Torture is good for getting someone to name any person they know. It is not good for getting useful information....so it's only barely useful if you torture someone weak who knows the name of others you are looking for, and gives them up. That's useless information, even to a monster like Saddam. He would never know if the important names were withheld and only acquaintances named, so would be forced to murder the entire country eventually. Only unknown hermits would be "safe".

Your example assumes dissidents with families would be allowed to have sensitive information.
Clearly it didn't work, too. There was a strong opposition to Saddam he utterly failed to destroy even though he tortured without pause. You create more enemies than you could ever catch by torture. Smart leaders start to wonder if torture for information is worth the cost. (Hint, it's not)

Torture for coercion, a different topic, that often works, but only until the tortured decide death is preferable and try to revolt, which requires you to keep them in N Korea conditions to keep any revolt from winning. Hardly a net gain for even third world nations.

*quality

As someone who watches a LOT of kid's movies with my daughter, I notice an alarming regularity of torture in children's media.

You like Pixar movies, right? Pick a Pixar film, ALL of them have a torture scene. It's bizarre.

It's late, so I'll be succinct about these, but let's define torture as follows:
Torture - noun - the act of deliberately inflicting severe physical or psychological suffering on someone by another as a punishment or in order to fulfill some desire of the torturer or force some action from the victim

Fair?

This is a short list I can think of off the top of my head

Toy Story
Sid tortures Woody "Where are your rebel friends NOW?" as he burns his forehead

Toy Story 2
Stinky Pete tortures Woody "You can go to Japan together or in pieces. Now GET IN THE BOX!"

Toy Story 3
Buzz gets put in the "time-out chair" with a burlap bag put over his head and is forced to turn on his friends

Monster's Inc.
Mike is put in the "scream extractor" and is interrogated "Where's the kid?" as the extractor inches towards his face.

Wreck it Ralph
Ralph asks "What's going on in this candy coated Heart of Darkness?" Sour Bill tries to run away but Ralph picks him up and threatens to lick him. "I'll take it to my grave" "Fair enough" and Ralph pops Sour Bill in his mouth "Had enough?" "OKAY OKAY I'LL TALK!"

Cars 2
The green-gasoline in his tank, the spy car is put in front of the radiation shooting camera and is interrogated about who the other spy is and who has the information about the green gas he recovered that could unravel their plan to get revenge for being discriminated against for being "lemons." His engine explodes (he's killed?) in spite of giving up the information.

The Incredibles
Mr. Incredible is restrained via some black goop and asked about his family's whereabouts on the island.

Finding Nemo
Near the end of the film when Dory finds Nemo but Marlin has wandered off thinking Nemo was dead, they need to know which way Marlin went and come across the little crabs sitting on the pipe "heyyyyyyyyheyyyyyyyyyyheyyyyyyyy" "Yeah I saw where he went, but I'm not telling you, and there's no way you're gonna make me." Dory lifts him up and threatens to feed him to the seagulls sitting on a small rock until he starts screaming "OKAY ILL TALK ILL TALK HE WENT TO THE FISHING GROUNDS!!!"

I could go on, but I hope to make this simple point:
These films do NOT have to include a torture scene. It's simply odd to me that it appears so often, instilling the idea early on that torture works for getting information or cooperation out of people.

Finally, I point to one of many pieces of research on the matter https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325643/

She clearly points out the ability of CONGRESS to satisfy their own self interest and the laws (that they write) that do nothing to stop loopholes of self enrichment and then EXPLAINS HOW THEY ARE HELD TO a higher standard than that of the OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT AND HIS CADRE OF SWAMP MONSTERS are held to.

And yet she somehow KNOWS that Trump ( POTUS of 2 years with ALL outside big money funding, SOME FROM OUTSIDE THE COUNTRY AND LAW) has been more GUILTY OF MALFEASANCE than those she sits with.

FTFY

YES! Whoever invented motion smoothing is a monster. It's the worst thing to happen to cinema since colorization. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't turned on by default, which means that a whole bunch of people who aren't tech-savvy wind up leaving it on and then wonder why movies look so weird.

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I don't understand what's so difficult to understand about this. Take care of all people, and they won't turn into the monsters that we're so afraid of, they become more productive members of society since they aren't busy scrambling to survive, and it costs less than dealing with the ramifications of NOT taking care of them.

I concur. He's definitely a loose cannon. Free range. Monster Is Loose. Real life Captain Quint.

Kingpin was a great villain, but I'm not sure I'd call him empathetic. You certainly see a human side to him, but he doesn't have any kind of goal the audience can get behind.

In fact, it's the disconnect between the urbane, kind man he is with his girlfriend and the ruthless, sadistic monster that makes him interesting.

Looks like an uglier version of the Monster Miata.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2BSSy7fxOc

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Reminds me of those monsters from A Quiet Place, if they were just cute and thirsty.