#OnTheBigScreen: 'Knuckle City', 'The Invisible Man' and 'The Informer'

Knuckle City

A gritty, raw and riveting exploration of the psychology of a boxer from the Eastern Cape that dissects notions of inherited toxic masculinity and the underbelly of the fighting world.

A slice of street life in South Africa’s Mdantsane township, known as the boxing mecca of South Africa, Knuckle City follows the journey of Dudu Nyakama (Bongile Mantsai), a down-and-out ageing boxer as he struggles to attain the one fight that he believes will uplift his fractured family. Contending that the underbelly of the boxing world is rife with criminality, Dudu unwittingly enlists the help of his reckless but resourceful, gangster brother who’s coming out of jail. Haunted by the ghost of their father, Dudu soon finds that the fight at home is far more challenging than any opponent he can face in the ring.

Knuckle City is writer-director Jahmil XT Qubeka’s much-anticipated fourth feature film.

“Growing up in Mdantsane in the ‘80s and ‘90s was an experience that has shaped the entirety of my life,” says Qubeka. “The energy of the landscape, and the visceral fight for survival that is palpable on the streets, has inspired in me a deep yearning to chronicle the lives of its inhabitants through cinema.”

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The Invisible Man

What you can’t see can hurt you.

Emmy Award-winner Elisabeth Moss (Us, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale) stars in a terrifying modern tale of obsession inspired by Universal’s classic Monster character. Trapped in a violent, controlling relationship with a wealthy and brilliant scientist, Cecilia Kass (Moss) escapes in the dead of night and disappears into hiding, aided by her sister, their childhood friend and his teenage daughter. But when Cecilia’s abusive ex, Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House), commits suicide and leaves her a generous portion of his vast fortune, Cecilia suspects his death was a hoax. As a series of eerie coincidences turn lethal, threatening the lives of those she loves, Cecilia’s sanity begins to unravel as she desperately tries to prove that she is being hunted by someone nobody can see.

For writer/director Leigh Whannell, the character of HG Wells’s Invisible Man has been in the back of his mind since he was a boy skipping school to watch Universal’s Classic Monsters on television.

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The Call of The Wild

Based on Jack London’s legendary adventure and the 1935 film adaptation, The Call Of The Wild is a cinematic experience of a lifetime, a hybrid of live-action and animated filmmaking employing cutting edge visual effects and animation technology

It vividly brings to the screen the story of Buck, a big-hearted dog whose blissful domestic life is turned upside down when he is suddenly uprooted from his California home and transplanted to the exotic wilds of the Canadian Yukon during the Gold Rush of the 1890s. As the newest rookie on a mail delivery dog sled team – and later its leader – Buck has embarked on an extraordinary coming-of-age journey that will lead him to ultimately discover his true place in the world and become his own master.

Chris Sanders makes his live-action directorial debut from a screenplay crafted by Michael Green.

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The Informer

Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman), a reformed criminal and former special operations soldier, is working undercover for crooked FBI handlers to infiltrate the Polish mob’s drug trade in New York. In a final step toward freedom, Koslow must return to the one place he’s fought so hard to leave, Bale Hill Prison, where his mission becomes a race against time when a drug deal goes wrong and threatens to identify him as a mole.

Based on Tre Sekunder (Three Seconds), a Swedish novel by Roslund and Hellström, the crime writing team of journalist Anders Roslund and the late Börge Hellström, the screenplay was crafted by Italian actor-writer-director Andrea Di Stefano, from a screenplay by Matt Cook and Rowan Joffe.

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