Word: sinew
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From the first line of the album?"They tried to make me go to rehab/I said 'No, no, no'"?Winehouse is in complete control of her out-of-control tale. "You know that I'm no good," she sings with remarkable power and sinew in another song, and it's not a boast, though her put-downs of the men who would take advantage of her certainly are. Throughout, she's mouthy, funny, sultry and quite possibly crazy, yet unlike Britney Spears or a dozen other pop idiot savants, Winehouse not only knows who she is but is able...
...Pushed beyond their usual performance tics, Scacchi, Friels, Mailman and Long are virtually unrecognizable. They not only get under the skin and muscle of their characters-none more so than the previously lightweight Long-but reveal the fragile sinew connecting body to soul. And in a film so obsessed with attempts to control the human form's direction and desire, it is the mind that emerges the strongest muscle of all. Can there be such a thing as a cerebral cinematic dance? Yes, when the choreographer is as clever as Kokkinos in turning prose poetry into the magisterial mystery...
...anticipation briefly floods her face, as radiant as that sunlit church. Bergman keeps energizing Saraband with such touchstones; he builds the edifice of the film on this latticework. And these superb actors - three veteran colleagues, one (Dufvenius) a newcomer in the great tradition of Bergman ingenues - give the characters sinew and subtlety...
...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 of her mother's beauty and most of her shy mannerisms in embryo. They bring body and soul to a tantalizing entertainment...
...nuance. Science fiction is an open invitation to moralizing. In a genre that lets you create your own world, who can resist the temptation merely to blow it all up while shaking a head at what fools these mortals be? Not Atwood. What's missing here is the emotional sinew of Cat's Eye, the complex mortifications of Alias Grace. In which case, pass the popcorn. --By Richard Lacayo