Words similar to pretensions

Example sentences for: pretensions

How can you use “pretensions” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:

Tina and the Weinsteins all have highbrow pretensions but feel no shame in embracing pop culture.
It "plays like a dead battery disguised as an objet d'art " (Jay Carr, the Boston Globe ). They are especially irked by the movie's artsy pretensions (Pip is turned into a tortured painter) and earnestness (its un-Dickensian fulminations about undying love), as well as flat performances by Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow.
The sets were cheesy, the music was awful 1980s synth-pop, and despite their martial-arts pretensions, the routines felt more like aerobics in disguise than like kung fu.
2) China's democratic pretensions are a joke.
He had performed alongside Charlie Parker, led a marvelous quintet with John Coltrane, and collaborated with Gil Evans on such jazz orchestral arrangements as Sketches of Spain and Porgy and Bess . Davis' 1959 sextet recording, Kind of Blue , became, with its haikulike lyricism, synonymous with cool and provided a soundtrack for nearly every party with intellectual pretensions.