Word: benisons
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Most directors take conventional scenarios and lay on comedy or pathos with a trowel. Solondz (who also did Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling and Palindromes) creates worlds suppurating with unspeakable domestic horror and lends them the benison of tragicomic sympathy. Whatever domestic crimes the people close to you may have committed, in the end they're family and you have to try to understand them. This sense of connection, despite all, and the pitch-perfect playing of Solondz's large cast, makes Life During Wartime one of the year's best films, in whatever year it ultimately finds theatrical release...
Incarnating amiability with an undercoat of evil can be a benison to an actor. Unfortunately for them, Dogville's old pros (including Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Harriet Andersson, John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgaard, Patricia Clarkson and Blair Brown) have only attitudes, not characters, to play, and these are as flat as the lines on the floor. It's not a pretty sight: gifted actors with big ambitions and nothing purposeful to do. Only two things keep one's eyes on the screen: the spectacle of the gorgeous Kidman soldiering on as Grace's regality is defiled, and the suspicion that this...
...picture by any means. De Hooch was a master of spatial composition. In his pictures you are never entirely inside or wholly outside. His rooms aren't closed, artificially lit boxes but part of a continuity between the inner and outer worlds, revealing the truth of both under the benison of natural light. In this painting the rectangles of the brown room with its wide wallboards and alcove bed open backward into stages of increasing light. The window casts a bright lozenge of sun on the worn tiles of the floor beyond. The light slants, giving De Hooch an opportunity...
...debate culminates, it has come to focus primarily on a single dichotomy--"employer mandates"--which liberals vaunt as a benison to be distributed to heretofor hapless American workers, versus "individual mandates" which curmudgeonly conservatives offer as a rear-guard action to stave off the "potentially disastrous consequences" of the above mentioned liberal benison...
...neck cops on a country road, the bombing of her synagogue, a distant but moving exposure to the force of Martin Luther King Jr.'s oratory all have their effect on her. But mostly it is the simple presence of a good man that grants her age's greatest benison, expanding rather than shrinking her humanity...