This required the rearranging of various objects and bits of debris (a pair of ice skates, several scratched Bob Dylan CDs, a camping blanket, some dead leaves), but she was kind, instantly sympathetic to whatever sentimental forces had been preventing me from acquiring a newer, cleaner ride.
As head of MI6, her relationship with her favourite secret agent is a strong, if at times overly-sentimental, narrative force as she helps us delve further into Bond's past.A clumsy third act gives way to a satisfyingly nostalgic ending which brings the franchise full circle.
Theologically, the social gospel has never quite escaped Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of liberal Protestant reform efforts as naïvely optimistic and sentimental about the force of love, unwilling to acknowledge the realities of self-interest, conflict, sin and tragedy.
Until recently, Steven Spielberg was known, among other things, as the king of the happy ending, a wholeheartedly sentimental director who forced us to tears before sending us off on a sugar rush.
And Freddy's story about a magical sunflower root -- a beanstalk in reverse -- leading to her dead parent's new realm has a forced, sentimental quality, as do Boyd's and Freddy's manipulations of the toy husband and wife in Freddy's doll house, tiny figures not nearly sturdy enough to bear the burden of meaning thrust upon them.
If the concept of Thomas McCarthy's film — depressed middle-aged man is uplifted by his friendship with a third-world life force — sounds sentimental and patronizing, it is realized by the director of "The Station Agent" with such grace, humanity and toughness that you embrace it in spite of your qualms.
And in none of these films do the positive elements feel forced or sentimental.
But the movie's notion of two self-centered people ill suited to each other, shedding their defenses and clinging together, feels forced and sentimental.
The pictures meld his innate talents, chiefly for color, with a yearning for transcendence, which had come across as forced or sentimental in earlier work.
They look forced and sentimental, and especially suffer in the company of Ketaki Sheth's mesmerizing images of twins, which are subtle studies in individuality, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew's ravishing yet unprepossessing photographs of Indian landscapes and workaday objects.
