Category: Review

SOS: Bath creature in distress

WHEN YOU HAVE a mythical creature lying naked in your bath, how do you convince a colleague who has roughly the same proportions, to bring her smalls over to your apartment, without seeming inappropriate, or completely nuts? This is the conundrum that our hero, Frans (Francois Coertze) finds […]

Mary Cassatt: Excellence on its own terms

SHE WAS A feminist before it was fashionable, a French Impressionist born in Pennsylvania, a woman painter in a man’s world. She took intaglio printmaking by the horns and created arguably one of the world’s most valuable collections of images. This was Mary Cassatt. Her story Mary Cassatt: […]

A ribald tango down memory lane

STRIP THINGS DOWN to their bare basics. What do you really need to make a production that sings while it reaches boldly into the interstices of everyone’s heart? The Old and the Beautiful with Tony Bentel and Fiona Ramsay is a show that has seen many summers and […]

Here’s looking at you, Cézanne

DO YOU REMEMBER a time when the world was a different place culturally, and the careful curation of an exhibition could be allowed the time and energy of nine whole years in its inception? The Cézanne exhibition central to this Exhibitions on Screen documentary ticks all those glorious […]

Grampa’s Pandora’s Box

WHAT POWER DOES a government have in whitewashing filthy sins of the past? When Lithuanian officer Jonas Noreika was killed in 1947 by the KGB, he was revered as a martyr for his country, and the celebrations of his life ran so thick with enthusiasm, that his crimes […]

Sock puppets and dream chasers

WHEN YOU DEEM yourself capable of putting another person into a categorising box, you perform an act of unmitigated violence. And you can do this by simply calling those people ‘foreign nationals’, ‘migrants’, ‘others’, ‘a problem’, the list goes on. It’s a magic gesture which strips another person […]

Checks and balances

SOMETIMES A NOTHING of a story can be the perfect shell for a mix of humour, philosophy and drama. And with the fabulous Javier Bardem at the helm of The Good Boss, you can anticipate narrative magnetism. It’s on this year’s European Film Festival; designed to be hybrid, […]

I was my mother’s best friend

WHO WAS YOUR mother when she was a child? And would you have played with her, if you had met her when you both were eight years old? These ideas are, admittedly head-spinners all of their own. Without sensationalist hi-jinks, Céline Sciamma’s beautiful film, Petite Maman explores the […]