rueful

It’s one of many smart, rueful asides in what amounts to a nonjudgmental cinematic essay on the increasingly atomized nature of contemporary living.

“And then,” she says with a small, rueful laugh, “everything was really hard for the next 20 years.”

Their catch-up turns into a rueful airing out of long-simmering resentments in a way that shakes Jay to his core, confirming some of his own worst suspicions about himself.

Who knows the best way to get out from behind a disaster by striking a rueful pose?

Good actors “act the way people used to act,” he says with a rueful nostalgia at odds with his youth.