Director Alexander Payne was once the movies’ most acerbic observer of middle-aged masculinity. He has gone soft with his Oscar-baiting drama The Descendants, a slick but manipulative look at the trials a family endures after the mother is injured in a boating accident that puts her
Material, the upcoming SA film produced by Internet entrepreneur Ronnie Apteker and starring Riaad Moosa, surprises in two ways: firstly, it’s as tender as it is rambunctious and, secondly, it’s actually pretty good. Consider it Apteker’s apology for setting the hoodlums from Straight Outta Benoni loose
Rape, murder, suicide and twisted medical experiments are just the beginning. Even by the perverse standards of Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In is bizarre and disturbing. It’s made even more so that it is one of the most carefully controlled films ever made by Spain’s greatest living director. The
Money is just “pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat”, declares Jeremy Irons as the reptilian CEO John Tuld in Margin Call, a drama about a group of investment bankers who have just realised
Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin does exactly what it promises to on the tin. It’s a rollicking, world-spanning adventure that does a respectable job of bringing Hergé’s beloved boy reporter to the big screen. The Belgian comic writer and artist’s
The gaming industry has had a fantastic year. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3’s record-breaking sales offer evidence of gaming’s growing cultural importance, and we have seen a string of critically acclaimed games across a range of genres hitting the shelves throughout the year. Here is TechCentral’s pick
This is our pick of the films screened in SA cinemas during 2011. The list excludes 2011 films such as Hugo, The Descendants and The Artist that have yet to be released in SA. By Lance Harris
Arthouse thriller Drive opens with a tense game of cat and mouse that is one of the most masterful action sequences in a recent film. In just two minutes of screen time, director Nicolas Winding Refn tells you everything you need to know about the driver
In The Social Network, scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin created a thriller about a geek building a website in a Harvard college dorm. With Moneyball, a new vehicle for Brad Pitt, he fashions a fascinating but uneven sports drama from the arcane topic of how
Few films have provoked as much controversy and heated debate as Straw Dogs, the classic 1971 revenge thriller from Sam Peckinpah. Pauline Kael, an admirer of the director, famously called it “the first American film that is a fascist work of art” – and that was in a review
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