The Age of Commercialism

good back-story, and good acting

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

whilst this movie is not to difficult to sit through for good cinematography and pleasing locations and some useful plot movements ultimately the character resolution/ development which makes a story of this type work is missing. at sff before screening the director assured us the story was complex. cant say id agree it is is fairly linear with most things in the beginning middle end type of script.do i care about these people?not much. do they reveal new insights for me ?no. tiny is very well directed acted and shot, the male lead sadly is not. as the script doesn't help his case i cant really assess him. if anything the movie reinforces a stereotype of south Africa which again doesn't add much to our existing knowledge or perception.

-The Endless River is a 2015 South African drama film directed by Oliver Hermanus. It was screened in the main competition section of the 72nd Venice International Film Festival. It is the first South African film to be nominated for the Golden Lion. It was also shown in the Contemporary World Cinema section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.-It is a film that brings a picture of South Africa in terms of filming shows some quiet moments what feels as unsettling and I also find that the overall movie story is as not complete.-Good acting

The lives of a trio of damaged characters from a small town intersect in the pouring rain, the enthralling pulse of a night club, ocean swells, resplendent beaches and ancient yellow-wood forests. Love blooms even as a woman cries alone and beneath the street lights in the middle of the night, terrible crimes are committed and coffins are lowered into the ground. Such scenes of pain and joy flicker like flames in the hearts of each character as they struggle to find answers to crucial questions like; who and why?! Some questions do not have answers and reveal truths that cut to the bone. This film is deftly crafted and finely done. It is firing on all cylinders. All in the filmmaker's bag of tricks – cinematography of beautiful and exotic landscapes as well as people, distant and diverse voices that need to be heard, creative camera angles that add to the mystery and suspense of the story and do not detract from it, fantastic pacing wherein scenes seamlessly blend into each other, music that makes you want to track down the singers and melt into their caravan, balanced, truthful and real portrayals of characters and themes, no pulled punches, acting that makes it seem you stumbled into the lives of these characters as you wandered around South Africa, intriguing themes and characters, organization and directing that keep your eyes glued to the screen and oblivious to all distractions be they what they may, a well-told story from beginning to end, and other support – is accomplished like fine art and without any of its pretensions. The only thing wanting here is sophistication and fame that may do as much to cheapen the film as help it. Seen at the 2016 Miami International Film Festival.

I don't know if officials in the South African Department of Trade and Industry vetted the script of 'The Endless River' before agreeing to part-finance it; if they did, they can't be terribly concerned about their country's reputation, as the film opens with a woman being gang-raped and (together with her two young sons) shot dead by masked intruders in her own home. And unless my eyes aren't as sharp as I thought, when police arrest some men for the crime, they've actually got it wrong - they've arrested black men, and the body parts revealed during the rape are white!The woman is the wife of Gilles, a French ex-pat and recent arrival to small-town South Africa. Fortunately for this bereaved husband and father, he's got South Africa's most unbelievably irresponsible police detective on his side, for when the latter decides, on scant if any evidence, that a newly-released jailbird must be responsible for the crime, he provides Gilles with a photograph of the suspect. Soon enough, the suspect turns up dead. Gilles offers his condolences to the dead man's widow, Tiny, whom he knows from her job in a café he frequents. Soon the pair, united in grief, take off together on a road trip - but what will happen when Tiny discovers that Gilles knew her husband was a suspect in his family's murders?As Gilles, Nicolas Duvauchelle sounds impossibly sexy when speaking English - as, of course, do all French people. But there are times - especially during particularly emotional scenes - when he is too obviously Acting with a capital A. But Crystal-Donna Roberts is very believable as Tiny, nicely portraying the creeping disappointment when her jailbird husband seems to be reverting to his old ways, the grief when he is killed, and the joy of potential new love with Gilles (and every man who watches the film will in turn fall in love with her).Despite the obvious plot holes and some dangling plot threads, the film is interesting and it's one I'll probably watch again.