Like their very names, Ms Wiggins's characters never quite dispel a whiff of contrivance.
Obama's post-partisan pragmatism, he has confirmed with his inaugural address, was only a useful political contrivance.
While that really did happen to "Your Show of Shows, " it feels like a contrivance, an excuse for comedy.
Intangibles are an accounting contrivance that resembles a cosmic black hole--we know it exists but understand little of its inner workings.
If there is one criticism of this book, it is that there is an occasional sense of strain, of intellectual contrivance.
And the movie itself shades from coldness and contrivance into a story as touching and mysterious as anything Kieslowski has ever made.
The whole plot is a pretty dumb contrivance, but, if you want to be picky, that's exactly what a plot always is.
This lovely illuminant contrivance is perhaps symbolic of that golden age.
But, without a hint of contrivance, Mr Gursky makes it strange.
For one thing, against the contrivance of the lead opinion there is the clarity of a united dissent that we now understand started out as a majority view with Justice Roberts's support.
The story's climax turns out to be anticlimactic, a predictable contrivance that pits the countess, for the last time, against Chertkov, who wants to manage Tolstoy's death as he managed his life.
WSJ: The Last Station and The Book of Eli | Review by Joe Morgenstern
An amazingly successful contrivance: this Agatha Christie-style house-party murder mystery, set in 1932, plants itself deep into social reality and achieves the kind of candor about class and sex that Christie would never have been capable of.
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