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.

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

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

Extremely pleasurable and well worth seeing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Much of the film is funny and alive.