Mapantsula

critic Reviews

, 100% Fresh Tomatometer Score
  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Janet MaslinNew York Times
    Mr. Mogotlane makes Panic much more than a symbol, treating him as a raffish, amusingly overconfident figure at first and a visibly shaken man as the film progresses, until at last he utters the single syllable that encapsulates the film's final point.
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Michael WilmingtonLos Angeles Times
    The film starts as a racy gangster melodrama with an unusually pungent low-life city background, then builds inexorably to a moral reckoning, a ferocious, unforgettable denouement.
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Tony RaynsTime Out
    The result has much the same energy that Lino Brocka brings to his Filipino slum melodramas, and it gets far closer to the sights, sounds, smells and rhythms of Soweto life than an entire Attenborough of white liberal movies.
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Bradley GibsonFilm Threat
    Mapantsula came out in a world with a different set of challenges than we face in 2024, and we are changed people from those who lived in 1988. The contrast is enlightening and interesting.
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    David ParkinsonRadio Times
    Thomas Mogotlane excels as Panic, the eminently resistible thief who reveals unsuspected levels of determination and dignity as he endures the same sadistic brutality as the militant activists with whom he shares a cell.
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Film4 StaffFilm4
    An intelligent and passionate voice from South Africa, from a period when its government was doing all in its power to deny such things.
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