Word: tormentingly
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...civilization dying slowly of self-disgust. Oates' characters are devoid of any sympathetic traits--not only are they lost and lonely, they are faceless and neurotic and filled with hate. Oates strips existential crisis of all its nobility, turning it into a form of mental illness. She transforms spiritual torment into a loathsome disease, a kind of leprosy of the soul...
Beverley plays this scene with vivid intensity. In the final moments, with her child dangling in the air, desperation molds her features. Her uncomprehending torment over the scene's inhuman conclusion chills the audience, plunging the theater into a hushed and telling silence. The message has reached home with stunning impact, transcending every barrier to understanding. Men, black and white, cannot fail to share her grief and understand, finally and forever, the wretched folly of their ego-driven attempts to dominate their sisters...
...confused shrink. At times, these infrequent monologues border on the histrionic, as Burton casts off the necessary restraint of a film star and takes on the exaggerated inflections of a stage actor's voice. But on balance, the technique succeeds, enabling Burton to dedge up the personal torment that his patient Strang has triggered within...
Strindberg was involved in three disastrous marriages that nearly broke his ever precarious hold on sanity. Only his ability to transmute his inner torment into dramatic art saved him. His is a classic case of what Edmund Wilson called "the wound and the bow." From the suppurating wound of his domestic life, as un-healing as was the eagle-torn liver of Prometheus, he gathered the strength to draw the bow of craft, passion and insight and to launch an arrow of dramatic significance that is still in flight more than half a century after his death...
...scenes, but it is arguably the shallowest of this great director's works. In Truffaut's best movies, such as Jules and Jim and Stolen Kisses, the heroes struggle mightily with the eternal conflicts of love, and the audience is all the wiser for living through their torment...