In Act II, when Grimes admits that he poses a danger to his apprentices, he exclaims, in a jaggedly descending line, "God have mercy upon me!" Anthony Dean Griffey, in the title role, made it an agonized cry, the St . Louisbrass and wind framing him with cold, savage timbres.
In Crawford, self-contempt and courage were inseparable — each spurred the other — and the combination made her an agonized performer, overearnest, overexplicit, and discomforting but enthralling for those who trusted her to act out and transcend their own dilemmas.
Very little screen time is devoted to that judicial battle, but its brisk decisiveness makes for an agonized contrast with the state of things today.
Needless to say, an artist so invested in mood is bound to have an agonized relationship with country radio, generally the primary engine of industry success.
For several minutes the woman lay on the ground as onlookers made increasingly agonized demands until an ambulance arrived and the woman was placed inside.
Ernst Lubitsch, who left Berlin for Hollywood in the early twenties, took a break from frothy sex comedies in 1932 to make "Broken Lullaby," an agonized First World War drama.
It's also an agonized meta-movie about the inability to make a movie, but it ultimately unspools the Ouroboros of reflexivity by topping itself with reflexivity — a scene in which Swanberg hears the criticism of his project from his wife, Kris, as they're dandling their baby boy.
With other people present, she can't make a scene, and yet the scene is made, to perfection, by the sudden fall of her face, and by her agonized efforts to crank it back up to a smile.
Though the group had intended to make a harder-rocking album after the softer textures of Out of Time, the somber Automatic for the People "[seemed] to move at an even more agonized crawl", according to Melody Maker.
