mordant

The steady-paced, often mordantly funny “Pick a Color” explores the immigrant experience, the long tail of trauma, the indignities suffered by low-wage workers and their companion emotions: loneliness, loss and grief.

Via a wild final act, the nihilistic streak seen in many of Mr. Lanthimos’s previous movies emerges again, this time in an especially mordant way.

Stamina is what’s required of those born into an earthly reality, for which, to quote mordant Beckett, there is no cure.

His worst critics perceived this outlook as complacency, something insufficiently mordant for any writer of the long, wicked 20th century.

Martinez scatters ceramic roses across the painting, a mordant honorific to past glory and current hopes.