A protege of Andrei Tarkov-sky-who got the thoroughly out-of-favor young director his first job, at Lenfilm Studio-Sokurov was both maximalist in technique and gratingly avantgarde, from his earliest feature film, The Lonely Voice of Man (1978/87), through the 1988 Days of Eclipse.

But as love grows, familiar Wong flourishes--"gratingly" repeated pop-song snippets, scenes restarted from scratch, unpredictable slo-mo and freeze-frame effects--appear with increasing frequency.

In both the book and this article, the "discovery" of the "key" to the relationship is unfolded in a gratingly self-congratulatory manner, but the new evidence the article presents is fairly thin.

Rightfrom the word go, former Tory MP Brandreth seemed to be out to ensure the audience at home had the worst half-hour of their lives, immediately becoming so gratingly overbearing and heart-stoppingly unfunny that you could almost see the crimson waves of hatred spewing forth from the other contestants.

The gratingly chirpy commercial was soon voted one of the most annoying on the telly and the challenge to viewers became resisting the overwhelming urge to hurl the box out the window whenever it came on.BRAD PITT

Dreading a non-fiction version of chick lit, I guessed it would be packed with gratingly motivational, pseudo-feminist, self-help guff.

As in, "Let's chuck in Nessa asking, in her gratingly dull and deadpan way, 'What's occurring?' or 'What's appertaining?' a few times, and Gavin (Mathew Horne), Smithy and Co.

Yet the aspects of the performance that linger most are not the fluttering mannerisms or the gratingly high-pitched voice, but rather the quietly moving exchanges with Catherine Keener as Capote's grounded friend.

Jose Mari Chan's ubiquitous crooning about sparkling lights and stardust and the love we have for Jesus sounds gratingly insipid amid the wailing of widows and orphans and the rumble of a collapsing democracy.

His face remains wooden as he rattles off statistics about his own success rate, but the same couldn't be said about Fadnis, who's gratingly screechy and hysterical in most scenes.

Awkwardly staged, sluggishly paced, and gratingly scored, Late Bloomers is not without its effective moments.

It surprises me a little to find myself rising to the defense of American journalism, but Susan Douglas's eulogy of the British media Pundit Watch, October issue) was just too familiar-sounding, and too gratingly biased, to let slide.