Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara · CC BY 2.0

Solondz built a filmmaking career on turning suburban New Jersey discomfort into deadpan, often excruciating satire, starting with Welcome to the Dollhouse in 1995 and continuing through Happiness, a 1998 film so unsparing about its characters' impulses that its original distributor dropped it before release. His refusal to soften his subjects — bullying, loneliness, predation — earned him festival acclaim even as it limited his commercial reach; Palindromes, Life During Wartime and Wiener-Dog kept the same unflinching register into later decades. He now teaches filmmaking at NYU.