• LIFE

  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?"

• LIFE

  Pedro Almodovar celebrates life in all its messy turns

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/11/2021

  » Pedro Almodovar's films turn camp into art, or art into camp. Or even better, he isn't bothered all that much whether the candy-coloured hijinks, the sexual anything-goes, the carnal perfidy and maternal heartbreak in his movies are a form of art or a celebration of camp. And we, the audience, shouldn't either. Almodovar, the internationally best-known Spanish filmmaker, thrives on something much simpler, I think. Freedom.

• LIFE

  The inevitability of farewell

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/02/2018

  » A truly remarkable Thai film, Malila: The Farewell Flower takes big risks and makes it seem the most natural thing in the world.

• LIFE

  Modern-day creature feature

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/02/2018

  » An eccentric love story between a woman and an amphibious creature, Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape Of Water has moved ahead to the front-runner spot in the Oscar's Best Picture, racking up the total of 13 nominations including the four acting categories. Del Toro's trick of turning B-movie grotesquerie -- interspecies sex, for instance -- into a darling of cinema bourgeois can still work wonders. And while this sweet and weird story isn't entirely unpredictable -- think mid-century beauty-and-the-beast flicks such as King Kong or, obviously, Creature From The Black Lagoon -- the director's imagination gives it an authentic vintage texture and enough doses of shocks and blood.

• LIFE

  For your viewing pleasure

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/12/2017

  » In a thoroughbred year for film, here are our must-see picks from 2017.

• OPINION

  Conscripted to fight an invisible war

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/04/2017

  » Until April 12, the biggest annual lottery will keep Thai men on edge: the military draft.

• LIFE

  Glowing in the moonlight

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/02/2017

  » The best film among the Oscar's Best Picture nominees, Moonlight glows like an iridescent animal, tender in touch and sensitive to the complexity of life -- black life, or masculine life, or black masculine life, or maybe just life. It's also a film about sexuality and identity, the two forces intersecting at the burning crossroads of race.

• LIFE

  Art, revenge, despair

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/11/2016

  » Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals opens with a montage of naked, fat-rippling, extremely obese women, their bodies wrapped in the American flag as they dance to the beat. We then cut to the opening of an art exhibition featuring those naked women on platforms, curled up as live installation pieces, or as morbid glitz, an excess of grotesquerie amid the well-dressed LA crowd.

• LIFE

  Northern lights

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2016

  » With over 400 movies on the slot, the Toronto International Film Festival was a feast and a maze. The latest edition of this North American showcase concluded last Sunday, with Damein Chazelle's La La Land winning the People's Choice Award, a bellwether for the bright Oscar season (Toronto, unlike other major festivals, has no prominent juried competition, instead letting the audiences decide the big winner). The festival is known as a launch pad for Oscar hopefuls as well as independent titles looking for distribution. It also features a strong experimental section that casts its radical net far and wide.

• LIFE

  Girls just wanna have fun

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/01/2016

  » Two transhookers are not looking for love and warmth on Christmas Eve around the crummy blocks of Los Angeles. In Sean Baker's hilarious, rambunctious and surprisingly sweet a-crappy-day-in-the-life-of-African-American-streetwalkers, they are looking for horny customers, and for their slick pimp and his new lover (who's "a fish", derogatory slang for real women). It's also a surprise that Tangerine, a guerilla-style indie film shot entirely on iPhones, has made its way to Thai cinemas (only at SF), and those keen to sample an unusual flavour of high-spirited wacky comedy with its heart in the right place, this is the one to go for this weekend.

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