Club Balafon

It's urban Africa: a world of French cars, Lebanese hardware stores, and American movies, not jungle and savannah-and of working-class Africans, not rich white men on safari. It's an off-beat, violent, darkly comic window onto post-colonial Africa and the children of expatriates on a single day in a West African city in the 1970s. Under its Elmore Leonard caper-gone-wrong thriller surface it's an examination, closer to V. S. Naipaul or Athol Fugard, of the changing and unchanging tragicomic rule