With its elegantly slow pace, extended tracking long-shots, protracted close-ups of faces in profile and boisterous, black-comic scenes in scuzzy bars, it owes something to Béla Tarr, who is thanked in the opening credits.
In The Long Good Friday, he showed the charismatic swagger necessary to fill a cinema screen, though it was the picture's final shot – a protracted close-up of Hoskins's defiant face – that sticks most indelibly in the memory.
The Central Election Commission declared Viktor A. Yushchenko, the opposition leader, the official president-elect, bringing the protracted election closer to an end.
A typical protest effort is more along the lines of Coal River Mountain Watch's protracted fight to close a MTR site and sludge dam located within spitting distance of Marshfork Elementary School.
Aside from the possible shortage of cash the state is facing to pay its bills later this month, the newly adopted $103.4 billion state budget, enacted after a protracted fight over closing a $15 billion deficit that left the plan 85 days overdue, is coming up a few billion dollars short in revenue.
The two battles have been protracted and excruciatingly close, and each has revolved around the subtler points of counting and statistics -- involving the Florida ballots in one case and a handful of ambiguous detections within giant particle-counting devices in the other.
Mutualistic symbioses are defined as the association between unrelated organisms living together in a close, protracted relationship that benefits both partners.
Sources said that despite the letter Virgin Media and ITV's talks have not broken down and while they have been protracted they are now close to the point of a deal.
The conviction of the officer, Francisco Rosario, brought to a close the protracted criminal prosecution of the Louima case, which has resulted in guilty pleas or verdicts involving five other city police officers in the last two years.
Gravel was the last Democrat to represent Alaska in Congress for 28 years, until Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich defeated Stevens, by now an aged, iconic figure who had just been convicted of seven felonies for taking unreported gifts, in a very close and protracted election result in mid-November mid-November 2008
