Breaking the Cycle review – meet the charismatic Thai politician striving to change his country’s history

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Gripping documentary examines the Future Forward Party’s unprecedented 2019 election result, and its leader’s aim to break Thailand’s repeated military coups With his disarming good looks, pro-democracy activist and businessman Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit resembles an actor rather than a typical Thai politician. Heir to the country’s largest car manufacturer, he is blessed not only with personable charisma but also inexhaustible funds. His stunning rise into public consciousness is the beating heart of Aekaphong Saransate and Thanakrit Duangmaneeporn’s debut film, a thrilling documentary about an extraordinary political campaign that shook a nation. As founder of the progressive Future Forward Party (FFP), Juangroongruangkit’s central message cut through the noise of electoral politics: secure a brighter future by correcting the wrongs of the past. Since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932, Thailand has undergone a never-ending cycle of military takeovers, including 12 coups. Dur...
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Michael Haneke films – ranked!

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The Austrian auteur has made his name with disturbing and superb studies of the violence and repression of bourgeois life. As he turns 81, we rate his finest films

An early, and relatively minor, Haneke showing 71 “fragments” – or glimpses of apparently unrelated scenes and people – set in present-day Vienna. These involve a security guard, a troubled young man, a depressed retiree and a Romanian illegal immigrant. So what’s tying them all together? The answer is partially given at the beginning and fully at the end, and the movie gives us Haneke’s keynote themes: the nature of violence, urban alienation, the abolition of compassion and community in capitalism and western hypocrisy in primly looking away from injustice and desolation in other parts of the world. But the backstory twist ending – similar to the one Krzysztof Kieślowski in effect gave us the same year in Three Colours Red – is a bit pat.

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