Solondz loves revisiting his creations (he did it in Life During Wartime and, glancingly, Palindromes). Alas, he never improves on the originals.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 14, 2016

Wiener-Dog is a mordantly funny tour of the human condition seen from the low-slung position of a sausage dog.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 12, 2016

It is a movie with a hard core of disillusionment.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 12, 2016

Wiener-Dog sees Solondz on top form.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 11, 2016

There's every chance you'll hate it. I'm not convinced I don't. But this is a film that, once seen, you'll always know you've seen and, in the most disquieting way, it feels as if it has somehow seen you too.

| Aug 11, 2016

Solondz' notorious misanthropy ... remains fully in force ...

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 11, 2016

The film is more successful as an exercise in style than it is as a gripping observation of the real world.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 11, 2016

The film's own bitter beauty is that the four characters, or character sets, are really one, and are really us. We're watching the ages of Every(wo)man.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 4, 2016

This is a gentler, less confrontational Solondz. It makes you laugh, but probably won't leave you reeling after.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 4, 2016

The best story involves Danny DeVito as a screenwriting teacher, which allows Solondz, an adjunct professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, to vent his spleen at the ignorance and arrogance of his students.

| Jul 14, 2016

It's heavy material, but Solondz shapes it all into an epic joke about the folly of living a good life.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 8, 2016

Even Gerwig, who could light up a darkened cavern simply with her walk, is wasted under Solondz' mirthless direction. She shuffles along with her shoulders slumped, like all characters in Solondz' movies.

| Original Score: D | Jul 8, 2016

Sic transit gloria mundi for the beleaguered title pooch of Todd Solondz's latest societal eyeballing, which leashes a dog's life to human absurdity.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 7, 2016

It takes a callused soul not to dread the inevitable, and it takes an exceptional film to earn that discomfort from its audience. This film is not exceptional.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 7, 2016

At a time when even niche films are virtually scrubbed clean of any traces of eccentricity, Solondz's downbeat vision of humanity is downright refreshing.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 7, 2016

Viewers wary of the director's reputation as a savage satirist will be pleasantly surprised by the deeply felt humanism in Weiner-Dog.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 1, 2016

The style tends toward the artificial and the humor toward the archly droll, but the stories themselves are perfectly sincere.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 30, 2016

You wouldn't exactly call the movie a thrill, but it's curiously engrossing all the same.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 30, 2016

As he gets older, Todd Solondz outgrows the cheap shocks and easy nihilism and stumbles toward a mellow misanthropy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 30, 2016

In the end, trying to compartmentalize this movie in some neat fashion is folly. This is Todd Solondz and, refreshingly enough, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 30, 2016