Sentences with word «staginess»

Closed Curtain transcends the literary staginess of its conceit mostly because of Jafar Panahi's compelling on - screen presence.

Gable's charisma is in full evidence here, even as a villian and Norma looks great but the film is hampered by staginess and some very mannered acting.

If you're prepared to accept an inherent staginess that gradually fades as the film progresses, you can become caught up in a drama of extraordinary power and insight.

For as distinct as the celebrated playwright's dialogue is, almost more so is the lamentable instinct to cast his largely - talentless wives in pivotal roles (first Lindsay Crouse, now the consistently abominable Rebecca Pidgeon), not neglecting Mamet's inability to transcend the mannered and under - populated staginess of the theatre in which he belongs.

To be sure, Life presents itself as more polished than Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl (2010), starring James Franco (who has also portrayed Dean) as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg during his obscenity trial for the titular poem, if only because Corbijn manages to avoid a certain staginess.

Unfortunately, the film's postmodern staginess assists in keeping Porter endlessly at arm's length.

Shot in black - and - white, the intentional staginess acts to highlight scarcity in lives that appear at first to be full, comfortable and celebrated.

And the cast, which includes Geoffrey Rush, Miranda Otto, Paul Schneider, Anna Torv, Sam Neill, and a remarkable actor named Ewen Leslie (carried over from the stage production), is so uniformly strong that they might well have made staginess work.

Most screen adaptations of Henrik Ibsen's plays suffer from extreme staginess, and there would seem to be little reason to expect otherwise from The Daughter, a contemporary update of The Wild Duck originally conceived for an Australian theater company.

Finley, a New York - based playwright, knows how to write dialogue that tingles with menace even as it drips with self - awareness, but he also has a fluid compositional sense that keeps «Thoroughbreds» from lapsing into staginess.

Or the acres of late nudes whose ponderous staginess looks back to Rubens and forward to Botero?

An effort to capture how things really are, The Spectacular Now is an earnest coming - of - age film that avoids the glib reflexes symptomatic of the genre, and the sanctimony and staginess of overwrought addiction melodramas.

Rope's staginess and lack of that usual edge - of - the - seat suspense leaves it kind of dangling in the air a bit...

There is occasionally a staginess to the screenplay but the characters are real and familiar, the performances are full on, and it is engaging right the way through.

The problem is that both versions of the story disappoint, the comedy sections lacking any real wit or energy, the drama cursed with that staginess and inertia so characteristic of Allen's London films.

Passionate performances pierce through the staginess of Washington's adaptation of August Wilson's hit play — an intense domestic drama coloured by the racial attitudes of the era.

Letts» work contains frequent verbal bouts, and showdowns between various characters, but the staginess of the movie — particular in scenes that get stuck in one room for minutes upon minutes on end with different people shouting at each other — can be tiring, and certainly visually lifeless.

Director Ryan Murphy's expansion of the original play bears the burden of its staginess, despite a hyperactive camera that sometimes makes The Normal Heart feel like an episode of «American Horror Story» (this guy can make a scene showing a few men shaking hands feel like a goddamned Tilt - a-Whirl ride, and he seriously overvalues ostentatious overhead shots).

The staginess extends to the performances, which are that brand of Shakespeare that are more recitation than actual performance.

Some staginess creeps in during the longer, more significant trailer - bound scenes, but Friedkin (and veteran DoP Caleb Deschanel) always shoots and cuts them with great clarity and purpose, and the scenes themselves are so electric that you don't particularly notice anything else.

The staginess gets in the way of the performances, too.

Taking this virtual mood lighting into account, director David Slade apparently tried to compensate for the production's lack of resources by turning the staginess of the material into an aesthetic, even though he shoots in the defiantly cinematic Super35 format.

There's none of the brashness of his 2016 English - language debut, A Bigger Splash, nor the staginess of his previous feature from 2009, I Am Love.

Despite its heightened sense of staginess to suggest the blurred line between life and drama, Ms. Barnard's «The Arbor» ultimately proves devastating when it establishes parallels between the lives of Dunbar and her biracial eldest child, Lorraine, with actress Manjinder Virk earnestly standing in.

Although his character sings, curses and generally behaves badly, Gere delivers all of this with a staginess that does not resemble recognizable human behavior.

Second, the accents emphasise the film's artificiality, adding to the film's staginess.

The staginess of the film also comes through in the acting.

Though dysfunctional family dramas are not everyone's cup of tea, and the Westons are a more volatile clan than most who've graced the silver screen, August: Osage County emerges as a very thoughtful, insightful, and well - acted drama that manages to break from the staginess of the play to be quite a good dramatic film on its own.

Using both Super-8 and high - definition video, Ms. Friedman, like Mr. Katz, makes us aware of the staginess of all relationships (not just the Hollywood variety).