OCCASIONALLY, WHEN YOU ignore the hype and opt to see a film that has not been aggressively marketed or thrust in your face, you come across a true gem. Paul Dano’s Wildlife touches on the complexity of gender in an age of misogyny and broken dreams, with the […]
SHE SIZZLES WITH her sense of queenly potency, her sexual beauty and the essence of being Cleopatra and all that she represents to the past and the future. This is Sophie Okonedo who defies ordinary adjectives. Her performance is so fine, you cannot take your eyes or your […]
YOU’VE GOT TO hand it to Robert Redford. Now, at 82, this actor who was the ultimate in good looking dudes since the 1950s, is not only the star but also one of the producers of The Old Man and the Gun, an absolutely delicious foray into a […]
DON’T FALL INTO the trap of taking the lull in theatre productions in Johannesburg at this time of year as an indication that there’s nothing worth seeing. Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III filmed by the National Theatre Live, takes the prize for the finest bit of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
IT IS NOT everyday that you find a truly South African story told with unabashed frankness in the eye of the horror of apartheid. It’s even rarer that you find one that is not only about the broad terrain of apartheid, but one which also burrows in a […]
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