Style a while

It takes gumption and panache to drop your nut graf in the second sentence of your article without sounding dry or clunky, but everyone’s favorite DVD critic, Chris Orr - structurally one of the tightest writers in film commentary today - pulls it off in his latest Home Movies column at TNR:

Has a historical epic ever told us less about the milieu in which it is set, and more about that in which it was produced, than Kingdom of Heaven? An exuberant war movie that is also a laughably ahistorical anti-war polemic, the film is an exceptional example of what happens when Hollywood's commercial and political imperatives crash headlong into one another.