Category: Robyn Sassen

Two to tango

WHEN A PLOT grabs you by key emotions and then twists and turns and slips and escapes your ability to predict its nuances, you get completely caught in what it has to offer. Bill Condon’s film The Good Liar, featuring stellar performers Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, is […]

Cyclic terror in a frock of red

In a moment, he takes an audience who is laughing and chatting loudly, and renders it speechless, quietly weeping and praying. This is the starting point of Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza’s Red Femicycle, which has enjoyed a few platforms in Gauteng this year. An essay on the scourge […]

Loss’s remedy

WHAT IF YOUR most treasured relative didn’t even know they were yours? The premises of Steven Woutelood’s magnificent work, My extraordinary summer with Tess, a Dutch-language film with English subtitles and magnificent sprinklings of salsa will take you through the whole gamut of holiday romance tropes, down to […]

SA satire, well below the panty line

THE FILTHY OBSCENITY of ratified apartheid legislation in South Africa put a very special and specific spin on the meaning of taboo. This was never pornography in the traditional sense, because that form of sexual gratification was deemed completely verboten. Rather, what you got under the apartheid regime […]

In love with the Big Apple

SAY THE NAME “Woody Allen” and if you’re able to remember a time before this filmmaker was branded as a sexual predator who had an affair with – among others – the child that he and his then wife, Mia Farrow adopted, you will think of the proverbial […]

How to chase pretty dragons

SOMETIMES WHEN 110% of attention is focused on the beautification of every nuance offered in every film still, something very important gets lost. Pedro Almodóvar’s long awaited semi-autobiographical film Pain and Glory resonates, in some ways with the premises of Federico Fellini’s (1963) 8½, but with too much […]