VENICE — Religion roars onto the screen as a subject for both mainstream and avant-garde filmmakers this season— a fact reflected in and out of competition during the first days of the Venice International Film Festival, which prominently featured dramas stimulated by the world's three major monotheistic faiths and one based on a thinly veiled version of Scientology.
The thinly disguised allegory is based on real-life events that sparked outrage on the Internet.
Dumas' thinly painted portraits, all based on photographs, invoke relationships, separations, losses, yearnings and death.
Accordingly, the 12 shortish novels that make up "A Dance to the Music of Time," published between 1951 and 1975, are full of characters based on thinly disguised real-life models, some famous (Muggeridge, George Orwell), some not (Constant Lambert, J. Maclaren-Ross).
At the same time, they acknowledge that in retrospect, some of its conclusions appear to have been thinly sourced and were based on methods less rigorous than were ultimately required under an intelligence overhaul that did not begin in earnest until later.
"Over the medium to long term, further thinking will be needed to meet the challenge of benchmarks based on thinly-traded markets, especially when they are quote-based".
His new, sketchy and thinly painted upside-down canvases based on Soviet Social Realist images from the 1930's, through tomorrow at PaceWildenstein (534 West 25th Street, Chelsea) are more interesting conceptually than visually (Ken Johnson).
Val McDermid discusses her 1997 novel The Wire in the Blood, which was about a serial abuser and rapist based on a thinly disguised Jimmy Savile … and what do you know?
She argues that detailed assessments of many tens of thousands of families a year based on "risk characteristics" divert thinly stretched budgets away from helping struggling families who don't intend – though may cause – their children harm.
In the thinly veiled, thickly fictionalized movie version, the character based on him is played by the rising comic star Simon Pegg and gets to dabble with the characters played by Megan Fox and Kirsten Dunst.
