Critics reviews

The movie floored me. It was one of my favorite films of its year, 2010, and so profoundly affecting that it forced me to go back through my reactions to all of Solondz's films and second-guess them.

A film I found a considerably deeper and more emotionally devastating experience than its predecessor.

WARTIME, which stands with the first part of STORYTELLING as Solondz's best work, is both his most formally aware and least self-conscious movie... Through its bullshit-less clarity, through its paring away of everything that doesn't relate to its clearly stated ideas, WARTIME becomes both Solondz's most nuanced statement of his artistic intentions (and simple morals) and his most direct and entertaining feature.

Like all of Solondz's films, Wartime teeters, sometimes excruciatingly, between emotional extremes. This tightrope can make audiences squirm with discomfort, but its creator is never deliberately cruel. The scourge of middle-class self-satisfaction, Solondz makes suburban horror movies that are exquisitely precise.

It is all perfectly dreadful and at times appallingly funny.

Solondz doesn’t coddle our prejudices but probes them. His pop-smart title is borrowed from a song on Talking Heads’ greatest album, 1979’s Fear of Music. Not doing a haynes, however, Solondz invents a whole new melody and lyrics (“Time to reflect time/ Time to rethink time”).

The film is replete with all these interesting corresponding dovetails with the earlier film, including the kinds of actors Solondz here chooses to take the "places" of the actors in the first film; and whole scholaraly studies may well be written about all these links, for in the space of five features, Solondz has managed to create a postmodern "omniverse" of which Quentin Tarantino perhaps could not even conceive.

Cruelty is the lifeblood of any Solondz film, and Life During Wartime is no exception, though his newfound austerity makes the brittle gags crack a little harder and gives the forgiveness theme some weight.

Framed against the image of pervasive artificiality, Solondz creates an eccentric metaphor for longing as a manifestation of impossible construction, where only the prospect of redemption, not happiness, lies within our grasp.