Reviews‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ review: Heavy-handed, but Johnny Depp sure is scaryPosted on August 6, 2020 There are a handful of novels said to be fundamentally unfilmable, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “Lolita” and “Dune” among them. Many of them have, of course, been made into films anyway. I’d nominate “Waiting for the Barbarians” for that list after seeing Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel, even with the substantial talents of Oscar winner Mark Rylance in the lead role and Coetzee himself, a Nobel laureate, as screenplay author.
