My primary desideratum for an approach to filmic emotions was a desire to explain the specific emotional appeals of particular films. I also called for an approach that could analyze a wide range of films and that encouraged critics to examine the full range of cinematic signification. By producing new interpretations of the emotional appeals of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters, Local Hero, Stranger than Paradise, Casablanca, Strike, A Day in the Country, The Lower Depths, The Joy Luck Club, and Stella Dallas, I have demonstrated the mood-cue approach's capacity to explain such a broad range of filmic appeals using both local and global structures. By examining how films such as Local Hero, The Lower Depths, and A Day in the Country change their emotional appeals, I have also shown how the mood-cue approach can satisfy the desideratum for an explanation of how filmic emotions change over time. Analyzing Strike, The Lower Depths, and The Joy Luck Club, I have demonstrated several ways in which this approach can discuss a film's failure to evoke emotion.

Along the way, this approach has also produced several neologisms that may be useful in future analysis of film's emotional appeals, thus satisfying one of the desiderata that called for such terminology. In addition to the basic terms of the approach (cues, mood), I have proposed other terms as explanatory mechanisms for particular texts, for example, emotion markers, feeling for or with, forward looking and rear driven, sparsely and densely informative texts.