Showing 1-10 of 176 results
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Once lost, now found
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/02/2017
» The 69th Cannes Film Festival begins today in southern France with its usual fanfare. Regarded as the world's most prestigious event of cinema professionals, the festival celebrates film as art, commerce, glitz and as cultural treasure. Fittingly, this year Cannes has invited only one Thai film to screen in the Cannes Classics programme -- the recently discovered 1954 Santi-Vina, which was once thought to be lost and has now been restored to its celluloid glory.
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2023 ROUNDUP A vintage year for Thai cinema?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/12/2023
» There were cheers of jubilation and gasps of disbelief as Thai cinema found itself awash with excitement in 2023. This has been the most successful year for mainstream Thai movies in a decade, a box-office triumph far exceeding all expectations. To many, the 2023 coup de theatre calls for celebration. "We are back!" cried optimistic pundits. But also: "Really? Is it just a one-time cinema party and can we keep the ball rolling?"
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The vagabond returns
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2023
» A film once overlooked and misunderstood may have found its moment many years later, the work's peculiar vibrations finally detected and at last appreciated.
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Prayut can't control lens of history
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/04/2018
» He came to drain the swamp, but the swamp has reclaimed him. He came to purge politicians, but politicians have found him. He came to rewrite history, and we wonder how history will remember him.
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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?
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The next step in evolution
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/05/2022
» The maestro is teasing us, with his favourite instrument: the scalpel. Mechanical, electrified scalpels that split open the flesh -- often, the belly -- like a bulging purse being unzipped. This time, what comes out of the belly is a menagerie of grotesque organs -- organs with neither names nor functions, grown inside the body primed for involuntary evolution.
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Filming history
Muse, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/10/2016
» Anocha Suwichakornpong's first degree is in jewellery design, but you won't see any gleaming items on her. A small woman with a pixie cut, the film director is more interested in crafting images than making necklaces (or wearing one) -- and that's good for her and even better for us on this side of the screen. On a recent afternoon she showed up to meet us, and the long talk was about film, memory, feminism, frozen ovum, political heartbreak and how the scourge of history has found a way into her latest film.
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Ditch this witch
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2016
» What an unnecessary movie. Seventeen years after The Blair Witch Project stormed Sundance and gave birth to the found-footage horror sub-genre -- in which we watch grainy video purportedly filmed by victims of horrifying phenomena -- this reboot comes late at the tail-end of our visual epoch flooded by smartphone clips, with handheld amateur images so abundant in our stream of perception that we no longer see the novelty or excitement in shaky pictures that supposedly contain gruesome scandals. It's awful, but aren't we seeing that almost every day online or in the news?
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Of Naga and political dissidents
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2021
» The Naga is real but the murder is not. Or is it vice versa? What history chooses to remember and relegate to oblivion, what it enshrines as story and what it buries as hearsay, is how the narrative of a nation is forged in a mould of clay or a furnace of fire. Or in this particular case, in disembowelled bodies stuffed with concrete blocks. The murder is real but the Naga is not. This sounds more like it.
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Bowie, in film
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/01/2016
» A shape-shifter on stage, David Bowie naturally found a new home in acting. Over the past 40 years, the late performer starred in many films -- though acting seemed more like another one of his experimental projects -- working with top directors such as Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan and the late Tony Scott, and playing roles from vampire and wizard, to alien and Andy Warhol (in Basquiat, a biopic of the artist by Julian Schnabel). It would be impossible to list them all, so here are my five picks on Bowie's screen performances.
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