Category: Film

How to face the demons in your belly

IF YOU READ the blurb put out by Ster Kinekor for Destin Daniel Cretton’s The Glass Castle, you may go into the movie theatre expecting to be uplifted by a kind of clichéd rags to riches yarn about reaching for one’s dreams. It is so much more and […]

Behold, the Queen: unguarded

SHE WAS SO many things. The portraits of her attest to her physical fierceness. An unbeautiful woman, Queen Victoria was pivotal to a stylistic era that was as much about decorum as it was about modesty. Victoria and Abdul, directed by Stephen Frears is a magnificently crafted work […]

Veld foundling

WHAT ARE YOU, effectively, if you do not fit the basic identifiers of the people all around you? This question comes under the sensitive but probing and compelling loupe of newly released Afrikaans (with English subtitles) film, Vaselinetjie. Like British director Alan Bleasdale’s mini-series that interpreted Dickens’s Oliver […]

Ode to the hole in your heart

THE IRREVOCABLE EMPTINESS of loss is the subject of the video piece and related artists’ books that comprise this intimate and raw, broken yet focused work of Minnette Vári. It’s a lot less abstract than her previous bodies of work and while it is unashamedly personal for Vári, […]

Life can be such a delightful Drag!

What happens when three drag queens decide to turn a new page on life, armed with a bus named Priscilla, lots of shoes and an urge to strut their stuff in the Great Australian Outback? The world turns on its heel, glitter and tears characterise the moves and […]

Death of a golden boy

Sometimes you just know that a film will most likely not break box office records, not in this generation, at least, but that this market-centric prediction has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on its brilliance, its historical merit or its importance as a piece of research. Johnny is nie […]

Who’s your daddy?

WHAT DO YOU do when your hot-shot entrepreneurial daughter who is earnestly climbing the corporate ladder in Europe freezes you out of her life? Do you do the social thing and try to wine and dine her and buy her gifts, or do you go all out to […]

The stuff of nightmares

AS YOU WALK into the gallery space, an aura of stunned silence enfolds you. There’s a single silver gelatin print by Shirin Neshat from her film Roja hanging on the wall before you: A young woman in black stands in front of a huge, vaguely mushroom-shaped building. And it […]