Word: chiaroscuro
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...prancing giddily in some absurdly verdant corner of the English countryside. This is the Virgin Queen before she was a virgin (to quote the preeminent Elizabethan scholar Groucho Marx)--and if this preposterous rapture is the best the film can do, one can't help but long for more chiaroscuro conspiracies and bloody assassinations...
...captive of powerful groups with dark designs--some Wall Street sharpies and a coven of Hasidic Cabalists. This no-budget ($60,000) New York City thriller offers a warning applicable to humans as well as computers: knowledge is a virus. But the real triumph of [Pi] is its sensuous chiaroscuro imagery (cream swirling in coffee, blood dripping from a man's jacket, Max's raccoon eyes after a sleepless night). Aronofsky, who has parlayed this movie's Sundance success into two Hollywood deals, is that rare indie filmmaker who doesn't want to make hip romantic sitcoms...
...CONFIDENTIAL Everybody knows the rudiments of the classic film-noir manner: chiaroscuro lighting, labyrinthine plots, dialogue written in battery acid. Working up imitations of it has become one of modern Hollywood's minor vices. But--a point usually missed--the style was never an end in itself. At its best it conveyed an idea about how the rottenness of big cities touches everyone, high and low, respectable and raffish. Director Curtis Hanson, working off James Ellroy's bitterly brewed novel about corrupt 1950s cops, gets that wonderfully right in a smart, complex film that exuberantly mixes comic excess, melodramatic pressure...
...directors improvised as well. In early talkies the camera could hardly move, but Dudley Murphy's Black and Tan Fantasy (1929) daringly depicted the Duke Ellington composition in bold chiaroscuro, then used woozy prismatic images to show that a star dancer (the gorgeous Fredi Washington) is feeling ill before she goes on for a fatal final number. Fred Waller directed Ellington's Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1934) with artful lighting of black laborers, and moody shadows caressing the young Billie Holiday. Aubrey Scotto set most of A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932) in a cleaning...
...visitor a coup de theatre, and it does. After a low entranceway the space soars, thanks to a circular well that rises clear through the building and finishes in the slanting oculus 130 ft. above. It transmits enough light down through the building for Botta to use a dramatic chiaroscuro of materials without sinking the interior in gloom-a striped floor of black and gray granite, for example...