impassivity

Poker face may have helped lend legitimacy to legions of men who ran for office before her, but despite 235 years of presidential stoicism across 46 leaders, Harris does not draw her power from impassivity.

Detours into his own family history, Indonesian mythology, the mindset of both predator and prey and his own motives as a journalist don’t just help illuminate his primary target; they also strip away layers of impassivity and turn the book into a more visceral experience.

With almost documentarylike impassivity, Ford and his cinematographer, Jeff Bierman, scrutinize Emily with neither sympathy nor censure, her close-ups flickering equally between anxiety and resolve.

Getting a read on Neil’s melancholic impassivity becomes especially tension-filled when Franco introduces a couple of shocking, violent incidents that juice “Sundown” beyond its protagonist’s initial deception, disrupting the initial depiction of sun-baked Acapulco as an escape and nudging the already simmering theme of mortality to the forefront.

And while the agonizing stillness of Brünnhilde and especially Wotan in their long final scene is effective in theory, Rose and Jones do not quite sell his endless impassivity, and the tension sometimes slackens.