MUSICAL BIOPICS ARE always complicated and oft dangerous affairs. They may be about not letting the facts get in the way of a good yarn, as they may find themselves compromised by a quest to find actors who look the part rather than have the skills or the […]
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, French actor Isabelle Huppert is magnificent. She has class and presence, she’s sexy and she’s not predictable. She’s beautiful in a way that evades Hollywood’s shallow glamour, but not even Huppert herself can save Greta, a film that may make you pause to consider if […]
DON’T BE PUT off by the title of the new Diane Keaton film, Poms, and the bubble gum shallow American yarn it implies. Yes, all that glittery bubble gum stuff is there, enfolded in the story’s mix, but that’s probably not the main reason why you will love […]
The name ‘Pablo Picasso’ has become idiomatic for so much: from superficial reflections on talent to car brands. But its associations have also become so completely flattened into a very narrow understanding of what this artist was all about, and why his work was important to the world. […]
WHAT WOULD YOU do if you discovered that your elderly mum, in her hand-knitted cardigan with her arthritic fingers, has had a secret life that is of great concern to the authorities? A life that involved nuclear plans and spies, sex and political manipulation? You might try to […]
VERY RARELY DO you find a film that is effectively a piece of advocacy work, so searingly well made and intensely carefully constructed that it surpasses the threshold of actuality and turns into great art. Nadine Labaki’s essay in Amharic (with subtitles) on poverty and disenfranchisement in contemporary […]
WHEN YOU WATCH the political rhetoric being thrust hither and yon on social media and other young platforms, the one thing that you notice is its lack of nuance. Political diatribe in South Africa in 2019 paints white people as racists. Blanketly. Utterly regardless of their history or […]
WHAT DO YOU do when the love of your life is swept away by a big old auntie with a fortune, a hazy tale of connection to her and all sorts of plans to marry her to someone else? Why, you ambush the property with no less than […]
WHEN THE UNIVERSE presents a possibility in your life that is unequivocally wrong, but still, it’s there, what do you do? A chance encounter with a literary letter when she was down and out and had no where to turn, represented an important turning point for American writer, […]
WHAT DO YOU do when the proverbial gift horse looks your way, and makes you an offer you can’t refuse? Earl Stone (Clint Eastwood) is an ordinary kind of 90-year-old divorced guy, who loves to garden much more than he likes family responsibilities. He won’t say no to […]
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