Word: rueful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...characters and the situation in The L-Shaped Room may be familiar, but they both come alive to present, with poignant vividness, the pain and pleasure of love that is the essence of life. The laughter of the audience reflects, by its rueful tone the accuracy of the film at many moments. This movie seems to have the cathartic effect that other foreign films aim for, but usually miss because of a lack of subtlety that tries to pass for realism. Restraint is evident here where it is often lacking in other pictures--the photography is not bizarre, but merely...
...When Drake was winning seas for England," in Poet Patrick Kavanagh's rueful lines, "We sailed in puddles of the past." For the most part, Ireland's postliberation politicians and intellectuals seemed determined to ignore the seas for the puddles. For years they kept up the strident outcry over partition and winked at endless, squalid raids on the Ulster border. Ireland, after all, was a divided country for decades before such latecomers to partition as Germany, Korea and Viet...
...this engaging second novel. Author James Stevenson, 33, displays Marquand's feel for the half rueful, wholly droll confrontation between the really wellborn and those who are merely born to do well. But he is less interested in dynastic decay than in dilettante dilemma. The islanders' big "fight McKinney" meeting bogs down in bickering about whether or not a mole has been gnawing at croquet court number three, and the whole argument becomes entirely academic when a pair of McKinney's bulldozers crash onto the court in the middle of the annual tournament. A hapless adulterer, surprised...
...Haven cleric rejects the phenomenon as "a gentlemanly fad." Students mostly take a dim view. "My grandmother had her Ouija board," says one. "My mother had her Bridey Murphy. Now they have this. It's all the same to me." The glossolalists expect skepticism, and respond with a rueful joke: "Maybe this is what St. Paul means by being fools for Christ's sake...
...Rueful Note. The new spending figures only increased the President's worry that his programs will have a hard time in Congress. Departing from his text, Kennedy ruefully noted that Presidents always get blamed for recessions-even when they try to prevent them. Said he: "When things go bad, the chicken comes to roost on the President's house"-an aphorism that, if not up to Shavian standards, is at least a demonstrable truth...