Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Continuing his miraculous invention of a dark pastoral, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or winner melds the last dying encounters of a farmer, Boonmee, with a gorgeously rendered landscape enlivened by the presence of ghostly apparitions. A veranda perched by an intruding forest becomes the astral stage for Boonmee’s transmigrational journey, accompanied by his dead wife, an ectoplasmic entity, and his long-lost son, now manifested as a “monkey ghost.” Weerasethakul’s humble genius is his beguiling ability to allow the primordial and the modern to coexist. This is not magical realism, but realistic magic. “A one-of-a-kind dream ghost story” (Los Angeles Times).