With this collection of characters for an anthology set-up, Wiener-Dog is just about the Todd Solondz-iest film you could expect from writer-director Todd Solondz, but there is an interesting formal setup to set it apart from the more standard formula...

| Nov 13, 2023

For lack of a better term, this is a filmmaker being an a**hole because he can and he doesn’t care. You will either champion or loathe that supposed brilliance and brashness.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 26, 2022

Slight and stilted in parts, hilarious and memorable in others, all held together by a brilliant Danny DeVito.

| Jun 9, 2021

As noted, the hostility directed toward the contemporary art and film scene is perhaps the strongest feature of Wiener-Dog. It is especially promising to see the pretensions and essential foulness of identity politics held up to ridicule.

| Feb 11, 2021

Solondz's boldest yet most precise cinematic statement on the futility of seeking meaning yet.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 27, 2020

While every story is razor-sharp, the Danny DeVito segment is particularly poignant in its depiction of film schools' toxic environment...

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 3, 2020

At the end of the day, Solondz puts all the charm and sweetness of the Wiener-Dog on this Daschund, but it is too much of a burden to fill up the 90 minute running time.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 15, 2019

Todd Solondz Once Again Shows His Panache for The Hilariously Morbid With Wiener-Dog.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 2, 2019

Wiener-Dog aims for wry, dry, and dark, but is instead outrageously patronising and horrible.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 2, 2019

Blackly funny at times, it looks terrific - but basically goes to show that life's a b---h. And then you die.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 19, 2018

[Todd Solondz] classified the film as a "comedy about despair." No one could have summed up the film in such an apt manner.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 3, 2018

Wiener-Dog has charm, and it is genuinely funny at times, but its bitter honesty and bleak tone can also be uncomfortable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2018

You'll wish you'd never sat through bleak filmmaker Todd Solondz's funeral procession of exceedingly depressed characters, even if they are played by fine actors.

| Aug 22, 2018

Solondz's dark humor doesn't work, the pacing is extremely slow, and the four stories feel incomplete and oddly thrown together.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Aug 14, 2018

Director Todd Solondz continues to force audiences to stare into stark and unflinching scenes of never-ending personal humiliations. That's his auteurist signature.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 12, 2017

I find little to recommend Wiener-Dog beyond the great cinematographer Ed Lachman's outstanding work in this joyless, even cruel, series of episodes linked together by Wiener, a lovely dachshund, moving from one owner to another.

| Aug 28, 2017

The actors strike the right tragi-comic tone, but the ending is such an ill-judged bummer that it's hard not to feel like the whole thing was a waste of time.

| Aug 18, 2017

It's tempting to dismiss this as directorial misfiring or lack of clarity. And yet there are indelible moments of pathos, pain, and wonder.

| Aug 8, 2017

Todd Solondz is back to his savage best with Wiener-Dog, an episodic movie following the life of a little dachshund.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 8, 2017

I laughed, but I suspect most people won't be "comfortable" with it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 4, 2017