Word: portrays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...best actor of the three, his is in some ways the most disappointing performance. Caught between love and ambition, Leicester serves both queens, only to betray each in turn; petty and cowardly though he is, his waverings also make him a tragic figure. Unfortunately, Hornblower chooses to portray the earl as a supercilious and excessively obvious double-dealer whose inward writhings cause him more annoyance than pain. Hand on hips, he delights in running his tongue over his lips in a gesture that reduces him to the level of a snake. It's hard to imagine what either queen could...
...portray Alan Casper, Native Intelligence is fine; it is as a real novel that it is hampered by its own wit and restless eclecticism. The materials in the novel run a bizarre gamut from an incredibly difficult crossword puzzle (Sokolov offers to send readers the solution, for a dollar), to a lengthy glossary of the Xixi language, to purported New York Times clippings, to a threatening letter Alan writes President Kennedy. The feeling emerges from it all that Sokolov is playing myriad obscure jokes throughout, that some second satiric meaning lurks behind everything. Is the Xixi language full of esoteric...
Ambler's old practice of humanizing his heroes by having them blunder into dangerous situations had become a tendency to portray his protaganists as, well, creeps. Like Arthur Abdul Simpson, the hero of Dirty Story, who is first introduced in The Light of Day. There he is blackmailed by a jewel ring into smuggling guns, and in turn blackmailed by the Turkish police into infiltrating the mob (a decent film, Topkapi, was made from this; Peter Ustinov made an excellent creep). Anyway, Simpson is the son of a British army man stationed in Cairo and an Egyptian woman. They...
...certified public accountant, may seem to Harvard sensibilities to be ever so slightly off, but it is the kind of minor point that doesn't mean a great deal. Though life in general and Hailey's obsession, class, in particular, are infinitely subtle, Hailey need not portray them that...
...camps, Wertmuller does portray alternative choices to those of Pasqualino in more fully rounded terms. The situation there is awful enough to make total refusal intelligible, and the character of the old anarchist (Fernando Rey), who continues to affirm his ideal of "man' in disorder" despite a set of crushed testicles, is a touching vignette. Nevertheless, the deaths of Francesco and the anarchist in defiance of the Nazis represent a purely negative gesture. Their renunciation of life based on abstract principles have little to do with the way men lead their lives; collective suicide is simply not a viable moral...