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“When I first started writing it, I tried to lay out a manifesto of what I wanted to at least attempt to do,” Gorman says, “which is to try to poeticize the experience of the last two and a half years — the pandemic and everything else in the world that manifests.”

What most of these people do is read a literal translation by an expert Assyriologist and then “poeticize” it, pushing it up into verse.

Santo Loquasto's set doesn't poeticize the ambience.

The enthusiasm for it has to represent the injustice the movie believes it’s aware of — against young murdered women, their suffering dysfunctional families and black torture victims we never see — but fails to sufficiently poeticize or dramatize what Mr. McDonagh is up to here: a search for grace that carries a whiff of American vandalism.

It’s all building up to the two scenes of the movie, the ones that will contextualize and poeticize everything that came before it.