Silence took Martin Scorsese nearly 30 years to make – and it shows

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The period drama set in feudal Japan is an epic of divine proportion, tackling grand questions of faith and colonisation with remarkable fervour Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email The year is 1640. Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) arrives in Japan with fellow Jesuit missionary Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) to search for their missing mentor, Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson). There, Rodrigues witnesses how “Kirishitans” – historical Japanese Catholics – must practise their faith in secret because their religion is heresy in Edo-period Japan. As he observes how the Japanese belief differs from his teachings, Rodrigues begins to question his faith. Despite praying ceaselessly, Rodrigues does not hear back from God. Silence, one of Martin Scorsese’s passion projects, was released in 2016 after nearly three decades in development. Scorsese’s dedication mirrors the spiritual journey of his protagonist. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SV6T...
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A Dry White Season review – Marlon Brando heads starry cast in ground-breaking apartheid drama

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This first Hollywood studio feature with a black female director is a compelling account of a South African who turns against the ruling caste

In the late 80s, there were a number of films about apartheid South Africa that somehow made the black experience dramatically subordinate to white liberal activism. Chris Menges’s A World Apart from 1988 had Barbara Hershey as the white campaigner based on anti-apartheid activist Ruth First; the year before that, Richard Attenborough’s excruciatingly well-intentioned Cry Freedom was supposedly about the friendship between white journalist Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) and Steve Biko (Denzel Washington), but contrived to put Woods at the centre of the action, all but forgetting about Biko. Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season from 1989, now released on Blu-ray, looks on the face of it to be the same sort of thing. And yet this movie is much tougher and shrewder on what it would actually mean for white people in apartheid South Africa to side against their own caste.

Donald Sutherland plays well-regarded white schoolmaster and former rugby star Ben Du Toit, who lives comfortably and is entirely content with the racist world of South Africa; he is deeply troubled, however, when his black gardener Gordon (Winston Ntshona) tells him his son has been beaten and then taken away by police – and decent, thoughtful Du Toit is radicalised by what he finds out. Janet Suzman plays his thin-lipped wife who disapproves of her husband’s unaccountable and dangerous soft-heartedness. German star Jürgen Prochnow plays the chilling secret policeman Captain Stolz, while John Kani plays lawyer Julius, and Marlon Brando almost walks off with the whole movie as progressive barrister Ian McKenzie who is hired by Du Toit to challenge the brutal regime in court. This is a role showcasing Brando’s remarkably effective, quasi-Shakespearean English accent, which snaps his entire performance into shape.

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