Word: reptilian
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...insipid but reptilian nephew, Oscar's son Leo (Dennis Christopher), raids the bank vault and thwarts his uncle. As Horace cradles the all but empty bank box, Regina goads him into a heart spasm and icily denies him the lifesaving pills that are just beyond his reach. After a few more calculated turns of Lillian Hellman's plot screws, Regina proves to be more fearsome than any little...
...camera tricks on the audience without ever cheating. The screenplay takes Madison's point of view, the camera takes the alligator's, and for most of the film they fight each other to a crafty standoff. Aided by Teague's expert direction, Sayles has created a reptilian specter for urban paranoia-alligator as allegory. The beast may not be plausible, but the fear it engenders is. And if the movie doesn't by itself justify claims for Sayles as Hollywood's Renaissance man, it at least suggests that he can help bring genre movies...
...curiosity of evolution, every human skull harbors a prehistoric vestige: a reptilian brain...
...face hardening now into some sort of death mask. Nicholson doesn't try to play Chambers as the twenty-three year old punk Cain envisioned. Instead he slouches around like a bored satyr. He seems to revel in his decay, in his unnerving ability to play an utterly reptilian Don Juan...
...rambling soon becomes coherent as he explains his theory of man's three brains: the "reptilian" brain which programs man for his needs for food, shelter, and copulation and the general survival instinct; the "affective" brain which contains the memory and responds appropriately to pleasure and pain, reward and punishment; and the "associative" brain which connects events from the past and enables us to use language. Laborit doesn't really like this third brain, also known as the cerebral cortex, because it allows humans to be programmed by society; it gives us the power to create "excuses, reasons, and alibis...