In great (lasting, challenging, beautiful, truthful, skillful) art – great film, great painting, great quilting, great photography – prurience has little place. However, nudity for a great filmmaker relates to film’s sense of time: it focuses on the impermanence of the body, while at the same time reveling in the beauty of the same body, as in each of these films.
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One of Mendes’s great successes is the mood he captures, in which we see doom but continue to hope for these characters. Kate Winslet’s April is that fragile balance of strength and whim so rarely achieved without overdoing it. The world around her closes in, and yet she continues to believe that things can change. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank for the coward he is; his youthful good looks and charm allow him to coast in a world where people are pleased to accept the easiest answers and deflect personal responsibility.
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