Xuanlin Tham

United Kingdom

Contributor at Freelance

writer, curator, pervert. 'REVOLUTIONARY DESIRES' out now with @404Ink ❤️‍🔥

Articles

Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival: 2025 Report

3 weeks ago | theskinny.co.uk | Xuanlin Tham

The banner adorning Heart of Hawick for the annual Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival reads ‘Embrace the Strange’. Like a lighthouse beacon, this enticing slogan draws in travellers near and far to bask in an oasis of experimental film and moving image work across the festival’s four richly-programmed days. Ahead of each screening, audiences are summoned into the theatre by the customary ring of an old brass handbell.
【GQ片單】史上最偉大「科幻電影」推薦：《駭客任務》無法超越、《AKIRA》神預言？

1 month ago | gq.com.tw | Xuanlin Tham

「科幻」這一龐大而奇妙的類型涵蓋了一些最偉大的故事，但是，是什麼造就了最優秀的科幻電影，相信每個人都有自己的答案，但我們大膽猜測，將偉大科幻片挑選出來非常簡單：無限的想象力、凝視宇宙（或怪獸、外星人、平行宇宙），從中汲取關於人類在地球上的意義的真理。所以，怎樣才能拍出一部好的科幻電影？我們相信要有星際想像力，且勇於揭開地球真相的那面！繼續閱讀盤點 7 部「黑科技」電影與影集《異星入境》由艾米亞當斯（Amy Adams）主演，丹尼斯維倫紐瓦導演的《異星入境》（Arrival）被許多人認為是她職業生涯中最精彩的表演。劇情講述了語言學家路易絲班克斯（Louise Banks）被美國軍方邀請幫助他們開發一種與神秘抵達並盤旋在地球上空的 12 艘外星飛船溝通的方法。電影改編自特德蔣的短篇小說《你一生的故事》，《異星入境》是科幻電影中的柏拉圖式理想：對時間、語言以及非人類能教給我們的東西進行了無盡的深刻反思。《駭客任務》...
Rage Against the Machine: police brutality and the 30-year free fall of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine • Journal • A Letterboxd Magazine

1 month ago | letterboxd.com | Xuanlin Tham |Robert Daniels |Ella Kemp |La haine

Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Blue, white, and red. Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé). What is the power of three? Three decades ago, La Haine exploded onto the world stage at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, winning 27-year-old Matthieu Kassovitz the prize of Best Director and searing its name—two deceptively soft-sounding French syllables for what we would imagine being snarled, hurled, splintering and enraged, hatred—into the annals of film history.
A Manifesto for the Modern Cinematic Sex Scene

2 months ago | anothermag.com | Xuanlin Tham |TextXuanlin Tham

Drawing examples from recent films like Babygirl, Passages and How to Have Sex, Xuanlin Tham makes a case for the enduring importance of the sex scene The sex scene is statistically disappearing from our screens, in parallel with the rise of increasingly commonplace anti-sex scene sentiment. This is a political phenomenon inextricable from our widespread immiseration and violence under late capitalism – one which illuminates the borders of what we are allowed to feel and experience today.
A Manifesto for the Modern Cinematic Sex Scene

2 months ago | flipboard.com | Xuanlin Tham

The sex scene is statistically disappearing from our screens, in parallel with the rise of increasingly commonplace anti-sex scene sentiment. This is …
A Book on the Revolutionary Power of the Sex Scene

Mar 4, 2025 | i-d.co | Douglas Greenwood |Xuanlin Tham

Be it Anora or Challengers, Babygirl or Nosferatu, it seems there’s nothing more offensive to the terminally online than the act of two (or three) people fucking on-screen. The sex scene has long been a key factor in narrative cinema, and while it’s gathered some vocal defenders and detractors online, to the writer Xuanlin Tham, the exhausted discourse has been misguided from both sides. On one hand, they found some dismissed these expressions of on-screen desire to be gratuitous and unnecessary.
Louis Partridge isn't reading the comments

Nov 10, 2024 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Xuanlin Tham

Louis Partridge can barely utter the word “celebrity” without cringing. That is funny, charming and typical for the actor, who, at 21, has already worked with two Academy Award–winning directors, has 9 million Instagram followers flooding his comments with marriage proposals and Olivia Rodrigo comments, and gets stopped in the street multiple times a day.
Gaza poet Mosab Abu Toha on his new collection Forest of Noise – The Skinny

Oct 27, 2024 | theskinny.co.uk | Xuanlin Tham

In November 2023, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was evacuating Gaza with his family through the Rafah border crossing when he was kidnapped by Israeli forces. He describes this experience in On Your Knees, a poem whose stanzas inhabit the harrowing silence between the echo of one heartbeat and the next, between the anticipation of a blow and the stunning pain of its arrival.
Louis Partridge im GQ-Interview: “Ich wollte beweisen, dass ich mehr sein kann als der Teenie-Schwarm von Netflix”

Sep 16, 2024 | gq-magazin.de | Xuanlin Tham

Louis Partridge ist in Hollywood angekommen. Trotzdem gelingt es ihm nicht, sich als Star zu sehen. Wir haben das neue Schauspieltalent zum Gespräch getroffen. Wenn man jung, berühmt und schön ist wie Louis Partridge, können die sozialen Medien ein seltsamer Ort sein. Auf dem Instagram-Account des 21 Jahre alten Schauspielers versammeln sich täglich neun Millionen bewundernde Fans, die seine Bilder mit Liebeserklärungen und Blumen-Emojis fluten.
Louis Partridge is so grounded

Sep 8, 2024 | gq-magazine.co.uk | Xuanlin Tham

If you’re young and famous and beautiful, like Louis Partridge, social media can be a strange place. On the 21-year-old actor’s Instagram, admiring followers – nine million of them – convene daily across geographical space and time, finding community in throwing around declarations of love like flowers at his feet.