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“... year – 1940 – went to John Ford for Grapes of Wrath. In practice, Selznick was not quite as straight or naive about these things as he liked to sound, and he often showed a quirky taste for visual invention. But he did like verbatim quotation from the literary texts he bought, and this preference guaranteed lots of direct quotation from Daphne du ...”

“... that he just gave himself up. Bergé’s relish in this performance, her sense that playing it straight will get you everything you might get from playing it ironically, and more, is especially clear when she is dressed up as a nun, as her counterpart is in Feuillade’s version. She locates us in a world of absolute, disciplined, mean calculation, as ...”

“... for example, or glasses of milk, work in Hitchcock. Varda recounts her film-making career fairly straight – allowing for a magical boat ride that goes directly from Sète to the Seine in central Paris. She makes her early New Wave films, notably Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) and Le Bonheur (1965), visits China and Cuba, makes some terrible movies in ...”

“... Isn’t or wasn’t Marcello a Fascist? This is where the myth kicks in. He was just trying to be straight, that’s what ‘normal’ meant. The myth isn’t homosexual guilt itself, of course, but the suggestion that without homosexual guilt Fascism in Italy would never really have got off the ground, or at least wouldn’t have been interesting. The ...”

“... so far south, and with more precarious modes of balance. Some of the comedy was transformed into straight horror and many of the horrors were not parodic in the least. They were all the more desolate for being so ordinary. Basing American Fiction, his first movie, on Erasure, Cord Jefferson decides to take the tension even further, and the film keeps ...”

“... his earliest memories of family life. Carpenter then went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1864, straight to the heart of the Broad Church network, and eventually to a fellowship in that college, newly relinquished by Leslie Stephen. In June 1870, he was ordained by the Bishop of Ely, and got to know F.D. Maurice, Professor of Moral Philosophy and proponent ...”

“... and the hype hadn’t prepared me for Malcolm X at all. I expected it to be dull and worthy, a straight and long-winded retelling of a famous life. I found it lively, pretty dramatic, not all that much too long. It is a glossy parable of the sinner who came to virtue, found fame and power, was threatened and killed: the work, death and glorification of St ...”

“... up washes so strong that the battered taxis stall – their drivers, sometimes in army uniform or straight from teaching or the office, can’t possibly afford to keep them in good repair. The new rich quarters to the south and north, with their guards, their high walls, enclave living, and often stridently ostentatious architecture, are no better off. Their ...”

“... many crime novels are now, as they used not to be, distinctly better-written than many so-called straight novels. How many of our highbrows, for example, the ones who get the lead reviews, write as well as, say, Michael Dibdin, author of the haunting Ratking? P.D. James’s new novel seems to return us ...”

“... In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel ...”

“... pretensions. One can hear him thinking: why can’t these supposed sophisticates get their story straight? (The translation, by the way, perhaps appositely, is by the late James Kirkup, a British expatriate poet who is best known for his work from the Japanese and who died in Andorra.)Kpomassie stays with people up and down the social scale. He gives ...”

“... his rich female customers, and turns apparent subservience into an art of extensive control. His straight sidekick is Zero, an immigrant lobby-boy played by Tony Revolori. Monsieur Gustave’s most spectacular ancient client is Tilda Swinton, who looks and speaks as if she had been mummified for years before her death. There is the story of a stolen ...”

“... Caesar espouses it, and it vanishes when he dies. Antony is too infatuated with Cleopatra to think straight, and doesn’t have those kinds of ambitions anyway. So not only is there no one for the audience to root for, there is nothing to root for, no cause we can care about. But then these problems with the film may represent finds for the ...”

“... Here they almost all have to do with money and power, and a desperate inability to see anything straight. When Brigitte Bardot, as the sulky beautiful wife of Michel Piccoli, the writer who may or may not work on the film within the film, tells her husband she despises him, cueing us in to our title, we realise she has found the word she has been looking ...”

“... beating even Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and prompting Sony Pictures to offer three more sequels straight off, is more of a mess than you can quite believe. Pieces of plot float in from nowhere, supernatural characters develop new sets of powers in mid-scene, all the most soppy and obvious scenes are played as if they were Ibsen and all the jokes have been ...”