Word: subtlest
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...supplied the "natural" image of the King -- three faces, looking left, right and straight ahead -- from which the Roman artist was to work. Van Dyck's portraits of Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria fixed them for posterity with a completion that few later artists could rival. They have the subtlest quality of propaganda: they make you forget that they are propaganda. If we think of Charles as the cultivated king par excellence, it is largely thanks to Van Dyck. There cannot be a more tender and intimate royal portrait than his effigy of the couple in conversation in a rocky...
...fact, it is precisely because of the limits he places on his poetic demesne that Heaney gains an almost unlimited expressive control. For instead of moving outwards, he burrows "inwards and downwards," sifting the Irish soil and Irish soul for meaning and metaphor, retraversing locales and themes until the subtlest shifts and shadings take on great meaning. He delves, too, into his own and his country's past and finds them richly veined with continuities...
...that the "evil empire" has become the beleaguered empire, nothing scares Washington more than the specter of a battle over Social Security. Even the subtlest effort to tinker with this most sacrosanct of federal benefit programs ignites the rage of senior citizens, whose lobbying groups are among the most feared in the nation. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's proposal to cut the Social Security payroll tax and stop using the enormous funds it generates to disguise the size of the federal budget deficit is anything but subtle. It is so explosive that Republicans and Democrats alike are running from...
Hackman is probably the subtlest screen player of his generation. He is a genius at hiding his true feelings under humor, letting them show with a seemingly unconscious flicker of expression or an unfinished gesture. Dafoe stands up to him with the kind of flat-voiced certainty mastered only by men of few, but unshakable, principles. Though each learns something from the other, their relationship retains its pure scratchiness from beginning to end. These guys are never going to be buddies...
...first few scenes are klutzy; Romero has never been the subtlest director of actors. But once he gets past the early exposition, he takes energized control of the subject (his script is based on Michael Stewart's novel) and gets a tough-minded turn from Beghe, his soap opera-handsome young star. Beghe must show all Allan's suicidal anxieties, homicidal anger and heroic resourcefulness while strapped in a wheelchair. His finger can hardly move, but his performance does, splendidly...