Happy Endings Reviews

The drama never feels more than a well-shot TV soap. Worse is Roos' tragic insistence on text inserts to explain every motivation, making the whole thing look like a fatal cross between Queer As Folk and VH1's Pop Up Video.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Potent social satire mixes with multiple characters incapable of telling the truth, especially to themselves, in writer/director Don Roos' enjoyable comedy of deception and dysfunction.

Full Review | Original Score: B

There's a little fanciful magic to spread over this flighty romance on the run, or at least enough to take that hackneyed notion of the happy ending, and fashion something fresh and new.

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Rarely has a film started so brilliantly and then so willfully shot itself directly in the foot.

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A quirky and often enjoyable film about dysfunctional relationships, Happy Endings brings together separate stories about complicated characters who are all trying to deal with the truth.

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The cast is a who's who, a who's not, and a who might one day be; they're the best part of a picture that is unnecessarily complex.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Happy Endings is two-thirds of a really good film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

The most satisfying film of the year.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

An unsuccessful attempt is made to tie all these loose threads together into one coherent story.

Full Review | Original Score: C

...an uneven, sometimes rambling journey that elicits mostly false emotion with regard to the payoff suggested by its title.

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Lisa Kudrow's sporting serious brown hair. Tom Arnold's wearing a rare dramatic frown. So we know Happy Endings isn't likely to be a frivolous comedy.

| Original Score: 3/4

Intriguing but overlong and indulgent, the work of a writer too in love with his characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Serves as a relaunching pad for the magical talents of Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jude.

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...although it's generally entertaining throughout, Happy Endings just doesn't have the emotional impact that Roos is clearly striving for.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Overstuffed with characters and contrivances.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Roos's movie is so aggressively pleased with itself it leaves you feeling it doesn't even need an audience.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

Roos does better at imparting a sense of the striving that's inherent to L.A., letting us know, through the characters' living situations, that not everyone shares in the town's magic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

It isn't quite right to call Happy Endings a comedy, although the film does have plenty of dark humour. It's more of an urban fairy tale, and a positive urban fairy tale about the pursuit of love.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

[It] feels like Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia for adolescents.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Even more cynical than the characters in Happy Endings is how Roos treats them in the final reel.

| Original Score: 2.5/4