Word: rueful
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...script sometimes strains coincidence and leaves some loose ends dangling. But as a study of a decent man twice victimized by megapolitics, Director Pinoteau's first feature rings with rueful truth. Escape to Nowhere is, in cinematic terms, aptly named. It represents a rare movie journey away from the Bondian glamorization of espionage toward that cold, perpetually drizzling landscape that Novelist John le Carré has mastered. Like him, Pinoteau sacrifices nothing in the way of suspense as he pursues his harried hero to a brilliant climactic confrontation with the enemy in the Swiss Alps. And he gains much...
...best and the truest sense, this is a woman's picture. Angry and rueful, it is an attempt to get at some of the political, legal and social complications that tie women down, humble them and sometimes defeat them. Heavily naturalistic in mode, the film makes good and pertinent drama out of emotional suffocation...
...there an alternative to love? In these stories, written not long before The Golden Notebook (1962)-Mrs. Lessing's broadest consideration of all the wars between the sexes-her answer appears to be a rueful no. Those who want to live, apparently, are more or less doomed to love. But cheer up -a little. Love, like the blight in A Mild Attack of Locusts, can be endured. The sturdy wind up saying "It could have been worse." Mrs. Lessing has always been a slow, deliberate writer who seems unable to spare herself or her reader the slightest wince...
Malick, who is 30, is a protégé of Arthur Penn, whom he thanks in the end credits and to whose Bonnie and Clyde he is indebted. Badlands, however, is very different in its sensibility - chilly, savage and rueful. It might better be regarded less as a companion piece to Bonnie and Clyde than as an elaboration and reply. It is not loose and high-spirited. All its comedy has a frosty irony, and its violence, instead of being brutally balletic, is executed with a dry, remorseless drive...
...entire generation of the U.S. young took Johnny Case's "holiday" in the '60s. In some instances, the results ranged from social anarchy to the destruction of the very self so clamorously being sought. To anyone who sup ports such an analysis, the play has a rueful undertone. Like some of the high flying securities of its day, Holiday, once hailed as a dramatic blue chip, seems to have plummeted to the lowly "cats and dogs" category...