Lawrence Chua
Lawrence Chua speaks to the filmmaker about Thai history and its ghosts.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s training as an architect may not be immediately perceived in his trippy and moving Tropical Malady.
At the heart of Julie Mehretu’s paintings is a question about the ways in which we construct and live in the world. Perhaps that is what makes the work so radical: its willingness to unravel the conventionally given answers about the violent environment we inhabit today.
In the afternoon, Hollywood Ketsouvan-nasane listens to a radio describe the snowstorm that would arrive that night.
In Pilot for a Soap Opera about an Egyptian Air Hostess, Sherif el-Azma conjures the quiet tension of an object about to fall.
Meet psych major and boxer Liz McGonigal, bluesman and entrepreneur Buddy Guy, and cops-turned-muses Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso in Carlo Rotella’s anthology of blue-collar life stories Good with Their Hands.
After seeing my first Michael Haneke film, I left the theater sick to my stomach. Perhaps this is not the most obvious compliment to pay a director, but there is a visceral effect to Haneke’s work that I would be remiss in not sharing.
Tran Anh Hung’s latest film is filled with love and infidelity, skirting the line between reality and a dreamworld.
“Even if you’re a punk you can have feelings of love and friendship.” Julien Temple
The man the world knows as Champion came into being on February 26, 1964. Cassius Clay had just defeated Sonny Liston and taken the heavyweight title and he announced his involvement with the Nation of Islam to the press.
“Boxing’s claim is that it is superior to life in that it is, ideally, superior to all accident,” writes Joyce Carol Oates in her influential essay On Boxing; “it contains nothing that is not fully willed.”
Shohei Imamura’s 25th film, Dr. Akagi, is a lovely mess of jazzy comedy, kink, and apocalypse that he has declared to be his last movie.
Lawrence Chua reviews the then-new film adaptations of two American novels, Russell Banks’ Affliction and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Falling through the skylight of Francis Bacon’s studio, petty criminal, and thug-about-town George Dyer (Daniel Craig) falls into the arms of his future.
Your skin is your uniform. A beacon and a membrane. Something to hold it all together.
The architect of dreams, filmmaker Peter Greenaway describes his film, The Pillow Book, an ode to Sei Shonagon’s 10th century vernacular sex diary and CD-roms.
In Yvonne Welbon’s short films and videos, memory laps at the crumbling shoreline of history.
Shu Lea Cheang’s film Fresh Kill is non-stop motion, traveling between environmental and cyber space.
Filmmakers and writers Gurinder Chada and Hanif Kureishi talk with Lawrence Chua about the British ethnic experience, Pakistani punks, and the limitations of tradition.
