Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema (15)

Lucky Kunene, anti-hero of this tale of post-apartheid opportunism, announces at the outset that his two icons are Karl Marx and Al Capone.

Accordingly, "property" and "theft" will become the axes of his criminal career, beginning in the Soweto slums where, unable to afford a place at university, Lucky graduates from carjacking to racketeering and extortion. Ralph Ziman's drama is fuzzily plotted and uncertainly acted, but he conveys the menace of Johannesburg's mean streets pretty convincingly, a place of free enterprise going from mad to worse. Hard to decide upon the film's view of gangsterism, though its lenient coda is certainly provocative.