IT TAKES A very special level of respect for a story to be able to tell it with the dignity and complexity it warrants and not teeter off into preachiness or sensationalism. Ellen Pakkies is a real woman who was raised in the Cape Flats context of unrelenting […]
ANY MANIFESTATION OF the arts in the public domain involves collaborative energy, give and take, the use of others’ expertise. And the names of those people are mostly not on the headlines of the work. Ask any sub-editor, stage manager, gallery factotum or set designer. Björn Runge’s film […]
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 […]
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