I worry about what he will encounter -- tender-hearted as he is.
"There was a quaver in her voice that made Alif look up," she writes of a tender encounter between Alif and Dina.
Typical of his exploration of instinct and gesture, his mesmerizing "Annonciation" depicted a tender encounter between the Virgin Mary and an angel portrayed by an androgynous woman.
"Fabrications" is one of Mr. Cunningham's plotless dramatic dances, and it has a strong, even romantic tinge, in its tender encounters.
Confessing all, he relates the highs and bitter lows of his affair with La Vellini, which unfolds as a series of overheated, assaultive (rarely tender) encounters between erotic equals.
Their credible and tender sexual encounter is the calm before the storm, as for Romeo and Juliet.
Contrary to the familiar narrative of a whore degrading herself with a series of seedy customers, "Concussion," which opens Friday, presents encounters that are as tender and poignant as they are erotic — from an overweight virgin who brings out Abby's maternal side, to a fellow P.T.A. mom whose private unrest summons a torrent of mutual passion.
Either way, this zone of intimate, even tender social encounters carefully sheltered from the outside world became a recurring motif in Mr. Parent's work, and is the aspect of it that can make it so moving despite its aggressive qualities.
Wheeldon remains wedded to the notion of the acrobatic duet, with the woman manipulated and hoisted aloft as a kind of pièce montée, but it's striking how fatigued this idiom is beginning to look, especially after Ratmansky's tender, even-handed encounters.
Dazzlingly shot and spiked with tender ironies, this brief encounter between romance and sociology confirms its star Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi as one of the current names to watch.
Already a huge success in its native India, Ritesh Batra's Mumbai-set romance arranges a tender marriage of Brief Encounter with Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner.
