Word: alec
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...exchanges between Equus 'antagonists are scarcely more exciting. Firth's performance, seemingly so natural in a theater, looks artificial in closeup. Burton provides a curiously bland Dysart who lacks the high-pitched emotional constipation that both Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen brought to stage productions. Lumet tries to save the day by flooding Burton's speeches with melodramatic lighting and music, but no such makeshift remedy can cure Equus of its congenital limp. - Frank Rich
...wave had a tidal force. Le Carré's first books proclaimed a new talent. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold became part of the language. Its antihero, Alec Leamas, was the personification of that burnt-out case, that necessary evil, the cold war spy. Tinker, Tailor earned more money than any other espionage novel, and The Honourable Schoolboy is about to smash its record. The novel, now in third printing before publication, is the October main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club; paperback rights have been purchased by Bantam Books for $1 million. The only arena...
...Country is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma-inside cellophane. The setting is a seedy, book-infested cottage in the woods. Hilary (Alec Guinness) and his wife Bron (Rachel Kempson) potter around, she arranging flowers and he devising puzzles...
...would have been easy for Cole to fall into the role of dilettante, composing patter songs to amuse his intimates. Instead, as Alec Wilder observes in his classic treatise, American Popular Song, "the body of [Porter's] work shows clearly that he constantly sought to maintain a high level, not of social frippery, but of professional craftsmanship." Cole worked as hard as he played. Each morning he would sit down at the piano for three hours. When he went on a cruise he took-along with his tailored dinner jackets and crates of his favorite champagne-a piano organ...
Certainly the contours and resolution of the plot proved to be one of the most irresistible appeals of the film. No ambivalent finale lies in store for the moviegoer in search of escapism; aside from the necessary sacrifice of a leading hero (Alec Guinnes' venerable elder, Ben Kenobi), the spacemen in white hats (or helmets) prevail in the end. A thoroughly unnpretentious narrative, the story succeeds in asassuring its audience that all modern movie need not be full of existentialist greys to attract reasonably discerning cineastes...