Reviews in, say, newspaper books sections (I'm biased) are vital in offering a properly critical (often negative) opinion of new books: a necessary accompaniment to (also important) articles in the same sections that simply showcase books, or report interviews with authors: these can all too easily become elegant exercises in PR.
Youth is an elegant, wan exercise from Sorrentino, but brilliant and passionate movies such as The Great Beauty and The Consequences of Love show he is capable of more than this.
In his initial review, Ebert awarded Vengeance 3½ stars out of four, describing it as "a formula thriller done as an elegant genre exercise".
Although this site is quite simple and doesn't have a lot of content, it provides five very useful and elegant interactive exercises you can do to figure out what you're all about.
With a minimal yet elegant explanation—"Exercises in colour, composition & texture"—Material Objects experiments in abstract compositions created from oddly juxtaposed objects and textures.
Finally, an intriguing and challenging aspect of clonality on the research agenda should be the feedbacks between environmental heterogeneity and clonal trait variation, as already predicted from the elegant modelling exercises by Magyar et al. (2004), mentioned above.
The buffet, like the table, was an exercise in elegant simplicity.
NUNZIO'S -- A slice from Nunzio's is a pristine exercise in elegant pizza minimalism.
Drawing from her six albums, Keren Ann's concert at the Allen Room was an exercise in elegant understatement.
"Arrival" is an elegant puzzle, an engrossing exercise in problem-solving — for the protagonist, the filmmaker and the viewer alike.
And if that's the case, it makes sense that the Clock Room, as it's called, is an elegant, if somewhat dusty, exercise in mechanical exactness.
