Ms. Hurston, who died poor and forgotten in 1960 at the age of 57, was once celebrated for her unflinching written portraits of black America.

But her portrait of Arthur Fiedler is as unflinching as a Holbein or Whistler portrait.

But as Davis's wonderfully strange story of a rancher descending into violent rage unfolds, so does an unflinching portrait of a way of life indebted to nature.

- with its beautiful but unflinching portrait of Harold Rosenberg as a needy, aging man - to remind him.

The film received mixed reviews 54% of reviews on rottentomatoes.com being positive, the consensus being, "a glossy yet unflinching portrait of violent, hedonistic teenagers.

And "Cold Parade," probably the most complex song on the album, is an unflinching but essentially sympathetic portrait of a lonely man with too much time on his hands.

Canadian National Film Board calls the documentary "an unflinching portrait with neither voyeurism nor false sympathy acknowledging those society prefers to ignore".

Yet it's worth noting that while "Citizen Kane" is an unflinching portrait of a monstrous man's will to power, "Alexander" soft-pedals a far more terrible monster.

When the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded the book in 2009, it called the prose "agile" and the book an "unflinching portrait".

Beginning with Vespasian, represented in a craggy, unflinching portrait from the second half of the first century, realism re-emerges as a favored style among the aristocracy.