THE GREAT WAR. It was billed a war to end all wars, and it radically changed the nature of society. Ask any historian. Read any biographical or fictional account of it. A world war is grist for a million story mills, the premise for timeless love stories and […]
IT’S NOT EVERY day that you get to watch a film which forces you to re-examine who you are as a human being in the world. Not in the sense of a frilly tale told with universal platitudes, but from a hard-hitting, real perspective that has nothing to […]
A ROUGH-AROUND-THE EDGES young man, replete with a lot of bravado and a whirligig macho kind of engagement with the world, with all its women, deals and chance-taking, finds his comeuppance in a way that takes him – and will take you – by surprise. Paco Arango’s film […]
JUST WHEN YOU think your hero has met the greatest challenge he’s capable of weathering, he pops to the surface to return victorious again, all cleaned up with the scars on the inside. This is the message prominent in Michael Moer’s reworking and direction of Papillon for 2018 […]
AN EXPLORER GETS a lot more than he bargained for, in Martyn Le Roux’s debut Afrikaans-language horror film which released on Vimeo last Friday. It’s a viable model for storytelling and the terror of the tale can be as close as your computer screen, with live-streaming. Die Pelsloper […]
HER FINGERS ARE riddled with arthritis, the skin almost transparent with veins criss-crossing one another. Her eyebrows are pencilled in, in a fashion redolent of years gone by. The red lipstick slips into the crevices of her lips and blue veins punctuate her forehead. But she tells her […]
IT IS NEVER the story itself; it’s how you tell it that makes a tale sing. Damien Chazelle’s film First Man, which celebrates the story of Neil Armstrong – the world’s first man on the moon – fits this bill perfectly. It’s the tale of not only a […]
WHEN YOU FIRST ‘meet’ Busi (Petronella Tshuma), the lead in Jerome Pikwane’s local horror film The Tokoloshe, you are grabbed by her sense of excruciating vulnerability faintly covered with a veneer of bravado. She’s young, she’s desperate and she cannot turn down this security job because she’s really […]
WHEN AN ARTIST – of whatever stripe – steps up to the proverbial mic and loses all sense of the audience in front of her, with just the song on her lips or fingers, something unforgettable happens. Ask any performer – be they a pianist or a drag […]
IAN MCKELLEN TAKES full and unexpurgated possession of all the complexities of a great king ravaged by the suspicion of daughterly disloyalty and onset and brokenness of dementia in this major and magnificent production of arguably Shakespeare’s most important tragedy, King Lear. Indeed, on so many levels, this […]
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