Year of the Dog: Critic Reviews

I mean no impertinence when I say that as a portrait of love and grief, writer-director Mike White's exceptional film Year of the Dog deserves the same admiration accorded Joan Didion's exceptional memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.

Year of the Dog is funny ha-ha but firmly in touch with its downer side, which means it's also funny in a kind of existential way.

A bit of a dog's brunch.

A bittersweet dark comedy about a lonely middle-aged woman who finds that animals are the only beings she can truly rely on.

There's an undeniable sweetness to the movie's celebration of surrendering to one's best self.

[Writer-director White] is perceptive and gentle enough a director to allow Peggy to become a dog person of tragic proportions without laughing at her. He's a humorist with a humane core.

Shannon's richly minimal performance-a series of reactions, most ranging from deadpan to perturbed -- derives pathos from the familiarly elemental: happy, sad, bitter.

While some may be put off by Peggy's wild-eyed mania, and the film's broadly comic tone, Shannon makes this lost spirit strikingly sympathetic.

Much is said in little moments: The entire cast offers jots of humor and insight, from Reilly and Sarsgaard to Laura Dern as a spiny sister-in-law and Regina King as Layla, a vehemently supportive friend.

Is it possible for a movie to anthromorphize humans?

The movie's meaning seems to be: we're all crippled in some way, so just live with it -- celebrate it, even. That isn't satire; it's moss-brained sentiment that turns 'sensitivity' into a dimly dejected view of life.

Year of the Dog succeeds in drawing you in, making you look at the world from her perspective. By the end of the movie, you will recognize what kind of a person she is -- and you'll understand how she came to be that way.

It's enjoyable in a dry but fervent way that most American comedies aren't.

Despite the gimmicky direction and a disappointing climax, this is a distinctive and unsettling comedy.

White's humanist account of a woman more comfortable with animals than people is another intricately crosshatched sketch in his gallery of outsiders.

A gentle, melancholy and silly movie about a loner whose only secure source of affection is her beagle.

Year of the Dog is a feel-good, feel-bad movie about personal choice in the face of an overwhelming world. It brings more than you expect and leaves you wondering. How extraordinarily brave.

The bittersweet Dog is a film that whimpers rather than barks.

The movie is original and disappointing at the same time. But I still have faith in Mike White.

Molly Shannon's bittersweet portrayal of its lonely canine-loving heroine, along with a passel of pups trying to steal the picture, make for a satisfyingand funny, if ironic, comedy intended for lovers of both the beast and/or sophisticated laughs.

A very low-key, well-acted dramedy.

It's a movie in mourning, a dark comedy where we never quite see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Neither extreme of the animal rights debate can take comfort from this take-no-prisoners comedy. Frequently disturbing but always compelling, Year of the Dog barks for attention from the right kind of audience.

Mike White's 'Year of the Dog': Smart, witty film about the consequences of single-minded committment.

In the end, [writer-director] White settles for some unearned and unpersuasive optimism, which, in Hollywood scriptwriting, serves as shorthand for poignancy.