Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...style that owes much to Brazil's famous soap operas, in which every movement, emotion and line drips with melodrama, the film depicts him losing a finger in a lathe accident and then his wife and son in childbirth, before he bounces back to lead the powerful metalworkers' union in historic strikes that challenged the country's military dictatorship. (Read "Can Rio's Crime Problem Be Solved Before the Olympics...
...film's Hong Kong director, Jingle Ma, says the new 115-minute Mulan is a sweeping melodrama that depicts the central character as an action hero, dutiful daughter and wistful romantic. The film stars Vicki Zhao Wei, who shot to fame in the late 1990s playing the wide-eyed lead role in the television series Princess Pearl. Zhao may have gotten the role because of her tomboy image in action films such as Red Cliff and So Close, but in Mulan, she appears with full makeup and long, glossy fingernails - even as a soldier...
...still complex, vivacious and emotionally resonant. Since the gynocentric Mother and Volver, and the guy-nocentric Bad Education, Almodóvar has returned to the plot structure of the noirish Live Flesh: the toxic romantic geometry of a triangle love story. In the world of telenovela melodrama that has long appealed to Almodóvar, jealousy must be twisted into violence at the top of a winding staircase, while lust collides with a dark fate on a highway with one too many cars...
...Assassin” is “so bad it’s funny” is to misunderstand the extent to which this violent and confused baboon of a movie is “bad.” Though some might try to give this latest martial arts melodrama the benefit of the doubt and call it “ironic,” “Ninja Assassin” has few fleeting moments of conscious self-deprecation. Its only redeeming characteristic, its constant flow of gasp-inducing, gory fight scenes, is undermined and rendered largely impotent...
...primarily an issue movie, banging home its thesis on the anvil of melodrama. It's closer to a romantic comedy. Ryan finds a kindred spirit in another high-flying exec, the sultry Alex (Vera Farmiga). As she tells Ryan, "Think of me as yourself, only with a vagina." Their relationship is affectionate, lusty and unfettered--the perfect sky alliance. It's a life Ryan loves: the pampering by flight attendants, the plush anonymity of hotel rooms. What you might call loneliness, he calls self-reliance. This is threatened by a young corporate rival (Anna Kendrick), who wants to save money...