The movie is seen through the eyes, the sensibility and the inevitably somewhat ambiguous life experience of Oliver from the year 2003.
We can hope he knows that and that his laughing remark was a sort of joke — an embarrassing, awkward, ambiguous sort of joke, perhaps, but one that implies an ethical sensibility.
Mr. Lurie, in keeping with the sensibilities of the times, makes the assault less ambiguous in its cruelty, but in other parts of the movie he holds onto the volatile blend of chivalry and misogyny that made Peckinpah's film such a nasty, queasy, fascinating document of its era.
Faber's two novellas strike similar chords: the chaste, damaged woman on a journey towards some sort of wholeness and hope, the ambiguous supernatural element, the stern dressing-down of a debased, inauthentic modern sensibility, whether in love or art.
His completely original voice and sensibility — a blend of sharp and always surprising observation, free-floating digression, ambiguous irony, impishness, tenderness, curiosity, and detachment, all overhung with constant, circling doubt — remain stubbornly resistant to all but ersatz imitation.
Mr. Spielberg accomplishes the improbable feat of melding Kubrick's chilly, analytical style with his own warmer, needier sensibility, and the result is an exquisitely layered movie -- the riskiest, most ambiguous, most intellectually challenging fairy tale the director has made to date (A. O. Scott).
Mr. Spielberg accomplishes the improbable feat of melding Kubrick's chilly, analytical style with his own warmer, needier sensibility, and the result is an exquisitely layered, complex movie -- the riskiest, most ambiguous, most intellectually challenging fairy tale the director has made to date (A. O. Scott).
"Boiler Room" reflects the sensibility of the generation it holds up to critical scrutiny, and it's a cunningly ambiguous act of self-portraiture.
(One of the smaller ironies of the affair is that it involves the collision of two subcultures, ambiguous Jewish identity and the obliquities of gay "coding," that did so much to make the modernist sensibility).
Written and directed by the 29-year-old Ben Younger, the film "reflects the sensibility of the generation it holds up to critical scrutiny, and it's a cunningly ambiguous act of self-portraiture" (A. O. Scott).
