QUOTE OF THE DAY: Guy Lodge

"Looking for all the world as if the print has been stewed in black tea before being left to gather a few months’ worth of dust in the projection room — and that’s a good thing, I hasten to add — the film proves a happy marriage between two very different brands of understated precision: the British scholarliness of le Carré’s dense espionage lore and the icier Scandinavian calm that Alfredson brought to his breakout vampire drama, “Let the Right One In.” In many ways, Alfredson directs le Carré’s self-described “little gray men” of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service as they are themselves vampires of the Cold War: lurking in irremovable half-light, striking efficiently and selectively, and only notionally acquainted with the concept of sunlight, these thickly-tweeded spies appear to bear the burden of their profession as a lifelong alibi for the avoidance of intimacy, social functionality and even standard-issue conversation." — Guy Lodge, In Contention

Lodge is fast turning into one of the better online film critics — smart, dry, descriptive, wary of the type of loose-fitting flannel that passes for judgment elsewhere ("... has seriously confused tonal issues and doesn’t succeed in blending concepts or nailing them individually either" to pick just one example currently etherising its readers. What kind of talk is that?)