Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Ploydsge just watch it!

Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

TBJCSKCNRRQTreviews An adorable wiener-dog changes owners, impacting these four different miserable and frequently humiliated people, each with terrible personal judgment, who clearly can't take responsibility for her. Remi is a lonely 7-year-old cancer-survivor. He once calmly mentions to his mother "we're all going to die". Dawn, though now an adult, remains naive, and reacting far too positively to Brandon. Gerwig does, some of the time, evoke Matarazzo's spot-on performance. Dave is a middle-aged struggling screenwriter who teaches film school, facing students who are particularly painful to endure. And the elderly Nana is kept company by little other than her regrets.The director's pitch black humor stays strong. We meet more people who definitely shouldn't be taking care of kids, and children who are comprised entirely of depression. One mother describes cremation as "sort of like... being put in an oven". The acting is all good. This is incredibly quotable, why is there only the "heel" one on the page? The fake intermission gave me cramps from laughing. How have DeVito and Todd not worked together before this? The only of his films I haven't watched now is Dark Horse. I love them all(this very much included), though I admit they aren't all equally good(this is one of the "not the best" ones. But I'm ecstatic that I watched it). I watched this as soon as I could, it's available for free streaming on my library's website. It never hit my cinema, an indie and all.The trailer tells you it's hilarious, in that dark way he does: if you watch that, you should have a fair idea of what to expect. Note that a lot of the negative reviews are from people who saw the title, and nothing else about it, and expected it to be heartwarming, rather than, y'know, soul-rending. Storytelling has problems from pacing as it's about such different people and stories; Happiness, the people have stuff in common. This fares pretty well. More exploration of "the h*** of suburbia", and the misery of middle America. The running time is 81 minutes without credits, or 84 with.Yes, the ending is shocking. But if you don't think there was a reason for that...then your mind is not twisted enough for Solondz' work. I recommend this to any fan of his. 7/10

areatw Well, what a let down. Here's me expecting a feel-good, laugh out loud comedy about a dog and instead I get a dull, boring and almost entirely laugh-free drama in which, towards the end of the film, the dog hardly even features. 'Wiener-Dog' couldn't have been any more uninteresting if it tried.The problem is that none of what is happening in this film has any purpose. None of it leads anywhere, it's just one pointless story after another. The dog is completely irrelevant for the most part of the film, only at the start does the dog feature centrally in the story. A big disappointment and huge waste of time.

BlueFairyBlog If you haven't seen anything by Todd Solondz, you have been missing out. Seriously, you have not lived until you have seen the absolutely pitch black comedies that he has directed. Classics such as "Happiness" and "Welcome to the Dollhouse" have been among my favorites for years, and no these are not films concerning happy people, or the fantasies invoked by the image of a child's toy. Todd Solondz captures a spark of the American consciousness that is both upsetting and completely ridiculous. You hope that these people are not real, that these situations do not impact the daily lives of anyone you truly love and cherish, but they absolutely do.Solondz has been making movies for twenty years but none of them have been as immensely loved as the two I just mentioned. This particular film premiered at Sundance in January and was bought up by IFC and Amazon Studios for VOD release in April. This low key release hasn't lent to great word of mouth, but then again what are you going to say about this film that would make someone willingly watch it? Do you talk about the section where Danny DeVito plays a defeated and morose screen writing professor? The first section that shows the acquisition of the wiener dog and its subsequent sickness via the ingestion of chocolate? (And all the mess that entails) What you should tell people is that it's atmospheric, moody, and self- assured in its stark representations of down and out losers.Solondz films don't show winners. They show people who deserve far worse than they're getting, or people who are so devastatingly wrong in every aspect of their lives that it's embarrassing to watch them just live them. The characters he chose for this film are each unique in a very different way. Julie Delpy's soft spoken mother consistency tries to break bad news to her child about the facts of life by overtly lying to his face. Terrible, inscrutable words form on her lips and flow out of her in a delivery style that is so blunt that it physically hurts.Honestly, if you like weird, this is going to be your favorite film of the year. While it doesn't exaggerate its mood with grand effects or strange settings, it's a film that tells the little person's tale. Grandmothers sometimes don't connect with their offspring. Parents sometimes can't trust their children. Making a spontaneous decision can change big aspects of your life. These are the themes that Solondz focuses on to great effect, and though these are small spaces, they produce a grand film.

vindstilla As i watched this movie i had a few good laughs.. but in the end, i failed to get the point. If there was one.. the acting is stiff and artificial, which by all means may have been intended, but not to my liking. The interconnected stories didn't connect at all which made the plot impressively uninteresting. Was it even the same dog pictured throughout the movie? Who knows... the humor is quirky, dark and bizarre, I can give credit for that, but there is no story.. Half way through I started yawning and towards the end of the movie I longed for it to end. Even so I rate this movie with a 6, since it was actually funny, when you managed to look past the pointlessness of it all.