Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/18World premiere: 21 July, 2011, Durban International Film Festival Dramas about apartheid are rare; South African films are rare; South African dramas about apartheid are thus exceptionally rare. And for that reason alone, I feel guilty about finding so little particular merit in Otelo Burning, a film about […]
I am ashamed to say that I didn’t make the connection that Real Steel is nor more nor less than Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots: The Movie until every other living person had already done so. But in my defense, that is only because I very early on got attached to thinking of it as […]
In 2002, the Oakland Athletics did not win the World Series. You might think that this is a sufficiently common event that it wouldn’t be worth making a movie about it, but then there’s Moneyball, which is happy to prove you wrong. You see, the A’s didn’t just fail to win the World Series – […]
The boxing movie is the most durable of all sports subgenres, despite being by no means the most popular of sports. My private belief is that this is because boxing is the sport that best allows for individual narratives, rather than stories of teamwork (and it is customarily the case that American cinema does better […]
Ray Schmit’s contribution to the Carry On Campaign was in service to seeing a review of one of his favorite childhood movies. Which is, I think, dangerous ground, but in this case I happened to rather like the movie he picked, though it was by no means part of my own childhood. You lucked out […]
There’s a something about boxing pictures; a certain movieish quality to them that’s not equaled by any of the more popular sports (has there ever been a truly great football film? or hockey story? Only baseball has come anywhere close to replicating the cinematic durability of boxing, and then typically as the background to a […]
Immediately after viewing Disney’s awards-hopeful Secretariat, I happened to meet a friend whose first question about the film was to know if, as promised, it is The Blind Side – an inspirational sports movie of virtually no aesthetic importance starring a woman who, for reasons best left unexplored, has been anointed as “owed” an Oscar […]
First principles: two hours and twenty minutes is a fucking unreasonable running time for a kids’ martial arts film. But that is exactly the running time of the new remake of The Karate Kid, which finds Will and Jada Pinkett Smith winning the Best Parents of the Year award, having bought their son Jaden his […]
It would appear that the latest “masterpiece” phase of Clint Eastwood’s career has quieted down for the time being: after making a few knockouts in the middle of the decade, and in the process fully justifying those of us who’d been known to call him one of America’s great filmmakers since sometime in the ’90s […]
The Blind Side is the kind of movie that by custom I absolutely hate, and I sort of vaguely, not at all to excess but distinctly and undeniably, enjoyed watching it anyway. That is your rave for the evening. It’s one of those movies that uses the phrase “based upon a true story” like a […]
When the great British social realist director Ken Loach last attempted to make a comedy, 2007’s It’s a Free World… the results were a bit mixed; being a great social realist isn’t just something you can turn off like its’ a light switch, and so the breezy, appealing, and very smart opening hour of that […]
Big Fan, the directorial debut of Robert Siegel, sometime Onion editor and writer of last year’s The Wrestler, is a most fascinating and unclassifiable beast. You couldn’t in good faith deny that it’s a comedy – but a most blanched-out and miserabilist comedy. It is saturated to its bones with sports culture – yet you’d […]
