Word: melodrama
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...rank among that pantheon, but he has vaulted over his contemporaries with this production. His performance ripens and changes night by night. It still seems unfinished in some scenes, too cautious in others, and is on the whole a bit quiet and constrained to energize a melodrama nearly four hours long. But he speaks the text with clarity and command, and he makes Hamlet believable as a whirlpool of contradictions: an inconstant avenger, a jealous yet indifferent lover, a humane moralist who kills innocents without remorse. Rather than impose a defining personality to achieve cohesion, Kline glories in the character...
Murnau, one of the greatest silent-film directors, went to Tahiti (with documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty) to make this ethnographic idyll spiked with Hollywood-style melodrama. A boy who has fallen in love with a local princess dives for pearls in a deep-sea grotto that is guarded by a possessive shark. The simple story is told with rapturous visual poetry that captures both nature's beauty and its threat. Murnau, 42, had his own rendezvous with tragedy: he died in a car crash shortly before Tabu's release...
...others - with their haunting and spirited ballads of regret and doomed love - were in vogue around the world. Now, Delerm and artists like Keren Ann, Benjamin Biolay, Carla Bruni and Thomas Fersen are making chansons chic again. The new-old sound incorporates elements of big band, swing, old-fashioned melodrama and whispery vocals. "Many musicians have a certain attitude, saying they do one kind of music but claim a certain pop aspect as well," says Delerm, sitting in a Paris café drinking orange pressé on an unusually warm spring day. "I've always said that what...
...only when Woodward descends into the darkness of a parking garage to consult with Deep Throat that the movie briefly becomes a real noirish melodrama. The filmmakers made Deep Throat a smoker, which some say he was not, to give him a Robert Mitchum air, which was surely not something we would now impute to Felt. But Hal Holbrook gives a gnomic, cranky performance as Deep Throat. (Shouldn't there be an Oscar for best performance by an actor you can barely see?) And director Alan Pakula added menacing off-camera sound effects to Holbrook's scenes--a mysterious bump...
...most influential American movie of the '90s, for good and ill, this multipart crime epic is fully up to matching its cocksure ambition with its love of the medium and its mad pash for melodrama. The movie still has the impact of an Adrenalin shot to the heart...