Word: taut
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Though The Outside Man is Trintignant's 53rd movie in 17 years, the quiet, diffident actor is relatively new to the luxury of choosing his films and directors. Trintignant, 41, has emerged only in recent years as a superbly subtle technician of the screen. His taut, understated performances have included such diverse characterizations as the driven public prosecutor in Costa-Gavras' Z, the uptight Catholic in Rohmer's Ma Nuit Chez Maud and the intellectual fascist-killer in Bertolucci's The Conformist. Trintignant's acting style is condensed to a prodigious point of thrift...
...their stead came a fleet of aides from outside the Harvard family. The predictable result was that many of the University's more protective members panicked at the prospect of a taut, centralized bureaucracy in Massachusetts Hall which would be largely insensitive to their needs...
...Asphalt Jungle was a taut and precise study of the way a robbery went wrong as a result of the psychological quirks of the perpetrators. In Cool Breeze, the gang is given a vaguely altruistic motive (the money from the job will go to start a "black people's bank"), which once proposed is rapidly forgotten. Pollack's script uses this political ploy as a kind of sop, an attempt to make the gang not merely crooks but criminal revolutionaries...
Something has been lost in the translations. Isherwood's stories were taut, bittersweet recollections of bohemian Berlin in the early '30s. By the time Scenarist Allen and Director Fosse have wrung them out, what's left -with one exception-is mostly slack and sour. The exception is their vibrant star Liza Minnelli, who cocks a derby over a green-shadowed eye and struts off with the movie, or as much of it as is worth carrying...
...carpenter in a Long Island town, he derided the Hollywood white elephants of that day in punchy prose. He didn't hurl jeremiads from on high, as high-falutin' auteurists do given half the provocation. Instead, he coined the phrase "termite art" to describe what he did like--taut action films with subversively-explored characters--and pulled off a Socratic sleight-of-language which reduced the Establishment to outraged epithets...