Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s New Film Gets Lost in Its Own Fog
Nearly a decade after Manta Ray won the Orizzonti prize, Thai filmmaker Phuttiphong Aroonpheng returns with The Burning Giants—a murky dystopian mystery that appears more interested in atmosphere than answers. Variety’s review describes the director’s third feature as an elliptical fable about the violent removal of an indigenous community from its ancestral land and the pressure to erase its identity.
The movie’s visual language is doing serious work. Cinematographer Emo Weemhoff frames fog-heavy forests and unnaturally purple skies in a feverish, hallucinatory style, making the landscape feel less like a setting than a warning system. That dream logic places Aroonpheng near the post-Apichatpong Weerasethakul school of cryptic Thai cinema, a comparison Variety says is understandable—even if it risks making the film feel more familiar than mysterious.
That tension is the real hook. The Burning Giants reportedly scatters its clues across a story about violent eviction and forced assimilation, asking viewers to assemble the larger picture rather than handing over a clean explanation. For some audiences, that can make the film feel richly layered. For others, the obscurity may read as a deliberate barrier, especially when the central ideas are already weighty.
Variety’s assessment lands in that uneasy middle: the film is admired for its ambition and visual control but criticized as strangely one-note. In other words, this is not being sold as an easy thriller with a tidy reveal. It is a politically charged art-film mystery whose most memorable elements may be its color, weather and sense of menace.
That makes Aroonpheng’s return worth watching for cinephiles who prefer their narratives slippery and symbolic. The warning label is equally clear: The Burning Giants may leave viewers contemplating its images long after the plot has vanished into the fog.
Nick Offerman Answers Ben Shapiro’s Critique of His Gay Role
Nick Offerman is pushing back on Ben Shapiro after the political commentator took aim at Offerman’s role as Bill in HBO’s The Last of Us. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Offerman responded during an appearance on Sam Fragoso’s Talk Easy podcast, where Fragoso played him a clip from Shapiro’s commentary.
Shapiro’s complaint centered on the idea that Bill is essentially Offerman’s Parks and Recreation character, Ron Swanson, rewritten as a gay man. During The Ben Shapiro Show, he described the character in deliberately crude terms while recapping the apocalyptic storyline: a government-skeptical prepper, isolated behind defenses, who eventually forms a relationship with another man.
That comparison is the entire fuse here. Ron Swanson is one of Offerman’s most recognizable roles, but Bill is not simply a reskinned version of him. Shapiro’s framing turns a character comparison into the joke itself, reducing Bill’s sexuality and relationship to the punchline rather than engaging with the role as a separate performance.
Offerman labeled Shapiro’s comments “rampant homophobia,” as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. That is Offerman’s characterization of the remarks, not an independently established finding in the supplied coverage. What is documented is the chain of events: Shapiro criticized the role on his show, Fragoso showed Offerman the clip, and Offerman answered publicly on the podcast.
The dispute also lands because Bill connects Offerman to a very different kind of screen conversation than the one that made him famous. The argument is not really about whether Bill shares a few surface traits with Swanson; it is about whether those similarities justify treating a gay character’s story as a gag. Shapiro made the comparison. Offerman rejected the framing. For now, that is the whole combustible package—and it is plenty.
Martha Stewart Says She Warned JFK Jr. to Fly With a Copilot
Martha Stewart reportedly had one very practical piece of advice for John F. Kennedy Jr. days before the flight that ended in tragedy: get a copilot.
E! News reports that Stewart has revealed the warning, while Us Weekly separately covered the same account and identified the advice as a direct suggestion to bring another pilot. The timing gives the story its eerie hook, but the claim is still a retrospective account of a private conversation—not evidence that Stewart predicted what was coming.
The detail matters because it turns a familiar historical tragedy into a sharply specific celebrity anecdote. Stewart was not reportedly making a mystical forecast or issuing a dramatic public alarm; she was offering a basic flight-safety recommendation. That ordinariness is precisely what makes the story linger.
Both outlets pointing to the same Stewart account gives the claim more footing than a lone recycled rumor, but it does not independently establish the conversation itself. There is no supplied record here of the exchange beyond Stewart’s reported recollection, so the cleanest read is that this is a sourced celebrity memory with an unsettling outcome—not a verified premonition.
That distinction keeps the headline-sized shock in check. Stewart’s warning was reportedly sensible, the crash is a matter of historical record, and the connection between the two is compelling because of the timing—not because the available facts prove anything supernatural.