South African cinema chains are ensuring locals have plenty to keep them occupied over the three-day holiday weekend. In addition to five new movie debuts (yes, five!), lovers of big screen entertainment have four more concert, documentary and live performance recordings to choose from.
These include the week’s Throwback Cinema release at Ster Kinekor, One Direction: This is Us; Imagine Dragons: Live From The Hollywood Bowl on 26 and 29 March; The Royal Ballet: Romeo and Juliet, only at Nu Metro Hyde Park on Sunday 23 March; and a final screening of Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert at select Nu Metro cinemas, also this Sunday.
If you love real-life tales of survival against the odds, Last Breath should be top of your list. Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu lead the cast of this thriller about seasoned deep-sea divers who strive to rescue a trapped crewmate hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface. Up top, meanwhile, a powerful storm rages, endangering the ship that is their base of operations.
Our Last Breath review will be up on the site in the next few days.
Honestly, Disney’s Snow White, also known simply as Snow White, is releasing with a lot less fanfare then probably intended, due to months of controversy and bad reaction. The latest live-action adaptation of an animated Disney classic goes back to the musical fantasy that started it all for the House of Mouse, 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with Rachel Zegler playing the beautiful young princess forced to hide in the forest from her jealous stepmother, the Wicked Queen (Gal Gadot).
Look out for our Snow White review soon.
For a different kind of escapism, check out high-concept action comedy Novocaine. The Boys’ and Companion’s Jack Quaid plays Nathan Caine, a genial everyman and assistant manager with a rare disorder: he feels no pain. It’s an ability that comes in handy when the girl of his dreams (Amber Midthunder) is kidnapped, and he resolves to fight to get her back.
For a filmmaker who planned to give up movie-making, Steven Soderbergh sure has been busy. Following last month’s haunted house reinvention Presence, this month he’s delivering star-packed espionage thriller Black Bag. When intelligence agent Kathryn Woodhouse (Cate Blanchett) is suspected of betraying the nation, her spy husband (Michael Fassbender) faces the ultimate test of whether to be loyal to his marriage, or his country. Also with Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page and Pierce Brosnan.
Finally, there’s homegrown comedy drama Som van Twee. In Afrikaans with English subtitles, the film centres on psychologist Henk Opperman (Louw Venter), whose already strained relationship with his son Renier (Adriaan Havenga) gets even worse after the death of his wife. But when the truth comes out that Henk cheated on his Matric Maths Paper in 1990, he has to retake the exam or lose his academic records, meaning he needs help from Renier, Henk’s eccentric father (James Borthwick) and Renier’s friends.