Dame Judi Dench, whose eyesight is said to be failing, never fails to have a twinkle of humor that at any moment could break into helpless giggles.
This small change never fails to have a brightening, energizing impact.
Alas, at the crucial moment he fails to have this insight.
His assassins invite him to dinner and feed him cyanide, which fails to have the desired effect.
In "2.5-Minute Ride," the narrator's train of thought gets progressively further derailed as her father fails to have the expected response to Auschwitz.
The power struggle among the three men takes various wordy, wearisome turns, in a script that tries and fails to have fun with semantics.
And yet it is precisely in telling us how he fails to have the proper, resonant, satisfying response that Aciman achieves his clearest note of authenticity.
One goes to the Olympic host country, if it fails to have a gymnast place in the top 20 at the world championships.
The darker drama being played out distracts us from Plum's own story so that the twist, when it comes, fails to have the impact it should.
In it the united forces of the past are so strong that the city fails to have a present; its people, with the rarest exceptions, are characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through".
The Nurse becomes very Clytemnestra-like as her black magic fails to have the desired effect: just before she is banished from the scene, the orchestra screams one of the bitonal chords of "Elektra".
