mawkish

adj

1. Excessively or falsely sentimental; showing a sickly excess of sentiment.

   “Some of Mr. Williams’s performances were criticized for a mawkish sentimentality, like “Patch Adams,” a 1998 film that once again cast him as a good-hearted doctor, and “Bicentennial Man,” a 1999 science-fiction feature in which he played an android.”

   “I found [Christoph] Buchel’s appropriation of the boat in which so many migrants lost their lives a vile and mawkish spectacle in the context of the biennale.”

   “The tabloids branded him James Hewitt forevermore as the “love rat,” and Pasternak was excoriated for peddling mawkish fantasy.”

   “After all, a vague, archaic, mostly harmless tradition fraught with pomp and ceremony and mawkish self-aggrandising with a bit of royalty thrown in is about the most British thing imaginable and would never happen in a boring sensible country like Germany.”

2. (archaic, dialectal)Feeling sick, queasy.
3. (archaic)Sickening or insipid in taste or smell.