A movie like "Hotel Rwanda," which also indulged in sentimental excess to dramatize mass slaughter, at least provided some background and shading to the events it portrayed.

While Sabina Murray's screenplay is hardly immune to sentimental excess, it does, like Binh himself, succeed through a kind of clumsy stubbornness.

But she interpreted passionate love between men as an "understandable sentimental excess," in the words of the Tchaikovsky biographer Alexander Poznansky.

Neither film is perfect, but at a time of wretched sentimental excess, both show admirable restraint.

Because they are of a piece, the movie's farcical and sentimental excesses work together.

She could interpret passionate love between two men as a sentimental excess, and therefore understandable.

They get Father's Day, invented by President Calvin Coolidge in 1925 to balance the sentimental excesses of Mother's Day.

Few compilations capture the luscious combination of splendor and sentimental excess of Afro-Cuban music as well as this.

The movie's sentimental excesses are forgivable, given the subject matter.

But "because they are of a piece, the movie's farcical and sentimental excesses work together" (Stephen Holden).