Happy Endings

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

It's possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

Why aren't there more American movies like this? I mean smart, unpretentious, sophisticated, un-condescending and cheap.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

Happy Endings is unabashedly sentimental (cheekily couched in a black-comic guise), with Roos acting as a sort of benevolent god over his characters.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

Extremely pleasurable and well worth seeing.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The film is entertaining if contrived. It is not as cleverly structured as Roos' best ensemble comedy, "The Opposite of Sex," which also co-starred Kudrow. But it does have humorous moments.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

There are marvelous moments and dull ones. The best asset is first-rate acting; the worst liability is Roos's overuse of cinematic gimmicks.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Bills itself as a comedy but unfolds as the drollest of dramas, an extended-family album for the age of abortion, adoption and donor sperm. It's a cheeky story about turning the other cheek.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

Complicated? Yes. Potentially heavy? Sure. But it's also highly engrossing and, in a dark way, ultimately rather sweet.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

A real audience pleaser, so long as that audience is mentally agile and adult, for it comes at you from odd angles and features three distinct story lines and 10 main characters.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

When all is said and done, Roos treats his characters and his audience to an unblushingly sentimental, conciliatory ending of the kind that ordinarily makes me feel as though I'm being played for a sucker. I wept on demand and went home happy.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The acting in this ensemble is of such a high order that the movie simply takes you in and makes you feel these lives as real.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Roos' sly, throwaway insights into the ways people deceive and undermine themselves are both ruefully funny and painfully on the mark.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's fine ensemble work, but you nevertheless grow itchy wishing Roos had focused it a little better.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Much of the film is funny and alive.

Chicago Tribune Allison Benedikt

Roos does an admirable job balancing the tragedy and comedy, but he bogs down every character with so much baggage that it's impossible to render them honestly without the captions.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The cast is strong. Kudrow and Gyllenhaal provide the movie's emotional center.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Maintains a certain level of intrigue, and occasionally bursts into life.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Way too long, too convoluted and too peppered with title cards...Even so, it's hard to dislike Don Roos' "Magnolia"-inspired triptych of interconnected comic tales about lies, sex and video.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Some of the characters are interesting, but their situations are not.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The film rambles, but rambling with the mischievous Roos is still a tricky and winning proposition.

Film Threat Jeremy Mathews

Roos creates a slate of interesting characters who find themselves in unexpected situations that lead to realistic--and in their own way, happy--endings.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

There are pleasing outcomes for almost everyone in Happy Endings, and that's not good news.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

As Frank, a widower who falls for his son's conniving would-be girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Arnold is a revelation.

Variety Todd McCarthy

A protracted parade of woefully familiar motifs from the Amerindie playbook, Happy Endings comes off like an undernourished Paul Thomas Anderson wannabe.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

There aren't a lot of laughs in Happy Endings, and those that sneak in are pretty wry. There's no comedic snap either, and while that seems not to be the point, humor might have helped with the film's often-sluggish pacing.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The themes are about the power and consequences of sex, but the stories are too glib and episodic to leave any impression.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

A tart-coated sugar pill of a movie.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

The kind of self-conscious puzzle picture in which characters behave in ways that serve the plot but in no way resemble things that actual human beings would be likely to do.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The sensibility is Southern California Witless, and the jokey intertitles that periodically take up half the 'Scope frames ("This is a comedy. Sort of.") are even more smarmy than the characters.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

Village Voice Ben Kenigsberg

Roos forecasts and explains every development with a title card, a device not unlike having someone yammering in your ear throughout the entire feature run time. In a more self-effacing director's commentary, he might have asked us, at least, to forgive the pun.