Word: dictum
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Screenwriter William Goldman's dictum about the movie industry - "Nobody knows anything" - goes double here at Cannes, when it comes to predicting the winners at the closing night ceremony. And it's quadruple this year because none of the 22 films received unanimous critical acclaim, like last year's Romanian winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. Even the festival's veteran handicappers, like Pierre Rissient and Variety's Todd McCarthy, are loath to lay odds...
Anticipation is often the best part of romance, including the form of ardor known as movie love. The dictum applies with its greatest, most poignant force when a sequel to a beloved series is finally unveiled; recall the shrugs and recriminations at the arrival of The Phantom Menace. The Indy franchise never reached the heights of Skywalker mania. It was just (just!) a trilogy that both tapped the innocent vigor of old B-movie serials and turned them into sophisticated thrill machines. Raiders and its progeny were fun without being facetious; they moved with the speed and power...
...affair with someone her age (Trevor Howard) but married a wealthy, older man (Claude Rains). It's not one of the great director's masterpieces, but it had an emotional gravity that locates the difference between love and being in love, and it fulfilled the basic dictum of Golden Age movies: beautiful people with difficult problems, in radiant black-and-white. For me, it also had the romance of being made in a time when the British film industry believed in its own power to entrance - something that's long been lost...
...origins of man. So popular has this idea become that for humans, bonobos are now cultural--and commercial--darlings. A raw vegetarian restaurant in New York City calls itself Bonobo's. California sex therapist Susan Block has developed a conflict-resolution protocol dubbed the Bonobo Way. (Sample dictum: "You can't very well fight a war while you're having an orgasm.") But do bonobos deserve their gentle...
...University of Ferrara, says she decided to revisit the events around John Paul's death after the Vatican took a hard line in a controversy last year in Italy over euthanasia. Indeed her accusations are grave, questioning the Catholic Church's strictly traditional stances on medical ethics, including the dictum from John Paul's own 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae to use all modern means possible to avoid death. (See the cover of the commemorative issue honoring John Paul's passing...