Happiness (1998)

Highly Recommended

USA

Feature Film

Writer/Director: Todd Solondz

Cinematographer: Maryse Alberti

Composer: Robbie Kondor

Cast: Jane Adams, Cynthia Stevenson, Lara Flynn Boyle, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Baker, Louise Lasser, Ben Gazzara, Camryn Manheim, Jared Harris, Rufus Read

With its deliciously ironically romantic score, brave, wholehearted performances, and pitch-black, razor-sharp script, Solondz’s pathos-dripping portrait of three middle-class New Jerseyan sisters is a remarkable work, which is simultaneously hilarious, repellent, and bizarrely moving, and which even manages to imbue the vilest of child molesters (amongst other various pervs & sickos) with a number of qualities with which we can empathise. Iain.Stott

Followed by Life During Wartime (2009)