Word: taut
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...Arizona, lawyers described her as a painstakingly careful attorney and a judge who ran her courtroom with taut discipline and a clear disdain for lawyers who had not done their homework. "She handled her work with a certain meticulousness, an eye for legal detail," recalled Phoenix Lawyer John Frank. Added John McGowan, another Phoenix attorney: "She's a very conscientious, very careful lawyer." Some defense lawyers, however, found O'Connor's strict demeanor on the bench so intimidating that they dubbed her "the bitch queen...
...produced in New York in 1960 when British Playwright Delaney was 21. Then, the play seemed to belong to the "kitchen sink" school of regurgitative grievances-today, it celebrates spunk. This revival, which off-Broadway's Roundabout Theater has transferred intact to Broadway's Century Theater, is taut, vital, moving and funny. An admirable cast threads reality through the needle's eye of truth...
...began as a taut suspense drama. A band of hooded, heavily armed terrorists invaded the ground-floor offices of Barcelona's Banco Central, taking some 200 hostages and demanding the release of four army and Civil Guard officers who were under arrest for their roles in last February's attempted military coup. They threatened to kill the hostages and blow up the bank if their demands were not met. After a 37-hour siege, crack squads of special police moved in to capture the terrorists and free the hostages...
Lewis Teague directed Sayles' finest B-movie script, The Lady in Red (1979)-a tart, taut evocation of the '30s working-class underworld-and here he plays 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...
...understood through his public utterances, and examines the way his subject spoke as well as what he said. In his biography of Channing, the author acknowledges an abbreviation of outward detail. He prepares us quickly for our journey into William Ellery Channing's mind; we learn in six taut paragraphs that he graduated from Harvard with a gift for oratory and sailed for Virginia in November, 1798, where he grew less sociable and more insular in Richmond as he searched for direction and purpose in his life. Five years later he had decided on a career in the ministry...