Word: deftly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Festival and the first to sell here this year, unfolds like a noir thriller about the director's notorious 1977 statutory rape case. But the shadowy villain in this film isn't Polanski - it's the judge who presided over his case, Laurence Rittenband. Through dozens of interviews and deft use of archival footage, director Marina Zenovich untangles the dense web of legal issues that surround the Chinatown director's sensational story and exile to France...
...emotional territory he has not this fully explored in his previous reflections on capital crimes. Which is not to say that Cassandra's Dream is quite the breakthrough film I think it might have been. It is a talkative film, rather earnest in its tonalities, not at all a deft, witty or well-paced. On the other hand, it is, for Allen, a comparatively rare excursion into lower-class life - the setting is London, as it has been in his two previous films - and its portrayal of the contortions upward striving can impose on people eager to move...
...Nichols moves this along with the easy assurance of someone who's being doing it, and doing it well, for ages - The Graduate was released 40 years ago today - yet hasn't lost his stroke or his speed. Those deft directorial touches, and the intelligence the movie both exudes and assumes from its audience, put Charlie Wilson's War up there with Hollywood's grand old comedies: the Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder movies about slick schemers and their slicker women. The Nichols-Sorkin film is so much fun, you will not only forget all of Hollywood's serioso...
...every note as persuasive as his words and gestures. Sporting an Elsa-Lanchester-as-the-Bride-of-Frankenstein streak of white in his full dark hair, Sweeney is, in a way, the monster created by the Judge's turpitude. Benjamin is effectively dead; Sweeney is his remorseless spirit, the deft hand of fate wielding a razor - shouting, "At last my arm is complete again!" - against the necks of those who deserve to die. And, once he gets in the habit...
...that the Rotarians who turned up for Romney seem to mind. They're the types who listen when E.F. Hutton talks. They appreciate Romney's businesslike approach, even his deft way with a slide. "I thought he did a good job with the PowerPoint," Sue Pease, president-elect of the Manchester Rotary Club, said afterwards. Ken Perks, a prosecutor in Hillsborough, reviewed the performance with a sentence that could be cut from a Romney endorsement: "I think we need the kind of analysis that is used in business more than in politics...