I watched the new Harry Potter movie yesterday, and thought it was pretty good. I’m not sure it was good enough to justify its 78 score on Metacritic, but it’s competently executed, and the film-makers have largely succeeded in their efforts to create a darker Harry Potter that corresponds with the increasing maturity of the [...]

Steven Friedman critiques the public criticism of Peter de Villiers: The problem is not that people criticise De Villiers — or Percy Sonn or Norman Arendse or black lawyers and business people whose names come to mind: in a free society everyone can criticise everyone else. It is that they are reduced to buffoons, butts [...]

Peter Suderman has mixed feelings about the new Star Trek: [T]here are things to love in Abrams’s Star Trek, yet very little of the original series’ appeal remains. Rather than concern itself with politics, ethics, or social organization, Abrams’s Star Trek focuses on familiar quests for individual self-discovery. Like so many successful comic-book movies, it’s [...]

As someone who enjoyed the minimalistic, faux-documentary style of The Wrestler, this strikes me as weirdly appealing: Despite its meager production values, The Girlfriend Experience looks sleek and appealing; it takes place in the same copper-toned cocoon of poshness that envelops the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, as Grey’s character, $2,000-an-hour call girl Chelsea, flits in and [...]

David Smith on the similarities between South Africa and America: In both America and South Africa, race remains a significant factor in social inequality, crime patterns or trying to predict how people will vote. On the surface, South Africa is the country that apparently flicked a switch to install a black governing elite for its [...]