Skin

Directed by Anthony Fabian

(PG-13)

**

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Afrikaners try to prove their daughter is white in 1960s South Africa.

Skin is an “ambitious, if sometimes uneven,” film that has “its eye always on the larger issues of race,” said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. In this dramatic retelling of a true-life tale about growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, Sophie Okonedo plays Sandra Laing, the daughter of white Afrikaners. Born with dark skin, she’s first classified as white, then later reclassified as “colored.” Tracing the family’s battle against the country’s rigid racial laws, director Anthony Fabian deals with “attitudes and government edicts, medical tests and court suits, confusion and heartbreak,” but all in workman-like fashion. The story is just “too rich” for a first-time filmmaker such as Fabian, said Kevin Lee in Time Out New York. He turns what could have been a complex portrait of a family divided by race into “colorless, by-the-numbers apartheid cinema.” While Fabian’s film is “sincere and well-meaning,” he tries too hard to wring tears from us, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Laing’s life is a “tragedy, not a melodrama, and it doesn’t need to be goosed.”