A Dry White Season

A thumpingly didactic script, but Palcy has crafted a watchable - if not particularly important, given its competition - one. Read full review

Palcy, in what amounts to the casting coup of the year, enlisted the reclusive Brando to make his brief but memorable cameo appearance--his first film role since 1980--for union scale. His performance alone is worth the price of admission to this earnest, somewhat predictable, but moving and significant film. Read full review

Like its predecessors, A Dry White Season is too reserved to effectively depict the hell of South Africa. Its most powerful moments occur in the courtroom, in jail cells and morgues filled with dead black children when its starched white protagonist is safely off-screen. [06 Oct 1989, p.6]

Sutherland's not particularly strong in his role of the man who knew too little -- he's handicapped by obvious dialogue like "I was so naive." Read full review

A tract, a dry rerun of Cry Freedom, with none of that film's visual sweep (whatever else its faults) and with nothing new to tell us. It's filled with obvious, earnest performances--Marlon Brando's ironic and subtle one is the only exception--and unresonant writing. Read full review

Marlon Brando is airily light and masterly as the veteran anti-apartheid barrister who takes the case even though he knows that he can't get anywhere with the rigged court. He saves the picture for the (short) time onscreen. But the director, Euzhan Palcy, seems lost; her work is heavy-handed, and the script (by Colin Welland and the director, from a novel by Andre Brink) is earnest and didactic.

Like Cry Freedom, it's still whites debating racial injustice: fine for a book published in Afrikaans a decade ago, but a poor premise for a message movie. Read full review