stagy

This framing device, which has the clunky air of a middlebrow play, provides a convenient if stagy way of breaking down his biography into manageable parts.

With the exception of James Gray’s more cinematically composed “Armageddon Time,” the movies have offered simple, stagy showcases for Hopkins, a lion in winter.

An ambitious period piece given an appropriately vintage look by the cinematographer Robert Patrick Stern, “Brooklyn 45” is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy.

But these images are also stagy and contrived, as if his birds are players on a stage, dramatically illuminated in the glow of gaslight.

Corden’s background in theater certainly helped him turn gimmicks into stagy events with lasting power.