Word: shrewd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...winter street outside the Heritage Club, dedicated to liberty and justice for all, but open only to Wasp males of elevated social and financial status, Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) is working his latest scam. Black, and a street hustler not quite as shrewd as he thinks he is, Billy Ray is dressed in rags and crouched on a rolling platform. He is pretending to be a blind and legless Viet Nam veteran, begging and trying to make it with a foxy passer-by ("Ain't you never heard of Porgy and Bess...
Author Spoto is too shrewd to imagine, however, that an artist is the sum of his quirks. Hitchcock's brilliance was entangled with his personal grotesqueries, but it was real brilliance. He grew up with the film industry, and at his best gave movies a dazzling visual impudence: the single flash of color in the black-and-white Spellbound, as the pistol of the suicidal villain flares red; the wicked eroticism of Janet Leigh's shower scene in Psycho, a film that, as Spoto points out, takes pains to make the viewer queasily aware of being a voyeur...
...Willie Mae Ford Smith is a round, sweet-faced woman with a shrewd yet sentimental eye, a determined spirit and a powerfully moving voice, now somewhat cracked by long, if lively service to the Lord. She is a beloved gospel singer, much looked to for moral and artistic guidance by people in her profession. Say Amen, Somebody is a documentary that follows her on her exhausting rounds, from bustling home to jumping church services to emotionally galvanic singing conventions. Following in her wake, the audience meets her mentor (Thomas A. Dorsey, a onetime blues singer and composer...
...film is shrewd in its selection of these moments. There are just enough of them to ground in a recognizable reality what could have been merely a well-shot and -edited compilation of irresistible music. But they are never so many that they interfere with the film's soaring flights of song. Say Amen, Somebody is a movie to which even a tone-deaf atheist will say amen. - By Richard Schickel
Like a jet-age symbol of the Palestinian diaspora, Yasser Arafat seemed to be at home only inside the fuselage of an airplane last week. As diplomats on several continents tried in vain to understand the latest political maneuvers in the Middle East, the shrewd survivor who runs the Palestine Liberation Organization jetted from South Yemen to North Yemen to Sweden and then to Tunisia, supposedly to attend a high-level P.L.O. policy meeting. But soon after arriving in Tunis, he left for a quick trip to Bulgaria, finally returning to Tunisia. Amid all this frenetic travel, whose purpose only...