Life During Wartime

Directed by Todd Solondz

(R)

**

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If Todd Solondz’s latest film has a message, it’s that the director should have stopped making movies after 1998, said Keith Phipps in the A.V. Club. That year, he released Happiness, a “bleak, funny, difficult-to-dismiss depiction” of a dysfunctional Jewish family. Since then, the writer-director’s “sharp, dark wit” has diminished with every new project. Films such as 2004’s Palindromes “felt like epilogues” to his earlier work, and Life During Wartime is no different. Though a kind of sequel to Happiness, this film marks a step forward for Solondz, said Deborah Young in The Hollywood Reporter. Many characters from the earlier film return (played by different actors), and this time Solondz concentrates on an 11-year-old boy who learns that his father isn’t dead but actually alive, in jail for child molestation, and about to be released. Solondz’s “heady mix of deadpan humor” touches on such dicey subjects as race, pedophilia, and terrorism. You have to admire the way the director “picks and picks at themes that consume him,” said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. Life During Wartime may not be for everyone, but Solondz “doesn’t care who stays and who leaves” the theater.