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38It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.
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70Ella Ramangwane gives a fine performance as the young Sandra.
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100This great film by Anthony Fabian tells this story through the eyes of a happy girl who grows into an outsider.
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75Inherently dramatic but needed a stronger director than Anthony Fabian, who overdoes understatement.
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A tragic, enraging, and uplifting tale.
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50Too many of the characters are either good or bad, and that loss of nuance is missed.
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60A little more variation in the script, though, might have yielded something truly great.
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50The direction is never more than conventional, with a tear-inducing finale better suited to a TV soap opera.
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63Skin is both exasperatingly choppy and exceptionally moving.
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75Director Anthony Fabian lets the story sell itself, and it does so partly on the strength of the lead performance by Sophie Okonedo.
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70The fact that it's actually based on a true story adds an extra layer of poignancy, heightened further by another superb Sophie Okonedo performance.
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50Alas, Mr. Fabian, directing his first feature-length fiction film, uses a club whenever a feather would do. He also mishandles the actors, in particular Mr. Neill and Ms. Okonedo, both of whom have been incomparably better elsewhere.
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The story is too rich in incident for Fabian, whose episodic TV-movie approach speeds through Laing’s lifetime of abuse.
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70One of the more bizarre illustrations of racial injustice under apartheid is dramatized in Skin.
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This workmanlike, but enormously moving, movie makes the case that apartheid really does control her life, even her decision to rebel and get involved with a black man.
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75If you didn't know that it was based on a true story, Skin would be a little hard to believe.