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It’s not just a film, it’s where our love affair with Thai cinema/culture began.
Before Tropical Malady, before Ong-Bak, before any of it — there was Citizen Dog. And it hit us like a song we didn’t know we’d been waiting to hear. A love story that floats, flirts, and doesn’t follow any rules. A city portrait that turns Bangkok into a candy-colored surrealist maze. A movie where logic dissolves, but heart never does.
Yes, the narrative jumps like a grasshopper on Red Bull. But we didn’t come here for plot. We came here for possibility.
Wisit Sasanatieng came from advertising, and it shows in the best way. Citizen Dog is practically stitched together from pop-culture fragments and commercial grammar: music video pacing, jump cuts, color floods, character archetypes reimagined as punchlines. The t-shirts Pod wears — one per scene — and other props are their own mood board. And the soundtrack? Pure Thai nostalgia. The opening and closing musical numbers are essentially full-blown MVs, and we’ve rewatched them more times than we can count.
And then there’s the humor — a very Thai kind of absurdity that lives in reincarnated grandmas, zombie scooter gangs, and a exhausted Teddy Bear. It’s the kind of satire that smiles as it stings. The kind that made us fall in love with the country’s storytelling where the sacred and the ridiculous sit comfortably side by side.
People compare it to Amélie, and sure we get it. Whimsy, color, loveable oddballs. But Citizen Dog is weirder. Wilder. More chaotic. More Thai. It’s not about being twee. It’s about embracing the full-speed absurdity of the city and trying to find a little peace or love inside it.
It’s a scrapbook of longing and humor and beauty and strangeness. And it made us want to know everything about Thailand... its films, its jokes, its music, its language, its people.
We’ll love this movie forever.
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In 2008, Chocolate felt like a revelation. A young autistic girl performing brutal Muay Thai combos with wide eyes and no wires — it was impossible not to be impressed. It felt fresh.
Rewatching it now, it’s harder to ignore how poorly the film has aged or even was made...
Yes, JeeJa Yanin still shines. Her physical commitment is undeniable, throwing herself through glass, steel, bodies. She brings something strangely tender to the violence. You want to root for her. And you still do.
But everything around her? Almost unwatchable.
The story is built on clichés so thick they creak. A dying mother, a missing father, a band of cartoon villains whose only job is to yell and get kicked in the head. The autistic protagonist, Zen, is a compelling starting point but she’s never given depth beyond her diagnosis and her mimicry skills. Her condition is used as both a gimmick and a shortcut: she watches Tony Jaa on TV, and suddenly she’s a master. There’s no learning arc. No struggle. Just imitation equals skill.
And then there’s the tone which veers wildly. One minute, it’s sentimental melodrama. The next, it’s slapstick. Then suddenly: brutal bone-breaking violence. The emotional logic never holds. ing characters exist purely to serve as punchlines or punching bags. The villains are caricatures. The dialogue is painfully on-the-nose. And the entire subplot with the yakuza-borderline-romance thread feels like a forgotten draft from another movie entirely.
The action scenes, once hailed as groundbreaking, now feel uneven. A few sequences still hit: the meat market, the ice factory, the glass-filled final showdown. But the choreography lacks the rhythm and clarity that made Ong-Bak timeless.
The truth is, Chocolate had an original idea/great lead but didn’t know what to do with either. And by the end, you’re left with a sour taste. Not because the film is offensive. But because it could’ve been so much better.
This chocolate is bitter.
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This isn’t a Thai film, but it cuts straight into one of Thailand’s deepest, most disavowed wounds: the unspoken caste system of Southeast Asia. Chakra, the 14-year-old boy at the center of this story, is Khmer/Cambodian. He’s poor, invisible, disposable.
He leaves his village in search of something better. A job. A wage. A future. Instead, he’s sold onto a Thai fishing trawler and forced into slave labor. No port. No language. No mercy. The boat becomes his new world. And there are no laws out at sea.
Director Rodd Rathjen doesn’t romanticize this descent, he documents it. With tight, suffocating shots, rhythmic repetition, and a slow, devastating transformation that’s almost silent. Chakra doesn’t narrate. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t ask for help. He just survives until even survival begins to mutate.
Sarm Heng’s performance is stunning in its restraint. He plays Chakra not as a symbol, but as a body slowly adapting to a system built to erase him. There’s no redemption arc. No last-minute rescue. Just the slow erosion of youth, language, trust, morality.
The horror here isn’t just the beatings or killings, it’s the banality of it all. Work, eat, sleep, obey. These men aren’t villains in the dramatic sense. They’re labor managers in a system that rewards violence, silence, and efficiency. The sea is endless, the violence casual, the escape routes imaginary.
And while the film is technically Australian, the commentary is unmistakably Thai. In the land of smiles, migrants from Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and often the country’s own poorest provinces are treated as lesser. They build the roads, fish the seas, clean the malls. Thai society depends on them, but too often refuses to see them as equal. Or even as human.
Buoyancy confronts that hypocrisy with precision. This isn’t about immigration. It’s about ownership. About how easy it is to enslave someone.
The film doesn’t offer solutions. It barely offers hope. But it forces you to sit with complicity. It’s a quiet scream, hidden behind boat's engine and silence.
And once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it.
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Tanit Jitnukul’s historical epic doesn’t aim for subtlety — it aims for legend. And in many ways, it succeeds. This is a story forged in national memory, retold like a battlefield hymn: a small group of Siamese villagers standing against the might of the Burmese army, refusing surrender, sharpening machetes, and marching toward certain death like it’s a family duty.
Bang Rajan is a film that wants to be myth. It wants to carve itself into national identity with spears, drums, and blood. And for a while, it does. But strip away the flags and the funerals, and what’s left is a clunky, overlong, painfully earnest war film that substitutes volume for vision.
It’s not history — not really. Even Thai historians have acknowledged that the tale blends fact with patriotic fiction. But that’s beside the point. Bang Rajan doesn’t pretend to be a textbook. It’s national folklore shot like a war movie. More Braveheart than Barry Lyndon.
The premise is pure myth: a village standing alone, defying a military empire. A story every Thai kid knows — and that’s the problem. The film doesn’t complicate it. Doesn’t question it. Doesn’t even dramatize it. It just reenacts it. Loudly. Repeatedly. With the subtlety of a war drum.
The battle sequences are the centerpiece — muddy, muscular, and genuinely brutal. There’s no stylized choreography here. Just blunt-force trauma captured on handheld. But intensity without rhythm becomes noise. And Bang Rajan is noisy. It keeps hitting the same emotional note — noble sacrifice, noble sacrifice, noble sacrifice — until it all starts to blur. Even death loses weight when it’s choreographed into ritual.
The characters are mostly types: The Brave One. The Hothead. The Wise Leader. The Strong Woman Who Cries on Cue. Melodrama floods the quieter scenes. The pacing stutters. And while female characters are present, they rarely carry the same dimensionality or consequence. This is a tale told in the language of testosterone and martyrdom.
And yet… there is something undeniably powerful in watching a group of doomed men prepare to die — not for glory, but because there’s simply nowhere else to go. No politics. No generals. Just home — and the refusal to abandon it.
This was a landmark Thai film at the time — a rare historical blockbuster with scale, ambition, and cultural resonance. But rewatching it now, it feels locked in a very specific political moment. Not just nostalgic, but nationalistic. A story designed to unify, not to examine.
And there’s no harm in myth.
Unless we start mistaking it for history.
There’s honesty here. You can feel it behind the camera — the filmmaker cares, the cast commits, and the world is familiar if you’ve lived close enough to it. It’s not easy to critique a film that comes from a good place — especially one trying to give screen time to lives so often erased.
Ekalak Klunson, coming from the world of advertising and documentary, seems to throw every slick instinct out the window — on purpose. What he delivers instead is a grim, heavy-handed, and deeply sincere look at the lives the city would rather not see: sex workers, trans women, broke kids, dealers, dreamers, and those quietly slipping through Bangkok’s back alleys with nowhere left to go.
It’s all here — poverty, abandonment, exploitation, betrayal. But it’s not framed with the precision of social realist cinema. It’s sometimes moving, often redundant, and frequently disted.
But maybe that’s the point.
There’s a kind of chaos to Red Life that feels truer than anything tidy could’ve captured. It doesn’t build to a climax. It wears itself down. Characters drift further from hope, and the film never tries to redeem them.
The performances are uneven. Some hit raw notes that feel unscripted, while others veer into caricature. But that inconsistency becomes part of the texture — a portrait built from fragments.
Klunson clearly wanted to make something unfiltered. A portrait of Bangkok’s underclass with no makeup, no gloss, no redemption arcs. And he got close. But the film often mistakes heaviness for depth.
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There’s something frustrating about You & Me & Me — not because it’s bad, but because it plays it so safe, so soft, so predictable. Like a story written by people who don’t fully trust what adolescence can handle — or what cinema can do with it.
Set in 1999, it leans heavily into nostalgia: Discman headphones, awkward school uniforms, grainy first loves. But behind the Y2K aesthetic is a film that feels more like a padded memory than a lived experience. It wants to be tender. And sure, it’s sweet. But it’s also incredibly timid.
The premise has potential — twin sisters navigating their first heartbreak, and the quiet war between them when a boy steps in. But the emotional stakes stay flat. Jealousy barely simmers. Pain is hinted at, then dialed back. Conflict is resolved before it ever properly erupts. It’s as if the filmmakers are scared to let things get messy — scared to actually trust their characters, or the audience, with anything too real.
Thitiya Jirapornsilp does what she can with the double role, and some moments — fleeting gestures, small looks — feel honest. But the writing doesn’t her. The dialogue is thin. The characters are one-note. The drama? Watered down.
And it’s not just the emotional texture that feels undercooked. The direction lacks confidence. From the pacing to the framing to the clumsy transitions, you can feel the hesitation — a reluctance to push any boundary, visually or narratively. It’s filmmaking by the numbers. Polished in places, but hollow in the middle.
Yes, I get it — not every coming-of-age story needs to be edgy. But this one feels like it’s talking down to teenagers, wrapping them in bubble wrap instead of reflecting their actual chaos, desire, confusion. The result is something that feels more like a brand extension than a film. A safe GDH product aimed at comfort over substance.
Plenty of people loved it. That’s fair. Maybe it’s made for a specific audience — the kind that wants their memories softened and their heartbreaks sweetened. But from where I sit, You & Me & Me misses an opportunity to say anything bold or new.
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There’s something uneasy about The Medium from the very start — and I don’t mean the supernatural kind. It’s the feeling that the film itself doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. And maybe that’s intentional.
Is it a mockumentary? A cultural thriller? A possession horror? A visceral exploitation piece disguised as spiritual inquiry? It’s all of those — and none fully.
It begins as a documentary. Observational. A camera crew follows Nim, a shaman in rural Isan, as she speaks of gods, possessions, and the ing of spiritual lineage. You think you’re watching a slow burn about Thai animism.
Halfway through, the film abandons all restraint. The rituals escalate, the bodies collapse, and any observational distance is swallowed by chaos. And this is where the film both thrills… and loses its footing. The horror is brutal and relentless — at times, impressively executed. But in pushing for terror, the film starts trading depth for spectacle. The edits grow harsher. By the end, the film is spiraling into something feral, chaotic, and deeply unsettling.
There’s an undeniable craft here. The mockumentary format brings eerie proximity to the rituals. The sound design hums with dread. The camerawork feels like it’s trembling under the weight of what it’s witnessing. The performances — Sawanee Utoomma as Nim and especially Narilya Gulmongkolpech as Mink — are raw and terrifying, resisting genre clichés even as the film leans into them.
But it’s a film torn between modes. The first half is meditative, methodical, drawing you into the beliefs and textures of Thai spiritual life — ancestral curses, animal spirits, offerings beneath banana leaves. The second half devolves into full-throttle horror: vomiting blood, cannibalistic frenzy, self-mutilation, shaky night vision carnage. And while that escalation might satisfy horror fans looking for a visceral payoff, it also dilutes the cultural framework the film spent so much time establishing.
What begins as a film about inherited faith ends in a kind of spiritual collapse — not just for the characters, but for the narrative too. The documentary crew — a presence throughout — vanishes when things get most brutal, which raises questions about ability, not just within the story, but within the storytelling itself.
This is not your average possession movie. Nor is it strictly Thai. The Medium is the result of a rare cultural collaboration: written and produced by South Korea’s Na Hong-jin (The Wailing), directed by Thai filmmaker Banjong Pisanthanakun (Shutter), and rooted in northeastern Thailand’s folk traditions. That hybridity is both its strength… and its fracture.
It’s not a clean film. It’s messy, uneven, and at times uncomfortable for the wrong reasons.
But maybe that makes sense. Possession stories aren’t meant to be clean — especially when they’re built from belief systems the industry rarely takes seriously.
If you come for thrills, you’ll get them.
If you come for truth, it depends on what you’re willing to see.
You don’t expect a Thai family film from the ’90s to open such a wound — and yet, Once Upon a Time… This Morning quietly does. It doesn’t yell, it doesn’t moralize. But it cuts deep.
Directed by Bhandit Rittakol, the film starts with what looks like a whimsical child-led adventure: three siblings run away from home, searching for their estranged father in a city they don’t understand. But underneath that fantasy frame — children wandering with a baby in tow, mistaking their journey for something noble or cinematic — is a heavy undercurrent of emotional displacement. These are not just kids looking for their dad. These are kids trying to fix something adults have already broken.
The story’s turning point — the hidden drug stuffed into a baby’s carry-cot by a fleeing street kid — feels almost surreal, but in a way that mirrors the world of children itself: unpredictable, unjust, and bigger than them. It’s not heavy-handed. It just is. Bangkok becomes a labyrinth of lost innocence — one where every alley contains either danger or daydream.
Rittakol doesn’t shy away from showing what many Thai films of the era would rather blur: homeless kids, child prostitution, broken homes, social neglect. But he does it through the eyes of children who don’t yet know how to be cynical. Their imagination becomes a shield — and a trap. In that sense, the film is deeply Thai: balancing sadness with softness, fantasy with failure.
It’s also a film that feels torn between genres. It wants to be a family drama, a social critique, and a fable all at once. And sometimes, those layers blur a bit too much. There are tonal shifts that may feel awkward to modern audiences — moments of levity that brush up against real pain. But if you surrender to its rhythm, you’ll see how intentional it is.
The performances — especially from the children — are tender, natural, and full of that unfiltered emotional intelligence kids carry before we teach them how to suppress it. They’re not just cute. They’re trying to make sense of the senseless — and that makes them real.
For Thai viewers, this is more than just a nostalgic VHS memory. It’s a quiet time capsule of the ’90s, back when movies still dared to walk into difficult subjects without sensationalism. It holds space for grief, for yearning, for broken families still pretending they’re whole.
In the end, Once Upon a Time… This Morning is a fairy tale told in the shadow of something darker — not to scare us, but to remind us: children always know more than we think. They just don’t have the words for it yet.
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There are films that shout, and then there are films that drift — through water, through jungle, through silence. Manta Ray is one of those. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s debut doesn’t offer exposition or clear answers. It offers presence. Texture. And something close to mourning.
It opens with light — disco lights in the jungle, like a forgotten rave or a ritual no one showed up to. A Thai fisherman finds an unconscious man in the mangrove, nurses him back to life, and eventually disappears. The man — nameless, voiceless — inherits his life. Wears his clothes. Pilots his boat. Lives his life. Nothing is explained.
And while that’s powerful in theory, in practice it sometimes feels like a film more interested in atmosphere than in human connection. You ire the images, the restraint, the intention — but you’re left wanting something more grounded, more visceral. Something to hold onto beneath all that mist.
Phuttiphong Aroonpheng dedicates the film to the Rohingya people — but never names them. Their crisis isn’t dramatized, it’s abstracted, ghosted. That choice has artistic integrity, sure. It avoids exploitation. The mute character — likely a stand-in for the stateless — becomes a canvas, not a character. A symbol, not a soul. And the politics, while present, remain submerged.
Visually, it’s stunning. Nawarophaat Rungphiboonsophit’s cinematography captures the coastal textures with painterly restraint. The muddy blues, the pink flares, the flashing lights in the mangroves — everything feels soaked in memory. The editing, by Harin Paesongthai and Lee Chatametikool, moves like a tide: rhythmic, organic, always holding something back.
But despite the sensory beauty, there’s a coldness at the core. We’re asked to feel for a relationship that is never truly formed, only inherited. To care for someone whose life we only glimpse through detachment. Manta Ray doesn’t tell a story — it floats through a metaphor.
It asks you to sit in its silences, to look where most films cut away. Some viewers might find it too minimal, too opaque. And maybe it is. But in a world obsessed with clarity and speed, Manta Ray needs you to witness.
There’s an unnamed ache running through it. A kind of cinematic empathy that doesn’t beg for attention, but insists on quiet reflection. It’s a story about someone taking another man’s life — not to steal it, but to carry it. And in that gesture, there’s something almost sacred.
In the end, Manta Ray doesn’t tell us who the characters are. It tells us who’s missing.
And that’s a message loud enough to linger.
There’s no denying the ambition here. By the Time It Gets Dark wants to rethink how we process memory, history, and the very act of filmmaking itself. It’s a film about stories that resist being told — about the unreliability of representation, and how trauma, especially political trauma, never really fits the frame.
Anocha Suwichakornpong builds a meta-cinematic labyrinth: stories within stories, characters recast mid-narrative, timelines that dissolve and reset without warning. It’s all deliberately disorienting — and often effective. But also, at times, emotionally opaque. As a viewer, you ire the structure, the formal play, the philosophical density. But you don’t always feel it. You think about the film more than you live inside it.
The director doesn’t just tell a story. She fractures it. Rewinds it. Lets it slip through fingers. The film moves like memory does: looping, layered, sometimes lucid, sometimes suddenly elsewhere. It opens with a director interviewing a former student activist — one of the few living witnesses to the 1976 Thammasat University massacre — and that thread never disappears, but it doesn’t stay central either. It disperses. It shifts into different bodies, different jobs, different time zones. The narrative blurs, but not by accident. It’s a structure built to mimic the instability of truth itself.
And maybe that’s the point. But it also risks pushing the audience out.
It’s beautiful, no question. The cinematography is restrained and elegant. The sound design is meditative. The performances, especially in their stillness, carry a quiet dignity. But the film keeps itself at a distance. It intellectualizes its subject matter rather than letting it wound. In doing so, it avoids sentimentality — which is irable — but it also avoids intimacy.
By the Time It Gets Dark is formally sophisticated and culturally significant. It asks necessary questions about authorship, memory, and artistic responsibility — especially in a country where history is often rewritten or silenced altogether. But it’s also a film that risks speaking mostly to the already converted. To the academic. The critic. The cinephile. The gallery-goer.
For many Thai viewers — and for those unfamiliar with the real events that haunt the film — it may remain too abstract, too self-contained, too resistant. And in its refusal to tell a story directly, it sometimes loses the emotional force that such stories desperately deserve.
Still, there’s value in its refusal. In Thailand, where political commentary through art often requires camouflage, this film’s fragmented, evasive structure may not be indulgent — it may be a survival mechanism.
But one can’t help but wonder: what would this film look like if it trusted its audience enough to let the emotion in?
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There’s something undeniably noble about the premise: invite four acclaimed Thai filmmakers to imagine the country ten years into a future shaped by its current political trajectory. But in practice, Ten Years Thailand feels more like an art installation than a cinematic experience — the kind of piece you might watch on a loop in a gallery, shifting slightly in your seat, not quite sure when to leave.
Ten Years Thailand is not a prediction of the future, but a dissection of the present, peeled back through metaphor, mood, and slow-burning dread. Inspired by the Hong Kong original, this Thai anthology gathers four directors to reflect on where Thailand might be in 2028. But really, they’re asking: where are we already?
Inspired by the original Ten Years from Hong Kong, this version brings together Aditya Assarat, Wisit Sasanatieng, Chulayarnon Siriphol, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul — four filmmakers with wildly different languages, tones, and cinematic instincts. Which makes the anthology fascinating… but also uneven. Each short feels like its own island. That’s not a flaw exactly — it’s more a question of format, of where and how a film like this works best. It could feel like the same question asked four times with slightly different lighting.
Because while the themes are weighty — censorship, erasure, indoctrination, aestheticized control — the execution often leans more toward visual metaphor than narrative urgency. At times, Ten Years Thailand feels more like a series of moving installations than a collective film. You wonder: would these pieces resonate more in an art gallery setting, where audiences can absorb them at their own pace, rather than in a dark cinema expecting cohesion?
Still, there’s power in each piece.
Aditya Assarat’s Sunset is quietly terrifying: an art gallery under the watchful eye of state soldiers. It captures the soft suffocation of normalized control — polite, unchallenged, banal. It’s one of the most grounded pieces, and maybe the most effective. There’s something chilling in how casual the repression feels — not violent, not loud, just deeply normalized. You can almost hear the air conditioning hum beneath the silence.
Wisit Sasanatieng’s Catopia is pure surrealism — a candy-colored nightmare where humans are second-class pets in a society run by cats. It’s absurd, charming, but also disturbingly close to how power can be masked by aesthetics. Conformity never looked so cute.
Planetarium, from Chulayarnon Siriphol, gets darker, examining indoctrination through school uniforms, state slogans, and a sterile education system. Children are taught what to say, how to smile, how to serve. The visuals are formal, almost sterile — as if designed by a committee. It’s a quiet horror film about education as a weapon and the loss of self.
Then comes Apichatpong’s Song of the City, which, depending on your taste, either elevates the entire film or leaves it adrift. There’s no plot, just memory fragments and soft urban tableaux. A gentle farewell to a future already erased. It’s Apichatpong doing Apichatpong — meditative, slow, and resistant to interpretation.
Not every segment lands equally, and the anthology format always comes with uneven pacing. But the ambition here is undeniable. Few Thai films this decade have been this bold in how they critique, question, and mourn. The filmmakers aren’t offering solutions. They’re holding up mirrors. Fogged ones, cracked ones, beautifully framed ones — but mirrors all the same.
Together, they paint a portrait not so much of a future, but of a present already drifting into silence. It’s a soft warning — not didactic, not loud — but deliberate. And maybe that’s the only way it could’ve been made here.
In a country where speaking out can still come at a cost, Ten Years Thailand doesn’t explode. It lingers. And maybe that’s the point.
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At a time when Thai cinema was still figuring out how to talk about identity with nuance, Beautiful Boxer went straight into the ring — with eyeliner, heart, and fists raised. Based on the real-life story of Parinya Charoenphol (Nong Toom), a transgender Muay Thai fighter who made national headlines in the ’90s, the film tells a story that’s both uniquely Thai and quietly universal: the fight to become who you really are.
It’s easy to forget just how radical this was in 2003 — a film that puts a transgender athlete at the center of a sports drama, in a country where queerness is both hyper-visible and deeply misunderstood. Beautiful Boxer doesn’t shy away from the contradictions. The robe, the lipstick, the wai before a fight. All of it becomes ritual. Gender expression, like Muay Thai, is choreographed, disciplined, spiritual.
Director Ekachai Uekrongtham shoots the story with empathy and a bit of romanticism. There’s poetry in the punches, yes — but there’s also grit. The fights are brutal. The stares are real. The silence between rounds says more than the commentary. It’s not trying to be subtle, but it is trying to be honest.
Asanee Suwan, in his acting debut, carries the role with surprising vulnerability. His physicality is undeniable, but it’s in the quieter moments — longing stares, clenched silence, the way he folds his hands before a fight — where the film finds its emotional core. You can feel the tension between performance and truth, between strength and softness, between the boxer and the woman she’s becoming.
Of course, the film has its limits. Some scenes lean into melodrama. The structure is conventional — biopic beats, training montages, emotional crescendos. At times it plays like a prestige sports film with identity politics layered on top. But in its cultural moment, that simplicity was probably necessary. It opened doors. It told a story people didn’t yet know how to hear.
Visually, it balances the kinetic with the tender. The boxing matches are fast, stylized, but what lingers are the textures in between — Toom’s makeup rituals, her mother’s silent heartbreak, the monks watching her train. The soundtrack pulls at the heartstrings, and it works, mostly because the film earns the sentiment.
More than anything, Beautiful Boxer is a document. A portrait. Not perfect, but important. It challenged the Thai audience to look at Muay Thai — and femininity — with different eyes. And two decades later, its punches still land.
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Let’s be honest — Ong-Bak isn’t “great cinema” in the traditional sense. But that’s not why it became a global phenomenon. It’s not here to win hearts with dialogue or subtle storytelling. It’s here to knee you in the jaw (literally), vault off a tuk-tuk, and land in your memory with raw, sweat-drenched force.
Ong-Bak opened in a quiet farming village. A low-level thief steals the head of a sacred Buddha statue, Ong-Bak, to sell in Bangkok. The villagers send Ting — a soft-spoken young man trained in Muay Thai — to retrieve it. What follows is an accidental hero’s journey that slams through gambling dens, fight clubs, and dusty alleys, with elbows sharper than any plot twist.
What you get is a Thai action-comedy, often goofy, that doesn’t pretend to be more than what it is — and that’s precisely its charm. The star is, of course, Tony Jaa: a one-man Muay Thai miracle. He’s a hybrid: Jackie Chan’s daring stunts, Van Damme’s martial clarity, and something purely his own — lethal, spiritual, unchained.
From jumping through loops of barbed wire to sliding under trucks in full splits, Jaa brings an athletic purity that makes even seasoned action fans blink. There’s a scene where he’s literally on fire while kicking someone in the chest — and somehow, it’s not over-the-top. It’s just part of the rhythm. His use of Muay Thai isn’t stylized like Hong Kong kung fu — it’s sharp, downward, decisive. And you feel every hit.
And yet, Ong-Bak isn’t just a fight reel. You’ve got a generous dose of classic Thai comedy (led by the brilliantly chaotic Phetthai Vongkumlao), and a kind of slapstick sincerity that gives the film unexpected flavor. It’s like a dish from a roadside Bangkok stall — spicy, bold, maybe not Michelin-starred, but unforgettable in its own wild way.
Tonally, it’s a full mix of late ’80s and early ’90s action cinema nostalgia, filtered through Thai sensibilities. The soundtrack — courtesy of Atomix Clubbing Studio — hits hard, with rhythm that actually stands the test of time. Ong-Bak is also a product of its time and budget. The storytelling is clunky, the characters are thin, and by the third fight, the formula starts to show. Some moments are replayed from multiple camera angles, which sometimes kills the momentum. The direction, while sincere, doesn’t always elevate the choreography — it captures it, but doesn’t sculpt it. Still, the opening sequence — with young men climbing trees and falling like broken dolls — sets a tone: this is going to hurt, and we’re here for it.
And yes — for action movies, budget matters. With just over $1 million USD, the filmmakers pulled off high-octane tuk-tuk chases and set pieces that looked way more expensive than they were. The return? Over $20 million USD at the global box office. Not bad for a Muay Thai redemption quest starring a quiet guy from Surin province.
A big part of that success came from the backing of EuropaCorp, Luc Besson’s production company. Once again, French and Thai cinema collaborated beautifully to bring something raw and deeply local to a global audience.
And now, two decades later, maybe it’s time for that kind of collaboration to come full circle — but with a local powerhouse behind the wheel. If Luc Besson helped bring Muay Thai to the world in 2003, someone like Chatri Sityodtong could do it in 2025. With his global platform, ion for martial arts, and love for Thai identity, he could help create the next Thai action wave — one that’s proud, visceral, and finally built from the inside out.
Because what Ong-Bak taught us is this: you don’t need wires, doubles, or Hollywood polish to break bones or break through. You just need belief. And knees. Lots of knees and elbows.
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If I had stumbled into this film blind, I would’ve sworn it came out of Japan. And I mean that in the best way.
Last Life in the Universe may be a Thai film, but it speaks fluent Japanese melancholy. From its pacing, framing, and soundscape, to its quiet obsession with death and displacement, it feels like a lost cousin of 1990s Japanese cinema — an homage to everything we love about it. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang crafted something that drifts, lingers, whispers, and then cuts deep when you least expect it.
The film opens with The Black Lizard by Yukio Mishima — and right away, we know where we are. Mishima isn’t just a writer here; he’s a signal. His presence in the hands of Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) frames the character as someone ordered, repressed, and quietly unraveling — a man constantly flirting with the idea of death, yet interrupted by life.
Kenji is a ghost in his own world. A Japanese expat in Bangkok, living in silence, surrounded by books, stuck in a country whose language he barely speaks. His quiet spiral is upended by a chance encounter with Noi — and their makeshift cohabitation becomes the emotional core of the film. She’s chaos. He’s control. She’s about to move to Japan; he’s barely surviving in Thailand. And somehow, in that cultural and emotional dissonance, something honest happens.
This is a film about a man who wants to die — and ends up having to learn how to live. It’s a minimalist poem on grief, connection, and cultural dissonance. The Thai “sabai-sabai” way of letting go meets the Japanese instinct to hold everything in. It’s still. Gentle. Uneasy. Paradoxically full of life. Oh — and yes, there are Yakuza. Because of course there are.
The director has said the film was partly born from a desire to collaborate with Tadanobu Asano and Takashi Miike (who appears briefly as a surreal presence). He often explores characters in limbo — physically, emotionally, spiritually. And in Last Life, the limbo is literal. For over thirty minutes, the story wanders like Kenji himself — we only get the title card halfway through, once we step into Noi’s house. That’s when the film truly begins.
Asano — fresh off Ichi the Killer — strips everything down here. No violence, no chaos. Just cigarette smoke and the weight of staying alive. His chemistry with Sinitta Boonyasak is strange, quiet, and fragile — the kind of intimacy that doesn’t need many words. It’s no surprise that Pen-Ek and Asano first connected at a film festival without a shared language. Sometimes, two artists just know they’re meant to make something together.
Christopher Doyle’s cinematography captures that intuition. His lens doesn’t just shoot scenes — it drifts through them, catching the things we almost miss. Light filtered through mosquito netting, the clutter of Thai homes versus Japanese minimalism, late-night road trips with nothing to say. It’s ambient cinema in the best sense — this is Brian Eno for the screen. Texture over exposition. Feeling over resolution.
Even the music drifts — delicate and melancholic, never intrusive. And the sound design — like those Japanese language tapes playing faintly in the background at Noi’s — adds a layer of distance, of someone always trying to belong somewhere else.
At Thai Loop, we usually focus on Thai cinema — but we’re also proudly in love with Asian cinema at large, especially Japanese works. So when a film like this comes along — something that bridges cultures so delicately, so intuitively — it becomes more than just a standout. It becomes essential.
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Now we’re talking. It’s been far too long since a Thai production delivered something this honest, this right. Not trying too hard, not trying to sell anything — just a film that quietly understands its people and knows how to observe them.
How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is more than its clickbait title. It’s a window into Thai society today: the tension between generations, the shift from tradition to superficiality, and the aching silence between love and indifference. The film doesn’t preach, doesn’t judge. It simply lays out the truth — the kind of truth you don’t always want to look at, but you should.
It asks hard questions:
How do we care for our elders — the ones who fed us when we couldn’t feed ourselves? Why do we abandon them once they become fragile and inconvenient? And when we do show up, is it love or inheritance we’re after?
From manipulative family to professional caretakers playing the long game, the film captures the many shades of selfishness and the rare, subtle moments of redemption. And from the grandmother’s perspective — that “mama bird” watching her babies fly off and never look back — it quietly devastates. Loneliness, invisibility, and the aching desire to be ed before it’s too late.
Director Pat Boonnitipat delivers a debut that’s confident, balanced, and never showy. The coverage is sharp, the cinematography feels lived-in and authentic — no artifice, no filters. Just Bangkok, as it is. The pacing knows when to hold and when to let go. Every choice — from blocking to location — feels just right.
The cast? Outstanding. There’s something unusually authentic in their delivery — not the performative, overly stylized acting we often see. This feels coached, lived, earned. Usha Seamkhum, in her first-ever role at 78, brings the kind of presence that can’t be taught. Billkin, who could have easily played it for charm, instead gives us quiet growth. And the ing characters — especially those circling like vultures — feel painfully real.
The writing and direction clearly come from a place of love. In a culture where saying “I love you” out loud feels almost foreign, this film becomes that very act. A love letter. A whispered apology. A long overdue thank-you.
And the music — yes, it pulls tears, but never cheats for them. It simply sits beside you, like a family member who knows you don’t need words right now.
This is the kind of Thai film we should be making more of. Honest, human, deeply moving — and necessary.
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Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Morrison reaches for something substantial — an excavation of historical trauma, national identity, and cultural residue in the wake of the Vietnam War. It attempts to approach the ghosts left behind by G.I.s, the bargirls they left, and the children born from those forgotten liaisons. And while the ambition is commendable, the execution feels lost in translation — or perhaps more accurately, lost in abstraction.
The film is clearly pulling from multiple cinematic wells. There’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul in its use of minimalism, ambient tension, and the psychic weight of place. But it also leans into the subconscious terrain of David Lynch — not just in tone but in its disted emotional logic. And there’s even a ghost of Barton Fink in the structure: a story about creative, cultural, and existential paralysis disguised as narrative. But where those references function as deep-rooted grammar in the works they belong to, Morrison feels torn between them — seduced by the aesthetic, but unsure how to integrate them into a cohesive whole.
Still, there’s no denying the film’s beauty. Visually, it often stuns. The use of real, decaying locations carries the kind of quiet, layered authenticity reminiscent of early Thai arthouse. At times, the shots feel ready-made for gallery walls. But that raw elegance is sometimes undermined by overly stylized lighting, heavy haze, and neon that flirts with the look of a low-budget music video. It oscillates between purity and polish — a hybrid film torn between slow cinema and mass-market codes.
The soundtrack, however, is a strength. It gives the film a pulse where the script sometimes falters, and the post-production team deserves credit for elevating the material as much as they could. There’s clear care in the sound design, color work, and pacing of the cut — even when the content underneath wavers.
All three leads — Chulachak Chakrabongse, Chicha Amatayakul, and Joe Cummings — have potential. Real presence. Real texture. But they’re not actors by training, and that’s where direction matters. Aroonpheng has publicly stated that he doesn’t “direct” his actors, offering them freedom and experimentation instead. That approach could have yielded something remarkable — if these performers had been nurtured, challenged, and guided into their roles. What we get instead is a sense of isolation. Each actor is playing around the emotion, not inside it. With stronger directorial , I believe they all could have delivered something far more resonant.
This speaks to a larger issue: the script. Aroonpheng, a gifted visualist, is still finding his voice as a writer. In interviews, he its this himself. The dialogue lacks nuance, and the character development feels more suggestive than defined. The film touches many ideas — diaspora, memory, cultural inheritance — but doesn’t dwell in any of them long enough to leave an imprint.
What’s frustrating is that Morrison could have been something much greater. The thematic foundation is rich and urgent. Thailand’s post-war American entanglements, and the generational ripples from that era, remain underexplored in cinema. This film had the potential to go there. To provoke, to heal, to resonate. But it chooses instead to dilute itself — hybridizing into a kind of art-house/pop crossover that never fully commits to either path.
I’m being harsh, but it’s only because the potential is so clear. Aroonpheng has an eye, no question. What he needs now is the right creative counterweight. Someone like Mai Nardone — not just as a screenwriter, but as a co-creator adapting one of his short stories or novels into a script. That collaboration could result in something truly unforgettable — I’d pay to see it happen.
Morrison is ambitious, uneven, and sometimes indulgent — but it is not unimportant. Its very existence points toward the stories Thai cinema still needs to tell. And with the right collaborators, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng might just be the filmmaker to tell them.
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Phuttipong Nakthong seems committed to building something — a cinematic universe, of sorts — rooted in Thailand’s underbelly. After 4 Kings and its sequel, this feels like the next chapter in his exploration of Thai masculinity in confinement, both literal and emotional. This time, the vocational schoolyards have given way to prison yards. Brotherhood is tested behind bars.
The premise is clear from the first frame — this is an action drama, complete with prison brawls, coded loyalties, and stylized violence. But there’s an ambition here too: to give voice to Thailand’s “lost boys,” the ones who are often overlooked or dismissed by mainstream media. In a local industry that tends to lean into sanitized, feel-good narratives, a film like this brings needed friction.
Still, that friction cuts both ways. When you choose to depict violence and prison life, there’s a responsibility that comes with it — especially when your audience includes younger viewers. At times, In Youth We Trust risks romanticizing life inside. The brotherhoods. The rituals. The codes. It flirts with myth-making, even when it might want to be critical. That line is thin, and the film doesn’t always walk it cleanly.
Some of the stylistic choices feel like post-production band-aids. The clunky bookend scenes — likely added in the edit to stitch the narrative into a tidy arc — feel forced. And the early use of soundtrack is heavy-handed. It tells us how to feel before we’ve had a chance to feel anything. With more trust in the silence, the film might have landed harder.
Visually, the film leans into the genre hard. The cinematography and grading follow every rule in the prison-drama playbook — gritty textures, muted palettes, aggressive shadows. But instead of elevating the story, the aesthetic sometimes feels like a layer meant to hide its weaknesses. There’s potential here, but it’s wearing a mask.
That said, the performances deserve credit. The cast — from school kids to prison regulars — throw themselves in fully. Some stumble through overly dramatic beats, but their sincerity is there. And in the middle of it all is Bhumibhat Thavornsiri (“Aelm”), who plays Fluke with real emotional weight. His performance is the quiet heart of the film. We saw flashes of this sensitivity in Doi Boy, but here he finds a deeper . Something unshaken, even inside the chaos.
Of course, comparisons to A Prayer Before Dawn are inevitable. Both films are set in Thai prisons. But where Prayer rooted itself in documentary realism — using real prisons, real inmates — In Youth We Trust feels more theatrical, more like a performance of confinement than an experience of it. It wants to hit hard, but too often pulls its punches or throws them in the wrong direction.
Still, it’s not an unimportant film. If Nakthong wants to build a legacy from these stories, I hope he keeps going — but with more honesty, less artifice, and deeper trust in the raw material he’s already brave enough to confront.
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