Todd Solondz is about to release his sixth feature film, Dark Horse (reviewed this week). But he’s still falling victim to the fallout from his second, infamous film, Happiness. That 1998 drama took as its subject a pedophile trying—and failing—to control his dark urges. The adult-child sex didn’t just get the film an NC-17 Read More
Todd Solondz is the sort of director beloved by fresh-faced film students when they first arrive at school—his films are superficially interesting for their shock value and their disconnect from reality coexisting with an insistence that this is how life really is. Once deep into the syllabus, though, the burgeoning filmmakers learn that these spectacles Read More
Will Todd Solondz find Happiness in his new home—a prewar loft at 74 Fifth Avenue? The director of such indie hits as the 1998 film of the same name is known for his dark and disturbing depictions of suburban American life. Yet he has just purchased a 3-bedroom co-op in Greenwich Village that is anything but dark or suburban.
Mr. Solondz paid $1.95 million for the airy pad, according to city records, which was on the market for less than a month at $2 million with Brown Harris Stevens brokers Jennie Holman and Edward C. Ferris. Read More
“It’s good to be with someone who isn’t weird, or screwed up, or sicko pervy,” says Allison Janney in Life During Wartime. Obviously, she is not talking about her director, Todd Solondz. Only the brave or genuinely perverse ever get through his offbeat films. A favorite of film festival eccentrics but studiously avoided Read More
Director
Todd Solondz has once again found safe haven in New York City. One of American independent film’s most polarizing figures has sold North American rights to Palindromes, his newest and perhaps most controversial film, to Wellspring, a Manhattan-based company, for a mid-to-low six-figure sum. The movie stars Ellen Barkin and landed prime forthcoming Friday- Read More
Todd Solondz’s Storytelling , from his own screenplay, is the work of an auteur whose six-year, three-movie career has been on the cutting edge so consistently that his directorial hands must be bleeding from his derisive stabs at what may laughingly be called the American Dream. Storytelling consists of two separate films, the much shorter Read More
Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke, from Mr. Rohmer’s screenplay, based on Grace Elliott’s memoir Journey of My Lif e During the French Revolution , is one of the most eccentric and unexpected movies to emerge from the New York Film Festival. For Mr. Rohmer’s most fervent admirers, like me, it seems at once Read More
Heather Matarazzo swirled into the Push Café, a dark, smoky coffee hole near Gramercy Park. It was a midsummer afternoon, and Elvis Costello was ranting grandly from the stereo.
Ms. Matarazzo, who is 18,took a seat in a ratty chair, fired up a Camel filter and began talking about her new movie, The Princess Read More
