Showing 1 - 10 of 23
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.
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.
Coppola's Megalopolis leaves Cannes scratching its head
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/05/2024
» Every year the Cannes Film Festival has its hottest gig -- a film so breathlessly anticipated and a justification of the festival's raison d'être. This year, that honour belongs to Megalopolis. Or, to be completely faithful according to the plaque flashed up on the screen, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis: A Fable.
Pita and the 'Myth of Sisyphus'
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/07/2023
» 'The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight."
Hear her roar
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/05/2023
» The image of a girl taking off her hijab is wrought with cinematic symbolism. Kamila Andini shows it in her Indonesian film Yuni (2021); Hesome Chemamah in his Thai short I'm Not Your F*cking Stereotype (2019); Ana Lily Amirpour in the Iranian vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014). Subversion? Provocation? Liberation? At this year's Cannes Film Festival, we see that image in Amanda Nell Eu's Tiger Stripes, a work as playful as it is potent in its portrayal of adolescence and what it entails for a young woman's body.
Deep in the paradox
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/05/2022
» In Cairo, a religious student at the prestigious Al-Azhar Islamic University is recruited by secret police to infiltrate a Muslim Brotherhood cell. In Mashad, a holy city in Iran, a serial killer prowls a seedy suburb and strangles head-scarfed prostitutes. In the first film, bloodlust officials torture dissidents with abandon. In the second film, religion is evoked and the name of God is cited as a justification for murder. This begs the obvious question: Will Boy From Heaven be banned in Egypt, and Holy Spider Iran?
Of zombies and fairy tales
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/05/2022
» The opening films across the three programmes at the 75th Cannes Film Festival speak of disparate destinies of contemporary cinema, from the poetic to the political and the pointless. Let's start with the latter.
Rebel without a cause
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/05/2021
» She came, she provoked, she burned, she left pools of blood and bits of brain on the school yard while laughing her pretty head off all the way to purgatory. She's Nanno, the demon child with Lolita's freckles and the Joker's face-splitting grin. She's the headline girl from the hit Thai series Girl From Nowhere which, since the May 7 release of its Season 2 on Netflix, has made it to the top-10 chart in many Asian countries and summited the algorithm in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. In China, the series' hashtag was for a time trending on Weibo (Nanno's Thai school uniform also inspires Chinese cosplayers).
Come and see (no need to pray)
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/04/2021
» In an ordinary democracy, a film like Ehipassiko (in English, Come And See) shouldn't have had the least bit of worry about the possibility of being banned. The subject itself initially provoked the censors' impulse: this is a finely-tuned, patiently observed documentary about the controversial Wat Dhammakaya and the dramatic 2017 siege of the temple.
Corona and the death of cinema (again)
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/03/2020
» "Cinema is an invention without a future," said Louis Lumiere who, along with his brother Auguste, invented the Cinematographe in 1895. From its birth, cinema was convinced of its own death. From the very beginning, cinema predicted its own eventual demise. And that was before the two world wars, the advent of home video, laser disc, DVDs, Blu-rays, terrorism, mass shootings, Netflix, and now the coronavirus, the latest scourge that has sealed shut cinema houses around the world.