The supporting actors are appealing despite the perfunctoriness of their roles.

She held out her cheek to Seaton, and he kissed it with obvious perfunctoriness.

"Good morning, Van," he greeted me, with impatient perfunctoriness.

Given the reality of all-around perfunctoriness, it is a most hapless non-event.

Recently we have begun to notice the perfunctoriness of the endings of Jane Austen's novels.

There is a certain perfunctoriness in the dispensing of all this plot, and in the show's interpolated proto-feminist cheerleading.

Apathy (also called impassivity or perfunctoriness) is a state of indifference, or the suppression of emotions such as concern, excitement, motivation and passion.

The film's habit of editing together various wife and girlfriend scenes serves less to underscore a prevailing theme than to show up the perfunctoriness of half the story.

Never since the Yankees began winning World Series titles in 1923 with a perfunctoriness that became an autumn habit had this storied franchise waited so long between victories.

The characters never seem to come by their big moments of revelation honestly, and the sentimentality has the stickiness and perfunctoriness of a recently completed by-the-numbers oil painting.

His principal objective appears to be to create dialogue that jibes with the internal stories of Ms. Griffin's songs, and the strain and a certain perfunctoriness are evident.

His orthodoxy did not prevent him from admitting the truth of the claims of the Pietists concerning the prevailing perfunctoriness of religious life, which he ascribed to the negligence of orthodox pastors.

Mozart on Period Instruments Alice Tully Hall What bothered one listener about the Mozart binge last year was not so much the overwhelming weight of it all as the perfunctoriness with which many programs were assembled.

Among the things that work least well are the occasional perfunctoriness of the editing, the breakneck way in which information is sometimes heaped upon the audience, a few gaps in the exposition and, oddly enough, the story's much awaited, slightly softened denouement.

Ms. Gems, a veteran of biodrama ("Piaf," "Stanley",) has crammed all this in with dutiful, checklist perfunctoriness, and it is hard for Ms. Phillips or Mr. Mathias to generate a natural flow.

The Bolshoi's dancers demonstrate no connection with either Tchaikovsky's ravishing score or Balanchine's lilting steps, approaching the piece with the perfunctoriness of a morning warm-up and never suggesting that these are beings from some parallel and far more elegant universe.

A Question of Spirit While few have questioned the high level of Mr. Mehta's technical command of his craft, there have been persistent critical complaints about the seeming perfunctoriness and indifference with which he approaches the bulk of his conducting assignments.

She opened with the "Moonlight" Sonata (the famous first movement only), presumably trying to set a mood but instead establishing a tone: one of perfunctoriness, which was furthered by a late program change, with the lofty Opus 101 Sonata dropped from the end.

Bernard McWilliams, a violist making his New York debut on Saturday evening in Weill Recital Hall, presented a program that though enterprising, with two transcriptions of his own, was ungenerous almost to the point of perfunctoriness, providing less than an hour of music.

One accepts, of course, that the sheer volume and intractability of the subject matter render resort to delegated legislation to some degree inevitable; but, by the same token, those very factors of volume and intractability almost necessarily involve a degree of perfunctoriness in parliamentary scrutiny.

Some of these cliches can probably be laid at the door of the equally experienced translator, John Glad, for whom this is an unusually leaden-footed performance: he too, it seems, has been infected by the perfunctoriness of the whole enterprise (he did a much better job as co-translator of "Generations of Winter").