Myanmar and Thailand.
Cannes asks: Cinema anyone?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/05/2024
» To remind us that we're here because of cinema, the 77th Cannes Film Festival did an uncanny double bill on its first day. The festival opened on Tuesday and will run until May 25. On the first afternoon, before the ritzy kerfuffle of the opening red carpet, Cannes screened the first part of the restored 1927 silent film Napoleon, an audacious epic of the French Revolution by Abel Gance, who 97 years ago tested the limits of what cinema could do with exhilarating results (the entire film runs for seven hours; we were treated to the first four here).