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90Solondz's most waywardly endearing film - his gentlest triumph.
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90You could never call Solondz a humanist, but he achieves something I've never seen elsewhere: compassionate revulsion.
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90Mr. Solondz brilliantly - triumphantly - turns this impression on its head, transforming what might have been an exercise in easy satirical cruelty into a tremendously moving argument for the necessity of compassion.
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88Someone like Abe could only prevail through the powers of denial and optimistic wishing, and Solondz makes that happen, as the film gradually slips into fantasy.
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Jun 7, 201285While skipping the more shocking turns of something like "Happiness," Dark Horse does feel like a return to the fearless darkness of those earlier films, a tale of a loser who's fully drawn but never allowed to be lovable.
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80Reality and fantasy become increasingly blurred. And if you want to enjoy Dark Horse, you're just going to have to go with it.
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80Less confrontational than most Solondz movies, in that it refrains from violence or kink, but still unsettling and affecting.
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80Abe is blustery and self-pitying, but, with Solondz's new tender mercies fully engaged, Gelber makes you feel close to a guy for whom nothing was ever meant to go right.
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75There's a streak of compassion in Dark Horse, a sincere empathy for a thoroughly detestable man, that is as surprising as anything in Solondz's earlier, more transgressive work.
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Jun 28, 201275The plot's problem is insoluble: There is no honest ending for Abe other than a completely undramatic continuation of the trapped life he has lived so far. So we get narrative disjunction and a limp conclusion instead of the brilliant reversal of formula that was promised.
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75It's a Solondz film; it's a given. Abe may deserve all that comes to him, but the question of how he got this way sustains the picture, against all odds.
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75The scenes between Gelber and Blair are the strongest in Dark Horse, because they form a bond not out of shared interests or passion, but a weary kind of compromise.
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70In movies like "Happiness" and "Storytelling," Todd Solondz has staged some pretty horrifying courtships, but the one in this seventh feature is surprisingly gentle.
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67Farrow and Walken are terrifically semicomatose as Abe's mom and dad, and Murphy – as a co-worker who takes what appears to be pity on the eternally adolescent Abe – is equally memorable. Yet Dark Horse feels like a lesser Solondz film, despite its cavalcade of misanthropy.
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63As the blindered Abe, relative-unknown Gelber earns a sympathetic pat on the head. But as the character is braying for attention, he's stuck in his stall, while genuine dark horse Donna Murphy carries the narrative load as the middle-aged co-worker who prances into Abe's daydreams.
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60Seizing the role, and the screen, Gelber actually makes us care what happens to his surly, thoroughly unlikable character.
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Jul 26, 201260Dark Horse is a comedy of bad manners that's imbued with uncertainty about the world and one man's place in it. Modest and mildly entertaining, it's a miniature portrait of a potentially jumbo-sized failure.
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60Though more forgiving than previous Solondz films, Dark Horse is too slight to herald a wholesale change of direction. Yet it's still worth catching, if only for Walken's terrible toupee.
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60He's either daring you not to laugh or daring you not to care, but either way, you'll laugh, care and worry about the consequences in Dark Horse.
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60Abe's day-to-day trials may eventually seem like cheap daytime TV, but Gelber and Solondz know how to nail the uncomfortably funny optimism shadowing American desperation.
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60The movie strays too far into fantasy - Abe suffers mightily - but Solondz still has an ear and an eye for a specific hell in the real world.
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50The combative, off-putting Dark Horse features many of writer-director Todd Solondz's usual preoccupations: misery, complexity, stunted emotions, misplaced dreams.
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50Fourteen years after "Happiness," why is director Todd Solondz still mucking around with the sort of idiot neurotic dweeb who makes George Costanza look like George Clooney?
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50Result is far less abrasive than some of its predecessors, but for that very reason seems unlikely to generate the attention needed to meet Solondz's already modest commercial standards.
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Jun 7, 201250It's a typical Solondz sad-sack tale, but this film seems to be disgusted by its own characters, which isn't true of the director's best work ("Happiness," "Welcome to the Dollhouse"). We don't need to like Abe, but it's unsettling to feel the director might actively dislike him.
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50With Solondz's old-hat funeral deadpan and his efforts to pass off Abe's adolescent rage as elevated insight, Dark Horse is neither incisively black-comic nor particularly attuned to human behavior - proof that some directors, at least, do end up the way they started out.
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50Never less than watchable and loaded with trademark negativity so extreme it's sometimes funny, the new film is nonetheless saddled with a protagonist so narrowly and unlikably presented that, in the end, he doesn't seem worth the time devoted to him.
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40There is little in the film's pitch-black interior that wasn't tackled better – with more bite, wit and abandon – in "Happiness," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," or "Storytelling."
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38Yesterday, Solondz blocking the screen meant something, even if it was just his own petulance. Today, a blurred sign only signifies his capitulation to peer pressure.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 2
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Mixed: 0 out of 2
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Negative: 0 out of 2
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A KVIFF screening, my second Todd Solondz