Eek. I think I just became a Sci-Fi geek. I just sat through the first two seasons of Battlestar Gallactica, back to back. Don’t say I don’t know how to have a good time…..

Well written, dramatic, and often touching, BSG was of course filmed in Vancouver, Canada - which is pretty much kick-ass when it […]

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Due for release in November of this Year, Baz Luhrmann’s latest opus Australia is set in north of that country just before World War II. It revolves around an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) who inherits a cattle station the size of a small European nation. When rival cattle barons plot to annex her land, she […]

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Maybe it’s Leonardo month on DSTV, but this week’s Sunday Night Movie was Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond. Set in the shocking chaos of a West African civil war, a poor fisherman (Djimon Hounsou) is enslaved by rebel forces and made to pan for the diamonds that essentially are funding the insurrection. Having found a diamond the size […]

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Martin Scorsese’s excellent The Departed was on TV the other night. Set in Boston, the violent tale revolves around a gangster (played smarmy by local boy Matt Damon) who infiltrates the police department and a cop (aced flat and hard by Leonardo DiCaprio) who infiltrates the gangs. When it becomes clear that there’s a mole in each […]

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I need to admit something: I don’t think I ever sat through an entire episode of the Sex and the City tv series. Miserable old grump that I am, I never quite saw the point of the cartoonish caricatures, the jump-the-shark misadventures, the trivialised sexualisation of everything, and the truly, truly ridiculous clothes. I’m also not at all a fan […]

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It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since Julia Roberts graced the streets of London in Notting Hill. It was on TV again over the weekend: a “what happens” when a megastar meets and falls in love with quite a normal chap. Even if the chap is floppy Hugh Grant.
What happens when a normal […]

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Ok, now that the movie’s finally out, it’s probably finally safe to talk about this…..
Although Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features all sorts of Cold War triple agent spy-jinks and McCarthy-esque witch-hunts for hidden Reds, it would appear that most feared were those who might have tried to steal the movie’s secrets. The final credits […]

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Caught Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel on tv again last night – a beautiful, gut wrenching and entirely appalling exposition of the confusions and mistakes and misunderstandings that separate us. In light of the xenophobic wrath unfolding in Johannesburg right now, it’s a timely reminder of umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu - our humanity connects us, a person […]

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The sister of our very fabulous friend Di lives in Winnipeg in Canada. Why any sensible, sun-drenched South African should make a life in a city where the average temperature is minus three, and it’s dark for nine months of the year (ok, it isn’t really, it just seems that it is) is beyond comprehension.
Given […]

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Anyone whining about the lack of success of the South African film industry need only to look at a movie like Pieces of April to understand what we’re doing wrong. Written and directed by Peter Hedges, April is a small, personal film, well told.  It stars Katie Holmes (post-Dawson and pre-Tom and therefore appealing) as an […]

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