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Category: Film

Precious winners all, in the bard’s chilly weather yarn

FILM REVIEW: THE WINTER’S TALE. WITHIN THE FIRST fifteen minutes of Blanche McIntyre’s version of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, you understand why the king of Sicily, Leontes (Will Keen) suspects the king of Bohemia, Polixenes (Oliver Ryan) for “bed swerving” with his beautiful wife, Hermione (Priyanga Burford). The […]

Paean to an African hairdo

FILM REVIEW: THE BARBERSHOP CHRONICLES. WHERE IS IT that African men get to kick back, let their hair down and loosen their tongues? The communal urinal? The local bar? Under the pen of Inua Ellams, it’s the barbershop; South African writers of the ilk of Tony Miyambo, Sue […]

Bloody glasses for sweet milk

FILM REVIEW: MACBETH. OTHERWISE KNOWN AS ‘The Scottish Play’ Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the one tragedy most filled with special effects to make it sizzle with audience accessibility. From witches and ghosts to murderers and phantoms, the work in anyone’s hands has the frisson of sensationalism of any good […]

Eternity: In their lips, their eyes

FILM REVIEW: ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. IF YOU FEEL you deserve something so rich and evolved, something so sophisticated and delicious on the senses, this evening or any time until Wednesday 13 May, don’t lean toward the fridge or the online hot food delivery business. Don’t get despondent that […]

Two fair gourds of equal sweetness

FILM REVIEW: THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, FILMED AT THE GLOBE. FRANCESCA MILLS TAKES the soul of this production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known works and rolls it between her fingers, thunderously like a god. This performer, who has dwarfism, takes on the whole […]

Original sin; utter hubris

FILM REVIEW: FRANKENSTEIN. This review is premised on the version of the work with Jonny Lee Miller as the creature. A man makes a living creature by pulling together alchemical possibilities and graveyard detritus sewn together with a crude hand. And thus starts one of the western world’s […]

A tale of monsters and broken men

FILM REVIEW: FRANKENSTEIN. This review is premised on the version of the work with Benedict Cumberbatch as the creature. What is it that gives us humanity? Nay, that gives us life? The stuff that distinguishes life from death is the substance of the 1817 prototype gothic horror novel […]

The guys your parents warned you about

FILM REVIEW: VOËLVRY — THE MOVIE. THEY WERE MORE than just angry young Afrikaans-speaking men. Musicians of the ilk of Johannes Kerkorrel, James Phillips, Koos Kombuis, Bernoldus Niemand, Willem Möller and others had the edge that could force change in a country locked down by blind racist imperatives. […]

Whirligig revenges and yellow stockings

THEATRE REVIEW: TWELFTH NIGHT Humour is easily one of the most difficult genres to uphold: it dates; what may have been pants-wettingly hilarious in the 1500s, might be simply boring or perplexing today. In the hands of Simon Godwin, however, the gender fluid wildness of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth […]

More beautiful than a summer’s day

THEATRE REVIEW: ROMEO AND JULIET. THERE IS SOMETHING eminently satisfying and comforting in this world, where everything is off kilter, of knowing that certain traditions are being upheld with a great sense of fierceness. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London has, in its wisdom and generosity, established a free […]