Search for Africa

Over the course of a 26 year career that encompassed more than 75 movies, Humphrey Bogart made only five color films. The first and most respected of those was 1951’s The African Queen, the last of five pictures he made with his good friend,...

It would be easy to dismiss Catch a Fire as yet another story of a heroic rebel fighting against an oppressive regime. That would be an accurate high-level description of the story, but it neglects the intangibles: solid acting, effective direction...

Despite embracing the tropes one associates with the Western, Michael Matthews’ Five Fingers of Marseilles transpires in an atypical locale: post-Colonial South Africa. Matthews reaffirms what Sergio Leone identified – the Western doesn’...

A Good Man in Africa, based on William Boyd's novel of the same name, is supposed to be a biting satire on the colonial attitudes of British subjects. The problem with the film is that it's frequently more tedious than funny. The story -- tha...

If you're like me, you probably paid little attention to the attempted genocide that occurred during the civil war in Rwanda in the mid-1990s (more than one million people died). I remember reading about it in the papers and occasionally seeing cli...

One reason to lament the existence of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (which will hereafter be referred to merely as Madagascar 2) is too bemoan the considerable amount of talent that was tied up developing this uninspired sequel when it could have bee...

Watching Out of Africa a quarter of a century after its release, it's almost impossible to guess how it won the Oscar for Best Picture. There's little doubt that this is a feast for the eyes and ears. The pairing of John Barry's lush score with D...

Much as I might like to, I cannot heap praise upon director Gavin Hood's Rendition, a political thriller with aspirations of being so much more that it is. The film treads into the minefield of debate that exists surrounding the question of Constit...

Safe House is an overlong, underwhelming knock-off of The Bourne Identity - another generic spy thriller in which the "bad guy" (a traitor) is the good guy (because he's at war against corruption) and the "good guys" (government agents) are the bad...

When a director can take a reprehensible monster and, over the course of a scant 90 minutes, turn audience reaction from distaste to sympathy, that's the mark of an adept filmmaker. This occurs in Tsotsi, an emotionally honest tale of redemption t...