Todd Solondz's Wiener-Dog is everything Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea should have been: a devastating rumination on tragedy, heart-break, grief, and the randomness of an uncaring universe. But whereas Lonergan's film takes itself so seriously it almost becomes hilarious, Solondz realizes that his film and the points it's trying to make are preposterous and pretentious. So he leavens his film with some of the best pitch-black humor I've seen in recent cinema. But that doesn't stop the film from being absolutely, positively soul-crushing. There's a scene where a junkie tells his brother with Down syndrome that their father died that might be the saddest cinematic moment of 2016. The second saddest? A scene where an ex-junkie granddaughter asks her estranged grandmother for money to help support a clearly unfaithful, possibly abusive artist boyfriend.
8/10
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