308 Best Original Movies to Watch (Page 21)

In a world when women are sexualized and objectified, but also judged and excluded under the guise of religious righteousness, Adire seeks a middle ground. It dares to explore how women’s beauty can be a force for good, rather than a source of shame, even within the religion that traditionally excludes women from its leadership. That being said, Adire focuses on this to the detriment of all other ideas loosely stitched to the narrative, such as the cultural heritage in using the adire fabric for modern lingerie, sex and desire as an impetus for art, and the need for intimacy, not just sex, in relationships. Adire has the ideas, but not the execution, especially when it loses its way in the second half of the film.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Femi Branch, Funlola Aofiyebi, Kehinde Bankole, Mike Afolarin, Yvonne Jegede

Director: Adeoluwa Owu

You can tell that Blaze director Del Kathryn Barton is an award-winning visual artist first and foremost. The images that she puts together in this film are frequently stunning—making use of the camera in fascinating, freeing ways, and with lots of practical and computer-generated/animated effects that paint her young protagonist Blaze's world in glitter and feathers and lush colors. The imaginary dragon, which acts as a shorthand to symbolize Blaze's complex psychological response to her trauma, is a wonderfully tactile life-size puppet that lead actress Julia Savage responds to in an entirely convincing way.

But you can also tell that this is Barton's debut feature. Ultimately her visuals don't do enough to shake off or give meaning to the graphic scene of rape and murder that occurs at the beginning of the film. And the way she structures the movie threatens to make it feel like a series of music videos or video art pieces. Despite its originality and the level of commitment displayed by both Savage and Simon Baker, Blaze has difficulty communicating a coherent message about trauma—the film strung together by heavy-handed scenes that spell out various ideas and lead to the most obvious conclusions.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Fantasy

Actor: Bernie Van Tiel, Heather Mitchell, John Waters, Josh Lawson, Julia Savage, Morgan Davies, Neal Horton, Rebecca Massey, Remy Hii, Simon Baker, Stephen James King, Will McDonald, Yael Stone

Director: Del Kathryn Barton

For some people, grief isn’t easy when a parent dies, especially if that parent is someone you wish you would never become. Grief can stir up a mix of uncomfortable emotions, like shame, anger, and guilt, and it can be very confusing to explain what’s happening to people who aren’t experiencing the same. There’s plenty of that here in South African drama Prime, with Marius losing his racist father, but the way the film depicts this grief is quite hard to follow because of the way it handles its other genres. The human horror of becoming someone you’ve hated is muddled with the randomly arranged sequences, sluggish pace, and mumbled dialogue, which is a shame, because the ideas and images could have made a better movie.

Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller

Actor: Gérard Rudolf, Jasmine Hazi, Michael Lawrence Potter, Nomsa Twala, Richard Gau, Sharon Spiegel Wagner, Sizo Mahlangu

Director: Thabiso Christopher