Showing 1 - 10 of 14
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.
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.
The afterlife of Mitr Chaibancha
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/10/2023
» In an abrupt moment of life's brutal script, Mitr Chaibancha fell to his death from a helicopter ladder on Oct 8, 1970. He was filming Insee Thong (Golden Eagle), playing an anti-communist masked hero, when he slipped from the rung and plunged to the ground in Pattaya. That same evening, his body was transported to Wat Kae Nang Loeng. Thousands of people, unable to believe that Thailand's most famous actor was really, tragically dead, amassed impromptu at the temple and demanded that his corpse be raised from the coffin and shown to the public.
10 films to watch out for
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2023
» A fierce hijab girl, a Vietnamese pilgrimage, a Scorsese-DiCaprio team up and a new Cate Blanchett drama, Cannes Film Festival opens today with an eclectic taste of world cinema.
A long crusade against healthcare woes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/04/2021
» Colectiv, a Romanian documentary film nominated for two Oscars, watches in terror as the Romanian healthcare system practically collapses before the camera. The film elicits a series of gasps, as one shocking revelation leads to another, and another: procurement frauds, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, nepotism, murder, mass bribery, healthcare mafia, maggots crawling on the head of a patient -- a living patient -- and finally, an election whose preposterous results ring too many familiar bells.
In School Town King, the kids are not all right
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/01/2021
» There's a sense of immediacy in School Town King, a Thai documentary about two teenage rappers from the Klong Toey slums. On the surface, this is an advocacy film, one that patiently follows the two underprivileged ghetto boys with an unorthodox dream and their misadventures in Thai schools. But what makes School Town King feel urgent is its exposé of structural narrow-mindedness and the ideological straightjacket that leaves no room for kids who do not fit the mould. The conservative school policy, the film suggests in its visual clues and off-the-cuff asides is a chronic condition that has worsened by the arrogantly old-school regime of past years. In the year of Bad Students and Free Youth upheaval, School Town King is a deafening confirmation that the kids are not all right -- and it's surprising only for ignorant adults why they no longer want to put up with it.
Eyes wide open
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/05/2020
» The literature about modern Thai politics is not abundant, and by this I mean a narrative that grounds its characters in the double-whammy of coup d'etat and street protest that characterised the mid-2000s to mid-2010s. The period, plus a few years earlier when Thaksin Shinawatra rose to power, contains some of the most convulsive and era-defining moments that continue to shape the visible and invisible dimensions of Thai society in the present time, and it's astonishing that not more writers find it a rich wellspring of artistic expression (on the contrary, visual artists and theatre artists seem more responsive to the political currents of the same period).
Les Miserables: The simmering rage of Paris
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/05/2019
» Cannes Day 2 witnesses the rage of Paris -- not the yellow wrath of gilets jaunes, but the brown-and-black anger of rundown suburbs that makes up the complex social structure of modern France.
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."
A baroque nightmare, upgraded
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/11/2018
» The original 1977 Suspiria was a trashy bloodbath, an Italian giallo at its most lurid and disturbing -- a lair of maggots, murderers and witches. The remake, in cinemas this week, is high-trash Euro art house, more bourgeois and hipsterish -- a baroque nightmare whose danse macabre has been upgraded to fit the faces and forms of Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton. The new film has been directed by Italian Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, A Bigger Splash, I Am Love) and shot by Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, whose 35mm work here is one of the film's high points.