How to Use in medias res in a Sentence

in medias res

adverb
  • The new Kurt Vile album begins, like many great yarns, in medias res.
    Simon Vozick-Levinson, Rolling Stone, 13 Apr. 2022
  • The film opens in medias res, with lifelong best friends Kevin (Abbott) and Val (Carmichael) about to shoot each other in the head outside of a strip club at 10 in the morning.
    Katie Walsh, Los Angeles Times, 13 May 2022
  • The book begins in medias res, tossing the reader into the postwar mêlée of a rapidly shapeshifting New York.
    Jamie Hood, Vulture, 15 Dec. 2021
  • Doerr likes to start in medias res, and then to go back to the origins of his stories and work forward again (or forward and backward and forward again, in alternation).
    James Wood, The New Yorker, 27 Sep. 2021
  • Yes, most shows that begin in medias res and then jump back are incredibly annoying.
    Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 19 Oct. 2021
  • The pandemic has jammed the churn of social life, pausing human interaction in medias res.
    Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker, 23 Mar. 2020
  • This poem by Lyudmyla Khersonsky begins in medias res with a dead body rather than the death itself, followed by a pile of urgent questions.
    New York Times, 20 May 2022
  • But the loss of greater context feels worrisomely like an in medias res contrivance, a way to ramp up the energy level before the story leisurely unfolds.
    Darren Franich, EW.com, 4 May 2021
  • The in medias res opening at the Kabul airport imposes a sense of inevitability on the documentary.
    Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2022
  • In fact, as critic Alan Sepinwall recently noted in Rolling Stone, a lot of shows have been adopting this technique lately: opening in medias res, then quickly doing a time jump to start filling in the blanks.
    Jen Chaney, Vulture, 31 Mar. 2021
  • Adjusting in medias res in such a way is easily done in Morocco, compared with Europe or America.
    Mark Ellwood, Robb Report, 31 July 2021
  • The writers and director team attempted to tell the story in an interesting way, dropping us in media res into Carol’s life on Hala and keeping both her and the audience in the dark about her former life.
    Kendra James, Harper's BAZAAR, 9 Mar. 2019
  • The effect is to give the audience a little hint of in medias res characterization, before returning to the exposition-heavy Act One.
    Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 24 Apr. 2018
  • Economical as always, the Dardennes kick off the story almost in medias res, with a lot of drama already done, dusted and absorbed into the characters’ background.
    Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter, 24 May 2022
  • The technique, which later won Dubochet and his collaborators a Nobel Prize, transforms water molecules into glasslike ice, in effect stopping life in medias res.
    James Somers, The New Yorker, 28 Feb. 2022
  • Douglas-Fairhurst’s biography, stuffed with a curiosity shop’s worth of literary gossip and Victoriana, begins with the author in medias res.
    Charlie Tyson, The Atlantic, 15 Mar. 2022
  • The resulting transcripts of their conversations, usually beginning in medias res, are masterpieces of comic incoherence and pop up now and again throughout the novel.
    Katherine A. Powers, WSJ, 20 Sep. 2018
  • The in medias res beginning followed by a backward time jump has basically become modern television’s standard storytelling device.
    Jen Chaney, Vulture, 9 July 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'in medias res.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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