If his performance is the movie's flashiest, the film is anchored in Mr. Thomas's strong, low-key portrayal of a simple man following his own deeply humane instincts.
This is not an account of the tragedy that plays down the politics (Stewart's low-key, canny portrayal demonstrates that Claudius is the subtlest mind in the play after Hamlet) but the production ends with the arrival of a burly Fortinbras who is left standing mute in the doorway.
But this is a virtue, and the key to Dutton's portrayal.
I think the key to Penn's portrayal of Harvey Milk is his comic timing.
Khaled Hosseini described her portrayal: "The key word with Mariam is that she is isolated in every sense of the word.
A 2007 academic survey that does attempt this, by Thomas Green, identifies three key strands to the portrayal of Arthur in this earliest material.
And as more praise unfurls when My Week with Marilyn opens nationwide today, the film's director, Simon Curtis, believes it's Williams's ambition to get such a coveted role that just might be the key to her flawless portrayal of the iconic celluloid siren.
Her portrayals of key personalities throughout, as one might expect from the author of "Paris 1919," are superb.
Family members had largely been supportive of her research, though her Uncle Hobart has already disparaged the book in a local newspaper, questioning its portrayals of key figures.
But though he mentions some of the faults of the brilliant, mercurial, charismatic and utterly unscrupulous Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father, and references his instigation of the training of conservative Islamists to hit hardline leftist nationalists in Afghanistan in the early 70s, some may find the portrayal of this key historical figure a shade uncritical.
While there is a key relationship (with an acute portrayal of sexual dynamics), the focus is on a different kind of love: the for-better-or-for-worse bond between a grown-up childhood gang in a picture-postcard town devoted to tourists with limited resources for resident teens.
