Word: benisons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...