Word: taut
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...Eastern Promises (a flaccid title for such a taut film) has some sensational set pieces: a barber-shop murder in the first few minutes, and a long, brutal fight in a bathhouse between Mortensen and two thugs; they're armed, he's naked. But at heart it's a two-family drama, one being Anna's sensible English aunt (Sinead Cusack) and crabby Russian uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski), the other Semyon and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Kirill is like a mutant Corleone: he has Sonny's hair-trigger impulses and Fredo's drug-addled weak streak, stemming from a need...
...someone else when he relaxes his features. His Bourne is a man of three expressions: going blank, which gives his features the slackness of a new corpse; showing wariness of imminent danger or unmasking, like a naughty schoolboy who realizes he's being watched; and, an instant later, getting taut, in situations where he expects the worst and tries to be prepared for it. The strategy is simple but effective. Damon uses the ordinariness of his appearance to help make Bourne invisible to his enemies, a working-class hero to the audience...
...because critical unanimity is a turnoff but because it tends to be conferred on the educational or exotic. Spoon's sixth album, unfortunately titled Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (out July 10), has no sitars or harps, no qawwali singing or convoluted metanarratives. It's just 36 minutes of taut, minimalist rock played mostly on guitar and piano and sung by Britt Daniel, a reedy Texan with a dry, been-around-a-bit voice. It's exotic like Clint Eastwood--and just about as direct...
...Iraqi men squatting shoulder to shoulder in the blasted, abandoned classroom couldn't tell at first that the American soldier addressing them was a man of real authority. He was slight, taut, with sandy hair and a thin beak of a nose. He didn't sound like a big shot; he didn't bark in a commanding voice. "How many of you are going to make it?" he asked, in sketchy Arabic. Several of the men - Iraqi police recruits - looked up, saw the four stars on General David Petraeus' cap and shifted nervously, unsure of what he meant. His interpreter...
...festivalgoing are such unexpected ones as Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. It is set in 1987, during the final days of the Ceausescu regime, when the whole country seems to be in a sour mood. But politics are in the background of this taut, fraught drama about what goes wrong when a college student (Laura Vasiliu) seeks an illegal abortion. She and her roommate (Anamaria Marinca) are led to the ironically named Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), a stolid fellow with a sulfurous whiff of menace. He'll do the job, but for a price that...