Word: melodrama
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When Crimes of the Heart is at its best, the cast is naturally witty, the script is true to life, and the direction devoid of artificial contrivances. At worst, the director resorts to gushy sentimentality, the acting borders on melodrama, and the playwright tries too hard to tamper with a meaningful comedy that speaks for itself. An entertaining evening--definitely. A Pulitzer-worthy performance? Not anymore
...superb erotic melodrama In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Japanese Writer-Director Nagisa Oshima is portraying-for Western viewers and his own Westernized countrymen-the social compulsions that once made Japan unique, and uniquely feared. In the earlier film, a prostitute and the husband of a brothel owner become casual lovers and then, following the logic of exclusive devotion, swoon into a passion whose fulfillment is violent death. In Merry Christmas, the viewer is thrown al once into the sadomasochistic excess of Oriental machismo. Here, every gesture of discipline, compassion, rage and honor is expressed by the blade...
Last week the first two trials resulting from that investigation were simultaneously drawing to a close in a Manhattan federal courtroom and in the small (pop. 10,381) New York town of Goshen. Both cases produced some legal melodrama: swaggering political posturing by defendants, protests by their radical supporters, and massive security precautions by officials. But beneath the surface, the trials were also textbook examples of smooth cooperation among the numerous law-enforcement agencies involved...
...takes a special kind of actor to play Franz, and Lamprecht, who looks like a cross between Emil Tannings and Hermann Goering, has the stolid majesty for the role. As for Fassbinder's actresses, they have always been lush galvanizers who surrender voluptuously to the jagged contours of melodrama. The viewer surrenders, just as willingly, to Trissenaar, a Diane Keaton-type, but with brains and guts and class; to Schygulla, with her wicked-witch profile and wicked, witty mouth; and to Sukowa, who, as sweet sad Mieze, blazes trails of girlish naiveté into the jungle of male psychopathy...
...Winkle strangely touching; anyone struggling to adapt to the technologies of the 1980s is bound to admire his good-humored patience with the ways of the world he nev er made. Director Phillip Borsos has an unpretentious eye for natural beauty and an admirable restraint that forces neither the melodrama nor the elegy. And Richard Farnsworth, the former stuntman who was so fine in Comes a Horseman, gives another splendid performance here. Like the movie, he is slight but sturdy. Film and actor compel one to lean for ward in order to catch all their whispered nuances...