Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

mcollins-78667 Having never heard of these film I was surprised how good it was. Casting was wonderful and the tone, dialogue and costumes very authentic.Enjoyable. Have recommended it to friends and would easily watch it again.Perhaps it would appeal mostly to people who were the same age at that time, which I am. It was quite nostalgic.Gabriel Byrnes and Nicholas Hoult were perfectly cast.

nycritic Richard E. Grant's life must have been spectacularly insular, because there are hardly any moments when a country's native African population get any valuable screen time. Hell, GONE WITH THE WIND had three supporting characters, all black, sharing equal screen time with the film's white stars (even if this sentence sounds wildly inappropriate, there is really no other way to say it, and anyway, I am right.). In more than one instance, they also practically walked off with the scene they were in, and Butterfly McQueen's line "I ain't no nuthin' 'about birthin' babies!!" has gone into cinema history as one of the most popular quotes of the movie alongside "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." I could even go into my own life living it in Dominican Republic, a country with a seventy-five percent mulatto population. While I went to an American-Canadian school, my life wasn't that insulated to the political unrest that was the order of the day. If I would have to ever write anything about life in the Dominican Republic from 1979 - 1996 I would and could not exclude an entire population in lieu of creating a pretty soap opera about familial divorce... which is exactly what WAH-WAH turns out to be for its entire run. Not that this is a bad thing, but aside from this glaring discrepancy, there isn't much else going for a story that tries to have depth, tries to focus on the fall of an empire, and succeeds in doing neither.

davidmsim I grew up in Swaziland five years after the period in which this film was set. Although I was a white boy growing up in Africa, and went to the same school as Richard E Grant, my experience was nothing at all like this film. Clearly, independence from Great Britain had a hugely positive impact on the country. The only affecting scenes are those showing the beautiful landscape and the climactic independence celebrations. And I got a small thrill out of recognising locations from my youth: the (presumably recreated) Cinelux cinema and the hot pool (commonly known as the cuddle puddle). All the characters in this film are loathsome. Are we really supposed to care about these pith-helmeted dinosaurs of the colonial period? Luvvies prancing around under the African sun? This is how Richard E Grant decides to pay tribute to the country he supposedly loves? This really is, as one of the characters remarks, all too hoity-toity and a load of old Wah- Wah.

rjackson7 This is the kind of movie I desperately hope for when I go to the cinema: A great story with great acting - everything else is window dressing. The British withdrawal from Swaziland forms a quite distant backdrop for this family melodrama. Absolute powerhouse performances from Gabriel Byrne (as an alcoholic divorcée) and Emily Watson (as an out of place American) join a watershed performance form the young Nicholas Hoult (from About a Boy), whose transformation from young boy to young man was one of the most compelling and convincing I have ever seen. The plot moves very rapidly through an endless cycle of unhappiness, family breakdown, drunkenness - and yet somehow, in the midst of this relentless pace, we feel for every character, and experience every emotion.This directorial debut goes so many places - staging a musical, many puppet shows, exploring the clash of three cultures, the ugly face of racism, a boy's coming of age - and yet the central narrative of a boy trying to find grounding in the midst of a tumultuous family life is brilliantly conceived, and always at the forefront. The auburn palette of the film is accentuated by over-exposed shots and intimate camera angles; this movie brings a small, insular circle of families to life, and while it makes no pretension to explore African culture (this itself is pointed, since the Brits were so racist), it explores the crisis of the modern family as well as cinema can possibly hope to.The tragic, show stopping revelation at the end concerning Byrne's character demands the whole movie be re-watched; it is an epiphany for Hoult, and it just may leave you thinking for a long time to come: What is the essence of a family? If love isn't enough, what is? There is a scene in the middle of the film where Hoult is transposed with Malclom McDowell's character from A Clockwork Orange. By the end of the movie I had my mind made up: Yes, Wah Wah can indeed stand proudly alongside the great films of cinema history, it's just that good.