From the first scenes of Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow demonstrates why she is such a formidable film-maker, as adept with human emotion as with visceral, pulse-quickening action.

Daughter was pressured into losing her virginity, writes Sharon Churcher

Fresh from an incredibly successful 2012, achieving success with their self-titled debut EP, Gangs of Ballet have just been nominated in two categories at the MK Awards.

Van Coke Kartel lead with four MK nominations, writes Therese Owen

A dreary, dismally unfunny excuse for a romantic comedy, Playing for Keeps is an undistinguished, impact-free watch-checker that will soon be vaguely distracting transatlantic travellers who forgot to carry on their iPads. As featureless and bland as the suburban Louisiana locations standing in for Northern Virginia, this is a movie that adamantly refuses to live up to its title, aiming instead to lure in a few unsuspecting fans of stars Gerard Butler and Jessica Biel, do its damage and – with any luck – disappear quickly from theatres with virtually no one knowing it ever existed.

There’s praise and criticism for Jodie Foster’s ‘coming out’, writes Jocelyn Noveck

There’s something perversely appropriate about director Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained being released in the same year as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln – one of which takes brazen creative liberties with history, one that’s far more prudent in its licence-taking, but both of which in their own way reanimate Civil War-era America in exhilarating ways.

A gallery of stellar performers wages a Sisyphean battle against musical diarrhoea and a laboriously repetitive visual approach in the big-screen version of the stage sensation Les Misérables.

Looper is a clever, entertaining science-fiction thriller that neatly blurs the line between suicide and murder.

If you plan to take the kids to Gold Reef City these holidays – and last Saturday it seemed that all of Joburg was already there – don’t miss the circus.