Word: portraits
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...England, a young man who dies violently and his mysterious death-magnet of a girlfriend. It can even be seen as an upscale soap opera, in which a decent spinster finally stumbles into a mature, equitable relationship with the local policeman. But Hare is after much more: the composite portrait of middle-class England, a community in which an affable exterior hides sexual crimes behind the privet hedge. The casting coup of Redgrave mère et fille pays handsome dividends: Vanessa, ever luminous, her face a substructure of sinew and stress waiting to implode, and Joely, with much...
...circumstances, and conventional detection by kindly Chief Inspector Reg Wexford and his younger deputy Mike Burden. The plot involves bigamy and incest and probes the links between feminism and lesbianism. As is almost always true in a Rendell narrative, things are considerably simpler than they at first seem. Her portrait of the killer is a classic Christie-style evocation of narcissistic...
South Africa's mining magnates and millionaires have been meeting in the imposing Rand Club in downtown Johannesburg for more than a century. The neo-Baroque building is filled with paintings of such celebrated past members as British colonizer Cecil Rhodes and the ubiquitous portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. Built on the wealth of the largest goldfield in the world and the sweat of black labor, the club's membership was, until a few years ago, closed to South Africa's blacks. But these days, there's a new breed of tycoon walking the club's wood-paneled corridors...
...wonder whether Johnson’s portrait is too simplistic. He seems to be seduced by the one-dimensional David-and-Goliath characterization of change in China. But it is not clear that the Communist Party is so uniformly bad. Despite their record of corruption, human rights violations, and excess bureaucracy, the Communists have also doubled life expectancy, educated more people than ever before, and dramatically raised living standards. My family in China, like countless others, can now expect what has heretofore been unthinkable in Chinese history: a life of economic prosperity, social stability, and modern technology?...
...only moments that achieve any sort of humanity in this movie are those that are probably closer to autobiography than fiction. David Duchovny actually did grow up in Greenwich Village in the 1970s and this fact shines through his otherwise lackluster writing. The portrait he paints of that time and place, as seen through a teenage boy’s eyes, is actually quite convincing...