The Bang Bang Club

Not a ringing endorsement from film critic Jeanette Catsoulis in The New York Times for “The Bang Bang Club,” the new feature film based on the real-life adventures of four white South African photographers making their reputations recording the political violence of the early 1990s around Johannesburg:

Why … do we care not one bit when Pulitzers are won [by some of the protagonists] and bullets unsuccessfully dodged? The answer lies partly in [the director's] refusal to elucidate the racial politics [of South Africa] or engage with the world outside the film’s incoherently chaotic bubble. Elbowing into war zones his heroes snap harrowing photographs whose effect, if any, on the international conversation is never mentioned. Ethical conundrums are dangled without being addressed as we linger on the men’s emotional pain, assuaged by soft-focus swimming, drinking and making out. In this way a particularly ugly conflict is reduced to not much more than a stream of pretty pictures.

Damn.