This is an unabashedly conventional melodrama.

It is, on one level, a conventional domestic melodrama, filled with staggered revelations of family secrets and confessional outpourings of long-suppressed emotions.

But his story is not the conventional melodrama of an athlete who falls apart after his dream is dashed.

It is a conventional melodrama directed by Oscar Micheaux.

The background of the film, painfully understated by the weight of the conventional melodrama imposed on it, is about martyrdom.

After the teasing dazzle of the first act, the second often feels like conventional melodrama, thematically apt but emotionally unsatisfying.

On the surface it is a conventional melodrama: the Tsar is coming to Paris's fashionable Studio Angele to be photographed.

The suspense is that of a conventional melodrama: Will Chiltern defy Mrs. Cheveley in the name of truth?

Staged by Janice Honeyman, the play is on one level a conventional domestic melodrama, filled with staggered revelations of family secrets.

It is pointless to criticize the opera's unfaithfulness to the original, which becomes merely an excuse for a conventional mid-19th-century melodrama.