Noy Thrupkaew

When I first came to the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh a year ago, it was finals week — the whole campus was heaving with the sound of last-minute practicing. Scales rippled and crashed to a halt, a flute student huffed through a troublesome measure over and over, and a young man […]

I still remember the first words I heard in Cambodia. “Man!” said my taxi driver, in a fluent display of Americanese. “It’s hot!” He jumped in the car and cranked up some Western slow jams. The bass line thumped through the humidity, an incongruous soundtrack for the images unreeling outside the window: grannies wearing traditional […]

Afghanistan Unveiled (airing on Tuesday, November 16 on PBS) makes much of its powerful backstory, and with good reason: the documentary is the first film “about Afghan women, by Afghan women,” says one of its fourteen native filmmakers, a graduate of an international program that produced the country’s first newly trained women journalists in years. […]

The image is familiar enough from Japanese woodblock prints: two women in casually erotic disarray, kimonos slightly askew. One tips her head back into the hands of the other, who is working through the thick hair, her plump fingers and sloe-eyed expression revealing a lazy intimacy. But instead of an elaborate geisha coiffure, the woman […]

The village in Ousmane Sembene’s masterful Moolaadé is dominated by two eerily beautiful structures: a spirit-possessed anthill and an ostrich-egg-crowned mosque, which echo each other in both their stalagmite contours and in the ways they symbolize the pull of differing traditions. Over the course of this vibrant protest film, a third hillock rises up in […]

Watching people write about Jacques Derrida — his theories, his passing on October 8 — has been a fantastic sight, much like watching a man shinny shimmy up a rope while simultaneously trying to unravel it with his legs. Because how does one write about the so-called father of deconstruction, who helped unmoor text from […]

Perhaps there’s a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum that I didn’t know about, but what could possibly account for a show like Desperate Housewives (Sundays at 9 p.m., ABC), desperate to lampoon the evils of what scarcely exists anymore — a plastic-perfect suburbia? As films ranging from Blue Velvet to the remade […]

Who are they, the Vietnam War veterans who have become such powerful, contested symbols on this election’s battlefield? Perhaps they are the vets in the documentary Stolen Honor — aging former POWs in medal-bedecked suits, the unbowed and angry men who say that John Kerry’s anti-war activism lengthened their time in torture cells in Vietnam […]

A white room, a shabby desk, feeble light seeping through a window: The set of Alison MacLean and Tobias Perse’s new documentary, Persons of Interest, is deceptively bland. But as 12 stories unfold within its confines — the narrators are Arab and Muslim immigrants who endured the terror and confusion of post-September 11 detention — […]