Noy Thrupkaew

Acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi scores with his vibrant new film, Offside.

The third time is very rarely the charm, and the angst-filled Spider-Man 3 — all plot holes and Band-Aids — is no exception.

The Lives of Others, which won the Oscar for best foreign film on Sunday, opens by drawing back the curtain on a secret scene — an interrogation performed by a member of the Stasi, the monstrously efficient East German secret police, in the mid-1980s. The film’s inquisitor, Captain Gerd Wiesler, is almost a caricature of […]

In his latest repulsive film, Roberto Benigni trots out the formula that served him so well in Life Is Beautiful — a backdrop of real-life terror, and a self-inflating display of self-effacing love. In the Oscar-winning Beautiful, the backdrop was the Holocaust; in The Tiger and the Snow, it’s the Iraq war. The difference is […]

What sustains a life? Food, water, shelter, certainly — all the tangibles taught in a survival course. But the ineffables — ideas, loves, passions, and pleasures — spell life or death, too, as Marjane Satrapi’s new book Chicken with Plums attests. This Romantic notion has been around at least as long as consumptive poets have […]

Will U.S. audiences avert their eyes at the latest Iraq documentary? A splintered mirror in three shards, Iraq in Fragments reflects realities that U.S. viewers haven’t wanted to see — jangling fear, black blooms of smoke, Iraqis’ faces flickering with rage or pinched hope. Like its setting, Fragments presents too many ruptured ideals and bruised […]

Advocacy and art — how does a filmmaker fuse the two? How to deliver a clear argument without sacrificing the ambiguity, the authorial humility that thought-provoking art demands? Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta relies on a triad of techniques — an embrace of mythic scope, finely wrought personal detail, and political clarity. It’s a difficult balancing […]

What is good made of, and how does it reveal itself? Perhaps through a dimpled half-smile, a red sweater, hair swept sideways over the brow — the guise of a girl, just 21, who would go to her death for resisting the Nazis. Sophie Scholl, student, martyr, national cipher. Sophie Scholl is at least the […]

In a pivotal scene early in Oscar award-winning Tsotsi, lightning flashes across the sky and over its titular figure — a young man in one strobe-flare, a boy in the next. The young man is someone out of scare-headlines about post-apartheid South Africa — a hardened street criminal from the townships, fresh from a vicious […]