Marlon Brando's fifteen-minute portrait of a Human Rights lawyer at work on a hopeless murder case in South Africa is a welcome dose of caginess in an otherwise artlessly direct protest film, with its burning gaze hardly wavering an inch from The Problem. (The lawyer's fondness for flowers in spite of his allergy to them is one such inch.) And there is an awful lot of artless directness to endure on either side of Brando's quarter-hour, beginning straightaway with an idyllic calendar shot of a black boy and white boy playing soccer in harmony and golden sunlight. A movie concerned to do good without concern to be good, it has Eisenstein's simple-mindedness without any of his sophisticated technique, his cinematic instincts. The director, Euzhan Palcy, had previously had only the overrated Sugar Cane Alley in her portfolio. And her lack of professional polish, less of a drawback in the UNESCO climate of her first film, becomes painfully apparent when she's thrust into the company of Donald Sutherland, Jurgen Prochnow, Susan Sarandon, et al., and into the driver's seat of a mechanical suspense contraption. She cannot get the damn thing to "go." Everybody has to get out and push. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd