Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HIGH HOPES. A dotty old woman fights to keep her home amid the crush of gentrification. Working with a cast that has helped improvise its roles, British director Mike Leigh creates a group portrait of characters who live, breathe and squawk their wayward humanity on the margins of Thatcher's England...
Temptation is the fourth of Havel's plays to be staged at the Public; a fifth, Slum Clearance, is scheduled later this year. Unfortunately, the Public's loyalty does not always result in illuminating productions. Temptation retells the Faust legend and evolves into a grimly believable portrait of life in a police state. This scientist who dabbles in black magic reaps only petty pleasures, while his demonic bargain leads him to mistrust friends, denounce colleagues, deny his beliefs and pledge to become a spy. Director Jiri Zizka, a Czech emigre, adds a mysterious high-tech gloss but stints on emotion...
...song cues; Pitchford's songs are standard technopop, except for a comic showstopper, called Life Ain't Worth Livin' (When You're Dead), that the suicidal teens of Heathers might take to heart. Otherwise, Sing is strictly Gold Diggers turned to brass. In the latest teenpix class portrait, it's a dropout...
...detail is brilliantly successful: Schama's tale is vivid, dramatic, thought-provoking. Yet such is the current academic vogue for bloodless and pseudoscientific historiography that the author repeatedly feels a need to apologize for what he somewhat disingenuously calls a "mischievously old-fashioned piece of storytelling." If Schama's portrait of the revolution is often surprising in its closeup details, however, it is no less so in coloring the background imagery of the French society being overturned...
...notions of official culture that are now held up to ridicule. Says Sergei Zalygin, editor in chief of Novy Mir: "Like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in the past century, our artists need to find a new style and a new way of thinking if they hope to create a psychological portrait of society today...