| Other releases | |
 | Secret Journey Based on a novel set in Ireland, this leisurely paced Italian mystery sets the action in Sicily. A psychiatrist returns to an old family home - the scene of his mother's shooting death - to establish the reasons why it is to be bought for his sister by her beau. Made in 2006, and still unreleased in major English-language markets, critics gave this feature a lukewarm reception. |
 | Body Award-winning special effects mark this, one of two Thai horror movies to open this week. A man suffers recurring nightmares of a woman being dismembered, but it only gets worse. The line between dreamscape and reality dissolves as he and his body become caught up in a campaign of vengeance from beyond the grave. The poster art wants to capitalize on the Saw franchise. Also known as Body #19. |
 | Train of the Dead Withering reviews accompanied the release of this ghosts-on-a-choo-choo flick, also from Thailand. Its release here points to a rule of marketing for local audiences in recent years: There's no such thing as an unsalvageable Thai horror movie. If a bunch of ill-fated bandits hitching a ride on a spooked caboose is your thing, then watch this, and be ready for cheap special effects and non sequitur motorbike races. |
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
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