WHEN THE FIRST thing you do after watching a period drama is to scour the bookshelves to find a particular volume and then secrete yourself between its pages, to gorge yourself on the story and the writing, you know the filmmakers have done something right. This is precisely […]
ASK ANYONE IN the world who Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is and they will answer you with sunflowers, a severed ear and suicide. And they may be able to point out a bit of Van Gogh branding on a t-shirt or a mug in their vicinity. Headed by […]
WAR. IT’S A time of cruelty and violence, of value-shifting upheaval and horrible surprises. War history, by its very nature is clustered with rich and timeless stories of hope and love. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a film based on the eponymous novel, that […]
BEAUFORT WEST. A Western Cape town that like many others in the dusty interior of South Africa, is one that 21st values seem to have left behind. It’s dry in so many ways, and prospects of life for a 24-year-old who is in the ignominious situation of being […]
HOW WOULD YOU explain your dodgy life choices to your 10-year-old self? This is one of the motifs that is intelligently threaded through the rich and magnificent text of Cédric Klapisch’s Back to Burgundy, at Ster Kinekor, Cinema Nouveau. But it’s not the element that will grab you […]
IT’S ONE THING to take a beautiful novel and translate it into a film which drives a similar story line. It’s quite another to parade a film under the title of said novel, but twist its ending into something else entirely. Curiously, Ian McEwan who wrote the novel […]
IT TAKES A great deal of wisdom to make a film as beautiful as Chappaquiddick. It has to do with an understanding of the fact that the story was told by history itself in 1969. It also has to do with an understanding of the texture of the […]
IN THIS WORLD where political correctness is invading expression like a disease, Madame is a nifty foray into the self-focused, idle and rather stupid rich, which is carefully written, beautifully cast and really funny and pointed. It’s a celebration of beauty that doesn’t kowtow to market-related bland norms […]
YOU DON’T HAVE to speak Japanese to get completely hooked into the maverick possibilities cast out by the story of Isle of Dogs. You don’t even need to speak ‘dog’. This Wes Anderson animated tale of a society gone anti-dog is a fantastic spoof on the political idiosyncrasies […]
THERE IS AN unequivocal boldness to the premise suggested by Rungano Nyoni’s film I am not a Witch, which was chosen to open this year’s European film festival on the art film circuit. By dint of its title, it ticks a number of boxes which are geared to […]
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