Salieri can recognize genius perfectly. What destroys him is believing Mozart's gift is God's personal judgment against him.

Carlito changes before he learns how to protect that change. Every exception gives the old life another claim on the future he wants.

Jerry wants one dishonest shortcut. The crime keeps growing because everyone involved mistakes control for something they still possess.

Forrest cannot control history or Jenny. His life gains shape through constancy, grief, and the duties he accepts when they finally arrive.

Chris survives because he finally trusts what he sees: admiration can conceal possession, and politeness can make danger easier to ignore.

Maximus loses everything except the habits that made him honorable. Revenge carries him forward, while power cannot give Commodus what he wants most.

Versailles gives Marie everything except a self she can safely inhabit, so pleasure becomes refuge until history breaks through the walls.

Dani finds people who will feel her pain with her. Their embrace becomes terrifying because belonging and surrender slowly become the same thing.

Moss thinks skill can keep him ahead of consequence. Chigurh calls his choices fate, while Bell grows old trying to understand the violence.

Ofelia's fantasy does not erase the violence around her. It gives her a language for refusing the kind of obedience Vidal demands.

Teddy builds a world that lets him hunt a crime instead of face his own. The final choice turns denial into something darker: a sentence he chooses.

Evan keeps rewriting the past to save the people he loves. Each rescue creates a new wound, until control itself becomes the thing he must surrender.

Michael enters the family to protect it and ends by remaking himself in its image. The final victory costs the identity he once claimed was his own.

John Coffey's innocence ends what Paul could pretend about justice. Mercy enters the prison, and obedience still carries a moral cost.

Katniss survives by learning the Capitol's script without fully surrendering to it. Mercy turns performance into a threat the state cannot easily contain.

Katniss survives the arena only to discover that victory has made her more useful to the Capitol, and more dangerous when she refuses its script.

Algren enters the samurai village wanting death and finds a discipline that makes life possible. His redemption begins as their world is ending.

Mendoza discovers that grace can change a man without repairing his past. The mission then forces faith to answer what it will do when power says leave.