Reviews of Today’s AFI Film Fest
Following are capsule reviews of today’s screenings in the American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival at the Cineplex Odeon Century Plaza Cinemas:
‘Mapantsula’
South Africa/Australia/Great Britain, 1988, 106 minutes 6:40 p.m.
A taught, affecting drama about a man caught between two cultures, both of which reject him: Panic (Thomas Mogotlane), a black petty con man, is dismissed by the men and women involved in the anti-apartheid struggle as a traitor and thug; the brutal police officers who want to use him as an informer despise him. Director and co-writer Oliver Schmitz makes the cruel, amoral Panic seem comprehensible, if not sympathetic, by exposing the social conditions that produced him. “Mapantsula” (“thief” in Zulu) has been banned in South Africa. RECOMMENDED.
Only good movies
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