Word: arching
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...babysitting in adjoining houses. The combined budgets of these two films total a great deal less than half the production costs of the more solemnly ingratiating Academy Award nominees you are likely to see in their places. In each, against the pulpy, gritty texture of the surface plot, an arch and fastidious intelligence glistens and clings like some slime on a rock. These films are constructed with canny, modest movie-making acuity, and within what they try for and accomplish they are as powerfully successful and surprising as anything of their kind currently on view...
...West and live like a crocodile." He loves London, even though that's where he finds out "you can't love two people at once, especially when they're married--to each other...If I don't violate everyone else's relationship then I have no function." All very arch, of course--"how the hell are you?"--Rolling Stones in the background, sarcastic and timely...
...first, these elliptical discussions seem arch and aimless. But Gilliatt, a film critic for The New Yorker and the author of several brilliant short story collections and novels, subtly builds them to establish the existence of a singular bond between singular men. In time, Peregrine becomes a barrister and then a curmudgeonly journalist whose essays excoriate the modern world. Benedick becomes an electronic harpsichordist and marries a difficult woman named Joanna, who speaks eight or ten languages and runs what appears to be an armaments brokerage from a telex machine in their Wiltshire house. When Joanna restlessly and ruthlessly divorces...
...include a rich body of alumni, as well as grants from the usual foundations; the presence of students, which Brustein convincingly argues is conducive to creativity; and on some level, perhaps, the poetic justic of being asked to leave the Yale School of Drama and then hitching up to arch-rival Harvard; blah blah blah blah...
...opinionated. Even here, chain management usually dilutes the effect with a "spectrum" of opinion, in a look-no-hands neutrality between conservative, liberal and middle-of-the-road. Those among the columnists who are also in television develop a manner to go with the act-William F. Buckley Jr., arch and fastidious; James J. Kilpatrick, full of pretend bluster. When Kilpatrick takes the conservative side against Shana Alexander on CBS's 60 Minutes, their genial volleys are reminiscent of Robert Frost's definition of free verse-like playing tennis with the net down. Such show-biz parodies suggest...