Rand Richards Cooper at Commonweal:
Payne is America’s poet laureate of losers. Over thirty years, the writer-director has sheltered a menagerie of the bumbling, the henpecked, the ineffectual, the distressed, and the depressed. Payne lists both Italian neo-realism and American movies of the 1970s (he was born in 1961) as influences. But his films bear a stamp all his own. Their hallmark elements include a fondness for voiceovers; a reliance on music as an active arm of storytelling; a use of both professional actors and non-actors; a commitment to character-forward stories, adapted from novels, that emphasize place and character; and, above all, a balancing, or mingling, or juxtaposition, of disparate tones and intentions.
Payne’s movies exude ambiguity. They are comedies, but their humor ranges from heartfelt to harrowing, sometimes in baffling succession. In a perceptive 2013 essay in the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien noted “a condition of permanent uncertainty” in Payne, “a mood that can move fluidly, with the slightest of accentuations, between farce and poignancy.”
more here.