Brainy sci-fi thrillers are always a treat, especially in a summer like this one, where the popcorn tentpole movies have for the most part been fairly uninspiring duds. So let’s be thankful for Neill Blomkamp’s remarkably assured feature debut, District 9, which although hardly flawless, rips along at a devilish pace unheard of, to my […]

It’s unfortunate the way that the sub-Saharan African continent gets all kind lumped together, and so we have people talking about “Africa this” or “Africa that” without any regard to the 46 countries that make up the continent. At its worst extreme, this results in a sort of First World inability to conceive of African […]

An admission: I feel actively guilty for not loving Indigènes (Natives, released in this country under the confoundedly meaningless title Days of Glory). It’s clearly an important film, documenting the institutionalized racism in the French army against the North African soldiers who, in a very real sense, liberated France from the Nazis. So compelling is […]

Perhaps none of what I’m about to write will remain true. My thinking in the last twelve hours has flipped a little bit; for a few hours after walking out of Tsotsi, the South African winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, I was prepared to say it more or less worked in spite […]