Life During Wartime
An 11-year-old boy learns that his father isn’t dead, but alive and about to be released from jail, where he'd been incarcerated for child molestation.
Directed by Todd Solondz
(R)
**
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Violet Affleck and healthy indoor air
Teenager has accused older generations of 'neglect of the highest order' on Long Covid
-
Shutdown: Democrats stand firm, at a cost
Feature With Trump refusing to negotiate, Democrats’ fight over health care could push the government toward a shutdown
-
TikTok: A little help from Trump’s friends
Feature Trump’s new TikTok deal would hand the app over to 'his billionaire allies,' ignoring national security concerns