Word: rictuses
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...Schindler was never paid," one character notes. "She's living in poverty in Argentina." Ah, that Godard: he is always serious, always impish. He lives up to his own maxim: "Every thought should show the debris of a smile." Elogie shows that smile as Godard's own: the rictus of the wise old ghost of modernist cinema...
...strips the Bruce Wayne legend down to its chassis, dumping Robin and the goony rogues' gallery. This is a face-off between two men in weird masks: one in a leathery black item out of a dominatrix's pleasure chest, the other with a grin frozen into a rictus. One man obsessed with good, the other enthralled by evil: Batman (Michael Keaton) and the Joker (Jack Nicholson...
Hard for an actor to cop an Oscar -- or earn a sheaf of rave reviews -- when an audience's first and lasting response to his appearance is "Ooooh, isn't he cute?" His face is a posh prison, his smile a winsome rictus. Because everyone wants to mother him, or date him, or have him for a baby-sitter, nobody will let him grow up. He must remain harmless, asexual, a teen-dream Dorian Gray doll or risk losing the devotion of his millions of chaperones...
...genre with a clip from an old movie or a spitballing, pratfalling sight gag. His loopy werewolf melodrama, The Howling (1981), and his profligately imaginative episode of last year's Twilight Zone: The Movie are both energized by this sly schizophrenia. In Twilight Zone, the smile becomes a rictus as a child forces adults to live inside a cartoon world of jack-in-the-box monsters and junk food. In a sense, then, Gremlins is Dante's breakthrough film. It delivers both gore and guffaws, and, more impressively, blends the two moods to create this season...
...File, just published to a chorus of raves, scrupulously documents Julius Rosenberg's involvement with a Soviet spy ring; Ethel was probably a knowledgeable but passive member of the cabal. Since the authors' preliminary findings were published in 1979, Daniel's angry grimace looks like a rictus of brazen naivete...