How to Use potboiler in a Sentence

potboiler

noun
Definition of potboilernext
  • Hands of the Ripper is a potboiler in the truest sense of the word.
    — Declan Gallagher, EW.com, 3 Nov. 2022
  • All of which isn’t to make The Beguiled sound like a campy potboiler.
    — Hillary Busis, VanityFair.com, 22 June 2017
  • His writing can be a bit all over the map, but this new potboiler is just nifty fun.
    — Marshall Heyman, Vulture, 21 Apr. 2021
  • The story of Garfield’s death is something of a potboiler.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 25 Jan. 2018
  • Yet, his movies feel like more than just cliché potboilers.
    — Adam Rogers, WIRED, 6 July 2017
  • But then Tina Brown, the writer making the comment in her new royal potboiler, is not, in that sense, nice.
    — Anna Mundow, WSJ, 22 Apr. 2022
  • But Jaffe did not set out to write a frivolous potboiler.
    — Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 8 Mar. 2023
  • To German prosecutors, Dr. Berger is an archetype straight out of a potboiler: the revered enforcer who went to the dark side.
    — David Segal, New York Times, 23 Jan. 2020
  • Published in 1987, Mahmoody’s pulp memoir had all the makings of a potboiler.
    — Audrey Clare Farley, The New Republic, 25 Aug. 2021
  • In the midst of his professional renaissance, Downey met his future wife on the set of 2003's potboiler Gothika.
    — Declan Gallagher, EW.com, 13 July 2023
  • But around 1890, with the rise of naturalism, critics soured on the potboilers that made her flamboyance shine.
    — Rachel Shteir, WSJ, 23 Aug. 2018
  • Collins was a kind of potboiler Proust, writing about Hollywood bashes in her diaries, tart excerpts of which are read in voice-over.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 23 June 2021
  • What happened to her career has become the great potboiler mystery of tennis.
    — Jon Wertheim, SI.com, 22 Aug. 2019
  • This sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller or a paperback potboiler in which the world is heading for conflagration.
    — The Economist, 7 Sep. 2017
  • The putative author of this potboiler is one Anya Partridge.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 24 June 2021
  • Bonestell also illustrated Project Mars, a 1948 potboiler novel by von Braun that imagined the first trip to the red planet and what comes next.
    — David Beers, The New Republic, 7 Dec. 2020
  • As a young man, Bourgoin resembled a character out of a potboiler.
    — Lauren Collins, The New Yorker, 4 Apr. 2022
  • Taking the form of a potboiler murder mystery, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is richly imagined.
    — Jack Butler, National Review, 4 Nov. 2023
  • And the main purveyor of inappropriateness in this potboiler isn’t an adult film star, amazingly, but the president of the United States.
    — Brian Chasnoff, San Antonio Express-News, 24 Apr. 2018
  • Unlike that wife, Hitler at least gets some grudging respect and decent dialogue in this potboiler about the diplomatic efforts to stop Germany.
    — New York Times, 20 Jan. 2022
  • How to Blow Up a Pipeline could have become a dour, moralistic exercise or a potboiler devoid of politics.
    — Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 8 Apr. 2023
  • And pivoting from the intimacy of Creed to a generation-spanning family epic straight out of a potboiler novel is just a weird call all around.
    — Todd Vanderwerff, Vox, 21 Nov. 2018
  • Get ready to simmer in the latest potboiler from prolific creator Taylor Sheridan.
    — Lynette Rice, EW.com, 3 Dec. 2021
  • Perhaps the Met carefully planned this deep dive into verismo, that blood-and-guts, heart-on-sleeve, homicidally inclined genre of Italian potboiler that flourished around the turn of the 20th century.
    — Zachary Woolfe, New York Times, 9 Jan. 2018
  • What distinguishes the plot from a potboiler Western is the vivid portrayal of Joshua’s transformation.
    — Tim Diovanni, Dallas News, 17 Aug. 2021
  • And that’s just it: Of all the recent dramatic work that could be supported, why does a minor, conventional potboiler merit this singular kind of showcase?
    — Peter Marks, Washington Post, 13 June 2019
  • The men were involved in an industry that produced racy potboilers about the mainland’s Communist Party leadership.
    — Raymond Zhong, New York Times, 15 Aug. 2019
  • This ancient political thriller has all the ingredients of a modern-day potboiler.
    — Anand Neelakanthan, Quartz India, 20 Dec. 2019
  • Their conflict centered on the perennials of business potboilers, namely power and money.
    — David Segal, New York Times, 4 Feb. 2018
  • But if the plot has too many potboiler elements, the characters are considerably more convincing in their disturbed emotions.
    — Kenneth Turan, chicagotribune.com, 8 June 2017

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

Last Updated: