Popular reviews

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 7

  One of the best and most maturely written films of the 21st century thus far.

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  Review by Martin ★★★★★ 2

  Great. A career-best performance from Paul Giamatti. He plays a documentary filmmaker who is attempting to examine the life of the modern teenager, although he seemingly misses every important moment and manipulates the result into focussing more on himself than his supposed subjects. I can't help but see this as Todd Solondz's response to American Beauty - there is one delicious, deliberate reference - and it's infinitely more complex, insightful and meaningful. Also has music by Belle & Sebastian.

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  Review by josh rosenthal ★★★★★

  WOW.
  Isn't it funny that fiction sometimes seems like nonfiction, or vice versa? This is Solondz's most mature and honest work yet, peeling back the layers on misconceptions of American youth and adulthood. People treat others badly, sometimes forcefully, and other times in a subtle way. A brilliant masterpiece, and the endings of both segments hit me like a bullet. Todd Solondz makes even the harshest things ironic.
  I'm blown away.

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  Review by {Todd} ★★★★ 2

  "Listen up because here's a lesson... Life's not fair." -Marty,

  - Film Club Ranked: boxd.it/3M2sq

  Meta.

  I love how Solondz does a story about two stories and criticizes the stories within the context of the story. It's an interesting exploration of the process, what works and what doesn't and how different takes on an experience can impact different groups.

  I personally enjoyed Fiction, the first story, a bit more but really feel that both get at important things. I could've watched more students read their stories and get criticized by the group in Fiction, I found the vibe of those scenes to be interesting. Many reviews discuss how intense this film is but I don't find the intensity to be so bad... the film has a few shocking parts but it's fairly grounded for the duration, which I appreciated.

  Really good!

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  Review by ✨ christie ✨ ★★★½ 1

  dry and nasty with some irreconcilable moral conundrums. few films hate performative liberalism as much as this, and the utterly terrifying scenes between the kid and the maid consuelo underscoring the portrait of the middle-class nuclear family, showing what has to be upheld to ensure it, are a great rebuke to films like roma that gloss over the inherent exploitation in the homeowner-maid relationship for the sake of a whitewashed and uncomplicated nostalgia. i have no clue if some of what's in here is defensible but the way it consistently engages with itself as a text and deconstructs issues of ethics and exploitation while at the same time knowing it may also be perpetuating these things due to the failure oftentimes of satire as providing adequate cushioning means it's at least solondz's most interesting film to me.

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  Review by COBRARocky ★★★★

  This would be called alt-right if it came out now.

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  Review by Hey Fella 1

  This sort of radical “honesty” has totally disappeared from cinema. Someone please get a script like this made again. Designed to bother all the right people but with a level of brilliant wit to get around feeling like surface level condescension or juvenile transgression. That short period post Columbine but pre 9/11 is such a fascinating cultural pocket of time for me. I’d say this and Larry Clark’s Bully from the same year would play together pretty well.

  Edit: This really would be treated like some Million Dollar Extreme shit if it came out now. Lol

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  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★★ 5

  Cinematic Time Capsule
  2001 Marathon - Film #63
  

  "It kind of reminded me a little of Faulkner,
  but East Coast and disabled."

  I don’t think anyone challenges me more than Todd Solondz, and the first story of this two-parter definitely does just that.

  Which probably explains why I’m much more drawn to the second story about Scooby and his dysfunctional family. There’s so many wonderful layers here, that I really wish it'd been fleshed out into its own stand-alone film.

  ”Mikey, listen up ‘cause here’s a lesson.
  Life’s... Not... Fair.”

  
  My favorite moments include:

  Scoob’s wonderfully disaffected dead-eye stares, as well as his dream sequence with Conan O’Brien

  Paul Giamatti’s riff on American Beauty which comes complete with the wonderment…

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  Review by tara ★★★★

  me:

  mister solondz:"It was confessional, yet dishonest. Jane pretends to be horrified by the sexuality that she in fact fetishizes. She subsumes herself to the myth of black male potency, but then doesn't follow through. She thinks she 'respects Afro-Americans,' she thinks they're 'cool,' 'exotic,' what a notch he 'd make in her belt, but, of course, it all comes down to mandingo cliché, and he calls her on it. In classic racist tradition she demonizes, then runs for cover. But then, how could she behave otherwise? She's just a spoiled suburban white girl with a Benneton rainbow complex. It's just my opinion, and what do I know... but I think it's a callow piece of writing."

  me: :O

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  Review by ivy wolk ★★★★½

  vi is a wannabe red scare gf

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  Review by 🌻 lindsay 🌻 ★★½ 1

  Film Club #67

  I knew there were 2 versions of this and didn’t think it mattered which one I found until the giant red boxes showed up to censor a scene WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA there were so many other ways to censor that scene pleaseeee

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  Review by george f ★★★★★ 6

  Objectively scattershot, crippled in its final form and way too short. The result hangs together in a way that bemuses me each time. Somehow manages in 50 minutes to outdo what took American Beauty nearly 2 hours to as well.

  In the other section, we get a scathing defense of Todd's earlier film Happiness, and a kind of mission statement about writing. Watch Todd increasingly going out on a limb himself with a medley of new themes to tackle, and himself personally going to the bathroom in a school for teens to find his new subject.

  How many themes can we get up to in less than 90 minutes? It turns out a lot. Definitely in the vein of a…