Showing 1 - 10 of 30
A Useful Ghost fills a vacuum at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/05/2025
» What begins as comedy sometimes ends as horror. Or maybe: What begins as comedy sometimes ends as tragicomedy. Last Saturday, writer-director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke presented Pee Chai Dai Kha (A Useful Ghost) at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, the sole Thai title in the festival.
Eyes without a face
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/10/2024
» The eyes like nomadic orbs, wandering the screen and inquiring the floor, like vagabond satellites in stray orbits -- eyeballs in search of their owners, lost or liberated from what once held them transfixed -- are the centrepieces of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Spain's cabinet of horror
Life, STORY: Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/10/2023
» There are zombies in the building and ghosts of dead Republicans in the hallway. Spanish horror films from the late 1990s up to now are a moody, stylish amalgam of urban creepiness, plain supernatural and a touch of historical terror.
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.
Sympathy for the monster
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/05/2023
» Great filmmakers cling to their obsessions, fine-tuning them, polishing them, and returning to them over and over as if they were breathing the only air that keeps them alive. Hirokazu Kore-eda keeps telling the story of broken families and their casualties, especially children, often cast adrift and always looking for their rightful place in the world.
False Eden, real hell
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/05/2023
» Sometimes Cannes pulls a poker face and smacks a big surprise down on its famous red carpet, all without a blink or a wink. This year, it comes in the form of a three-and-a-half-hour documentary about Chinese sweatshop workers, shot entirely in a crummy garment district on the mainland's eastern coast.
A new spirit of Malaysian horror
Life, Story: Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/06/2021
» The Malaysian film Roh (on Netflix) is a pagan horror with clear Koranic references, a work of foreboding menace set entirely in a nameless forest somewhere deep in the Malay peninsula.
Out of the shadow of the Cold War
Life, Kong Rithdee and Putthapong Cheamrattonyu, Published on 24/09/2020
» The Cold War saw the birth of the persuasive power of cinema. In the early 1950s, the United States decided that psychological warfare was needed to thwart communist threats in Southeast Asia and so it set up a propaganda unit to produce movies, documentary films, cartoons and pamphlets to provoke a red scare among the people. The United States Information Services (Usis) was also active in Thailand during this decade of sinister geopolitics. Its main responsibility was to produce a number of narrative and documentary films which would be screened around the country to promote American-style democracy and caution people against the deadly dominance of communism.
Winning isn't the only thing
B Magazine, Story by Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/02/2020
» Best International Feature
All screens great and small
Life, Kong Ritdee & Melalin Mahavongtrakul, Published on 18/12/2019
» Life evaluates the year's best in cinema, streaming and television