Noy Thrupkaew

My mother told me about drug mules when I was 6. It was her ingenious way of keeping me from running amok in Bangkok’s Don Muang airport. “Someone will kidnap you!” she hissed, clamping her monstrous little bird claw on my wrist. “And make you swallow the drug! And then” — the claw gripped tighter […]

Legendary metal band Metallica has wreaked a lot of havoc over its 23 years. “Blistering,” “lacerating,” “gut-assaulting,” and “bone-crunching” are the terms most often used to describe the band’s oeuvre — words more frequently associated with bodily harm than with the experience of listening to a CD. That seems like an awful lot of anger […]

The New York Asian Film Festival is arguably most famous for its horror films. As The New Yorker recently documented, a critic staggered out of one of the more gruesome screenings several years ago, emitted a gurgle, and then dropped in a dead faint in the lobby. This year provided no exception to the high […]

A polemicist who draws on the techniques of investigative journalists. A director who unleashes the broadest comedy on the darkest subjects. A baseball cap–wearing Everyman, champion of minorities and the working class, who is really a rich white man — Michael Moore is all these things, a contradictory figure who elicits many conflicting emotions, often […]

Dear Margaret, I should be congratulating you — Sundance airing the movie version of your latest one-woman show Cho:Revolution last Saturday was a big deal. But I’m writing for a different, less gracious reason, and I’m kind of nervous about it. When I started typing, the dorky little paperclip icon popped up on my computer […]

Fox has already gotten people to start voting — can they make us like jury duty, too? That’s the central question behind the network’s latest offering, The Jury (Tuesdays, 9pm), a heavy-hitting drama with a fancy pedigree. Executive produced by the writers and producers (Tom Fontana, Barry Levinson, James Yoshimoto, and Jim Finnerty) behind influential […]

Blighted seeds, tiny children hunched over sewing machines, a nation in convulsive riots over the price of water: What shadowy entity could be behind all these horrors? The corporation, according to the documentary of the same name. Created by Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan, and Jennifer Abbott, and inspired by Bakan’s book The Corporation: […]

American Idol‘s third-season finale ended with a scene straight from its first: a young woman (this year’s stupendously talented Fantasia Barrino) bawling through a ballad in front of the millions of TV viewers who had voted her to stardom. But despite the similarities, this season’s déjà vu happy ending hid the fact that a bit […]

Twenty-six grimy people in buckle shoes and corsets, four colonial cabins, six months of back-breaking labor and puritanical laws: Welcome to another slice of “experiential history” as crafted by the creators of PBS’ latest reality show, Colonial House (May 17-18 and May 24-25, check local listings). The eight-episode series is the network’s latest foray into […]