Nayan Gough
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
Mandeep Tyson
The acting in this movie is really good.
Marva
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
lasttimeisaw
Todd Solondz's fifth feature, a divisive drama-comedy even among his acolytes, PALINDROMES makes great play of an outré gimmick, its protagonist, a 13-year-old girl Aviva is played by eight different actors in its chronicling chapters (8 chapters plus a coda rehashes the same procedure in Aviva's broody attempt), they are vary in appearance, age, race, even sex (including one familiar face, Jennifer Jason Leigh, superbly cooing to capture a child's mannerism), fairly predates I'M NOT THERE. (2007), from another Todd, incontrovertibly much more prestigious, Mr. Haynes. Yes, Aviva, her name is a palindrome, which is recently implemented in Denis Villeneuve's ARRIVAL (2016) to under-gird the ethereal mystery of predestination, yet in Solondz's methodology, palindromes are emblems of human nature, which is explicitly rounded out by the acrimonious speech of Mark Wiener (Faber) near the ending, a character stems from Solondz's breakthrough WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (1995), here an alleged pedophile shunned by everyone else but Aviva - we perpetually run back to the same pattern in our individual trajectory and remain more- or-less the same person, that is palindrome, a sociological pathology nestled everywhere. The story unflinchingly tackles the thorny subjects of baby fever, teen sex, abortion-and-its-risk, child abuse, religious fanatics and pedophile, sometimes feels a tad over-stretching to skewer all these into one feature length, and how on earth could we endorse an opinionated pre-teen who is possessed with the idea of becoming a mother, with some part of the world is still endemic with harrowing child-bride horrors? Nor can we lay the complete blame on her helicopter mom Joyce Victor (Barkin), as self-serving and inconsiderate as she is, when a girl is at that delicate age, honestly, moms always know the best. Ingenious as the narrative device is, spoon-feeds us with the universality of the identity of Aviva, each chapter can be regarded as a vignette holds its own wholeness, interleaved with an idyll interlude when Aviva is played by a boy (Denton) roaming in the countryside. The meat of the story is the chapter where Aviva is portrayed by a plus-size adult black woman (Wilkins), an elephantine presence where a 13-year-old girl dwells inside, this agency of discrepancy imbues a perturbing vibe during Aviva's sojourn with the counter-intuitively insidious foster family headed by God- botherers Mama Sunshine (Monk) and Bo Sunshine (Bobbie). And in the ensuring sequences where Aviva hitchhiking with a stocky middle-aged lorry-driver-turns-hit-man Bob (Guirgis), the inappropriately one-sided tenderness is spiked with a pungent scent of reactive self- consciousness from another side, one might get bemused in Solondz's straddling stance about the semi-romantic-semi-perverse rapport (though we firmly grasp his take on pro-choice/pro-life option) until the violence bursts out, follows by a foregone conclusion and rounds off Aviva's daring adventure. Contentious in its self-inflicted archness, PALINDROMES is hard to decipher after its bold but sketchy presentation of a nexus of problems beset in America, like a nihilistic anecdote sums up to this: everything sucks, people are doomed and our world rotates in a rut, ad nauseam, especially under today's circumstances, we don't need to watch a movie to get a glimpse of this.
Joseph Sylvers
A line that at once resounds everything that is uncomfortable about Todd Solondze and his work. Palindromes is a film whose bleakness is only matched by it's moments of uncomfortable hilarity. Solondz also expands his material a bit, this time out, by opting to show the same character through six different actresses (before "I'm Not There", and in the vein of "That Obscure Object of Desire"), with each actress representing a portion of our tragic heroins emotional geography. The film begins with the funeral of an earlier Solondz character, Dawn, from his first film "Welcome To The Doll House", having killed herself, a funeral attended by the young and impressionable heron of this film Aviva. Abortion is the central focus of the film, with neither side of the issue "winning" any argument, instead we are shown a girl named Aviva(her names a palindrome), who wants only to have babies to love and love her forever and ever. From this monstrously co-dependent springboard we get a tour through religious extremism and Laissez-faire middle class liberalism, at they're best and worst, and abortion in all of it's contradiction and paradox. Solondz by this film has defined himself as a pessimist, a definition which like a true pessimist he believes is unavoidable as palindromes themselves, the same both forward or backward, forever. Understandably, there are those who find Solondz too cynical; empty jaded misery mongering which gives us nothing of the beautiful and sublime we would expect from "true" works of art, which has always seemed to me a denial induced distortion of the medium and message. Because we don't like what is being said, we pay no attention to the skill with which it is being communicated, or the intricacies of it's phrasings. Solondz films are brutal, disturbing, and hilarious all at once, and it's a difficult mix, handling despair and comedy, and there simply isn't anyone who does it better Todd Solondz. Anyone can make an inappropriate comedy about abortion, just as anyone can make a disturbingly realistic look the subject, but few can dance back and forth across the boarders without loosing their footing like Palindromes. A more meaningful, if less enjoyable film than Happiness, but easily one of Solondz and the decades best.
Ami Kapilevich
There are hints of classical allegory (see: Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain) to this intriguing, disturbing, difficult but ultimately triumphant film. I think that the use of several characters to play Aviva (meaning "Springtime" in Hebrew) implies that the young lady is mildly schizophrenic - something that was either triggered by exposure to sex at such a young age, or by the trauma of the aberrant abortion.The film jumps around a bit in time. Chronologically, it starts with the first sexual encounter when Aviva visits the younger Otto (palindrome), and ends with Bob (palindrome) getting shot by the police. The film itself splices a few scenes in between, beginning and ending with the young black girl 'character' who is perhaps the youngest and most innocent of the Aviva characters. I was blown away by the portrayal of the foster family. Had no idea where to place them. I think that ultimately Solondz is sympathetic to them, which gives the film an impressively mature and equivocal view of religious fundamentalists (but a deep, dark part of me had a good chuckle, too).More please, Mr Solondz!
genki831
I am beginning to wonder at this point if Todd Solondz is himself a pedophile. But don't get me wrong; if he is then he at least understands whats wrong with it and at the same time he understands people, both victims and perpetrators. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he is in fact not a pedophile and this is somewhat supported by the Mark Weiner character who for all intents and purposes may as well be Todd Solondz himself. Mark Weiner in a moment of what I believe to be total honesty declares to the Aviva character that he is in fact not a pedophile. It would have been safe enough for him to admit to her that he is a pedophile if he is. You'll have to watch the film to understand why. I was totally blown away by the film and actually watched it twice in a row because I needed to understand it more thoroughly. I highly recommend it for anyone who is a Todd Solondz fan and also for David Lynch fans as well. I'm not sure what to make of his portrayal of the Christian family, the Sunshines. I think it shows both the good and bad of the Christian right in America. I actually did spend sometime being good friends with a very similar family and eventually had to cut my ties with them after their illusion of Christian family bliss was shattered by the wife/mother's sexual advances toward me. An additional group of people I would recommend this film to is current or former right-wing Christians who are questioning their faith. This is where I come from and the movie definitely resonated with me because of that. I also appreciate Solondz' brave study of abortion. One could almost see it as a pro-life movie if it weren't for the fact that most pro-lifers would probably be horrified by it. I'm of the rare-breed that is a pro-lifer but not over-sensitive to controversial media. Still I would not say that this film proves Solondz' to be pro-life, rather it probably shows that to him the subject can never be completely black or white, which of course is a very wise and healthy viewpoint to have. Great job Todd Solondz!
