Sarah is so moved by Nick's socially conscious performance art that it doesn't occur to her how immensely self-serving his act is.
This third one is the most painful to observe, but there's an element of conscious performance about it: she's suffering, but she's playing it for all it's worth.
A broader distinction between the (automatic) initiation and the (conscious) performance of behaviour, however, is concordant with the present definition.
This film's unusual subject matter doesn't entirely explain the various excruciatingly self-conscious performances and prosthetic makeup effects.
Graham's singing, as usual, has a pleasing clarity and warmth; her unself-conscious performances of such masterworks as "Serenity," "The Circus Band," and "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" are delivered with a keen intelligence and a lovely, rounded tone that make us treasure this difficult music all the more.
Uninspired and self-conscious performances from Jonah Hill and James Franco are part of what's wrong with this exasperating and unenlightening film: it's a dramatically unfocused, sluggishly paced real-life story, based on the curious, self-serving testimony of disgraced New York Times journalist Michael Finkel.
Incorporating many Mayan legends, Rolando Klein's glossily picturesque film sometimes has the feeling of a posh, all-expenses-paid weekend in the Yucatán, but, Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, "Mr. Klein does show real ability in obtaining simple, direct, unself-conscious performances from his Indian actors".
But adolescence is a sloppy, ungainly, awkward time, and after a while the bad lighting, graceless editing, sluggish dialogue and self-conscious performances begin to seem like marks of authenticity, as if the movie had been made not just for and about teenagers, but by them.
Setting aside the movie's tediously lame dialogue, self-conscious performances and frequently predicable scares, the narrative's compulsively shifting chronology intermittently manages to engage, although it does little to obscure the distracting shortcomings of both plot and character development".
It was a film that exasperatingly failed to deliver on its promise, featuring a somewhat self-conscious performance from Marling.
Gerlich is the only character with judgment and moral courage, and Mr. Modine's twitchy, self-conscious performance undermines his message.
