Reviews

Tsotsi

Best Foreign Film Oscar winner brings great soundtrack, little else

By PETER KEOUGH | March 8, 2006

2.0 Stars

TSOTSI: Existential odyssey gives way to rote manhunt

Adapted from Athol Fugard’s lone, nearly forgotten novel, Gavin Hood’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film updates the playwright’s earnest allegory of redemption from the black-and-white moral climate of its original 1960 setting to the ambiguity of the post-apartheid present. Lacking Fugard’s creative imagination, however, he transforms the flawed but impassioned original into a slipshod generic trifle. Tsotsi (scowling, baby-faced Presley Chweneyagae), whose name means “thug,” leads a Johannesburg gang that preys on the weak without remorse or reflection. Then he comes into possession of a baby — abandoned by a prostitute in the novel, but here unwittingly kidnapped when Tsotsi carjacks a wealthy black couple. The interior existential odyssey of Fugard’s hero gives way to a rote-like police manhunt with vague social implications, trite sentimentality, and a pat resolution. The contemporary setting, however, does allow Hood to include rousing South African kwaito music for one of the year’s best soundtracks.

Topics: Reviews , Entertainment, Performing Arts, Theater, More

| More

view all

[ 05/26 ] Arborea + Christopher Paul Stelling + dilly dilly @ One Longfellow Square

[ 05/26 ] "Bike Month: Alley Cat Bike Race & After Party" @ SPACE Gallery

[ 05/26 ] Liquid Sky + Icepicks + Baxx Sisi's @ Bayside Bowl

More Information

Watch the trailer for Tsotsi - (QuickTime)

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: WHERE DO WE GO NOW? | May 22, 2012
Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's whimsical film about internecine slaughter has a tone problem from the very start: a group of widows engage in a goofy line dance while the voiceover narrator bewails the death toll of religious warfare.

REVIEW: MEN IN BLACK 3 | May 24, 2012
Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a fifth dimensional alien, can see the infinite possibilities each moment possesses and the infinite contingencies that caused it to happen.

INTERVIEW: RICHARD LINKLATER MESSES WITH TEXAS IN BERNIE | May 16, 2012
No matter how far he strays, Richard Linklater's heart remains in Texas.

REVIEW: THE DICTATOR | May 16, 2012
Though his PR campaign might suggest otherwise, Sacha Baron Cohen has actually made (with director Larry Charles) a sweet movie, not unlike Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator , if less sentimental.

REVIEW: THE HUNTER | May 17, 2012
Apparently extinct since the 1930s, the Tasmanian Tiger resembled an uncanny assortment of mismatched parts from other animals. Daniel Nettheim's film is equally weird and motley.