Tsotsi (2005)
Directed by Gavin Hood
A young South African boy from the Johannesburg ghetto named Tsotsi, meaning Gangster, leaves home as a child to get away from his helpless parents. Now a teenage thug, Tsotsi finds a baby in the back seat of a car he's just stolen. He decides that it is his responsibility to care for the infant and in the process learns that maybe the criminal life isn’t the best way.
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What critics compared Tsotsi to
Like Fernando "City of God" Meirelles, Gavin Hood is definitely a filmmaker to keep a close eye on.
What does it say that this South African export won the 2006 Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film when the similar but more shattering City of God didn't even place back in 2003?
Director Gavin Hood keeps the movie moving at a breezy, unsentimental clip with a fast-paced, gritty style similar to City Of God, while energetic Kwaito music blasts throughout the picture.
A widescreen wallow in socially enforced slum nihilism brought to you by Miramax, Tsotsi could be pegged as City of God relocated to the Soweto shanties, but it eschews the ironic swagger and strobe-speed action of Fernando Meirelles's lurid jigsaw for a more conventional arc: the tough guy humanized by a cute kid.
Writer-director Gavin Hood easily could’ve stripped down Athol Fugard’s novel of personal responsibility and cultural empathy into a Hallmark-esque distillation of “City of God.” Instead, Hood retained this redemption song’s minor key — bullets, blood and beatings meant to illustrate a descent into dangerous living.
With its unflinching look at impoverished youth running rampant, brandishing handguns and attitude in equally volatile amounts, "Tsotsi" invites comparisons with the brilliant Brazilian film "City of God" ("Cidade de Deus").
Having cut his teeth on the socio-political themes of Tsotsi and Rendition , Gavin Hood knows that the real interest here lies not in the futuristic sci-fi spectacle (which is handled efficiently) but in the more contemporary issues of virtual violence, and jaw-jaw versus war-war.
With shades of Starship Troopers and a Disney Channel sense of cultural diversity, director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) flirts with fascism while avoiding some of the other traps Card created in his narrative.
I take no responsibility for future films, but this one, under the guidance of a marvelous adaptor-director, Gavin Hood of “Tsotsi” and “X Men Origins: Wolverine” fame, sings.
Directed by Gavin Hood, the South African who won a foreign-film Oscar for the tough-minded “Tsotsi” before going Hollywood, “Ender’s Game” is a blandly sanitized spectacle.
The director, Gavin Hood, has been responsible for two of the most annoyingly bad movies I've seen recently, the Oscar-winning Tsotsi (2005) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009).
This task went to writer / director Gavin Hood, whose dramatic teeth were cut on 2005’s Tsotsi and whose sci-fi teeth were cut on 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine .
Gavin Hood’s gripping, squirm-inducing Tsotsi showed us the lawless slums and criminal gangs of Johannesburg’s Soweto neighborhood, but Blomkamp’s equally hard-to-watch, hard-to-look-away film shows us more: enclaves of white privilege beset by corruption and nepotism; Nigerian crime lords who traffic in voodoo fetishism as well as weapons and other black-market goods; a world of xenophobia, oppression and malaise.