Noy Thrupkaew

What power lies in a picture? Flat, boxed in a frame, a mere snap in time, skeptics may say. But, for at least three artists in a new, Washington, DC, exhibition, photography offers the sweeping power of protest — dynamic, fully dimensional — captured in the smallest and simplest of human moments. “We Could Be […]

It was a familiar sight: a photograph of a drawn, ashen-faced man standing next to rows of skulls. He looked liked many of the tourists who stand at Cambodia’s Choeung Ek killing field, dazed and staring at the rows of bones, craniums stoved in by machetes and clubs and garden hoes. But the man was […]

The theater at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh is buzzing, even on this sticky Sunday night. Hordes of young people are pulling up on their motorcycles or chatting on cell phones — the kind of crowd I’ve seen at free rock concerts by the city’s riverfront. The young people are here […]

Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries is a valentine of the best sort: dirtily reverent, humid with secrets revealed over tea. The comic artist’s latest billet-doux to her Iranian homeland unfolds over one long afternoon, where three generations of women have gathered to mull over an issue of international concern: sex. In this blue version of The View, […]

by Noy Thrupkaew Transgender camp, Buddhist ghost stories, tales of nationalist struggle, a dip into Thailand’s porntastic underworld: Filmgoers at the second ThaiTakes film festival in New York watched a wild, puzzling brew of Thailand’s latest cinema over the course of four days in April. As speakers at the festival noted, Thai film has entered […]

The executives at ABC are becoming gruesome stage parents. First the network trotted out Desperate Housewives, its strumpety little diva darling, that derivative burlesque of Sex and the City and suburban angst and ambivalent modern womanhood. Then, with the success of that tarted-up show, ABC execs felt entitled to foist a little sister on us, […]

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Iron Bamboo begins with a prayer, actors and musicians sitting before a shrine, as they do before every performance. This time, however, the shrine is onstage, and the performers are praying in the very play, their backs to the audience. They complete their devotions and pick up shadow puppets, made from […]

Watching the premiere of The Shield‘s fourth season this Tuesday, I felt a bit like the show’s newest addition, top cop Monica Rawling, who walked into a precinct haunted by a snarled back history and shrieking hostility. I confess I’ve missed out on one of cable TV’s hottest series, and so found myself somewhat at […]

Michael Tucker and Petra Epperleine’s documentary, Gunner Palace, is much like one of its central characters, the jittery, foully charismatic psycho-savant Specialist Stuart Wilf, a U.S. soldier from Colorado who finds himself in the hell of “minor combat” in Iraq. The crass 19-year-old wears obscene T-shirts, yuks it up in a Qatari thobe and head […]

Flickering between shots of a red-light district in India and the wide-open eyes of young girl, Born Into Brothels poses a difficult question from its very beginning: Whose film is this, anyway? Who is shaping and interpreting the vibrantly horrifying images onscreen, the two Western filmmakers or their Indian protégés, eight children who have been […]