But the most gripping portraits are self-portraits, Artaud's features racked by disease, though his expression remains gentle, pitiable and lost.

On view is a gripping, anonymous portrait of Edgar Allan Poe that prompted Poe to say on seeing it: "My life seems wasted.

But hers is a gripping portrait, not least because it raises the specter - the anxiety of genetic influence - that haunts the imaginations of daughters everywhere.

The author's most deeply felt novel yet, "Freedom" is both a gripping portrait of a dysfunctional family and a telling, wide-angled snapshot of our troubled times.

So it's even more of a pleasure to report that he's come up with a gripping and suitably grimy portrait of how we live today - if, that is, we happen to live in New York City.

Winner of numerous awards at this year's Berlin Film Festival, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation is a sophisticated, superbly acted and wholly gripping portrait of modern Iran.

A result is a gripping portrait of a tragedy through the victims' eyes that is at once human, universal and touching, and also uniquely, terribly Russian.

As such passages indicate, Mr. Darnton can write lucidly and straightforwardly about his subject, giving the reader a gripping portrait of the social, literary and political dynamics at work in prerevolutionary France.

Derek Elley of the entertainment magazine Variety similarly found the film to be an achievement, particularly in how it played with genre conventions, calling the film a "stylized but gripping portrait of mob power play and lifestyles in 1930 Shanghai."

Most striking of all are Hartley's gripping, near-devotional portraits of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder and the English poet John Donne.