Marley & Me

Marley & Me, starring Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, and 22 Labrador Retrievers playing Marley, is another holiday-slotted film aimed at the family crowd. Certainly not at critics. "Marley & Me might be easy to watch, but -- even for die-hard canine lovers -- it's as easy to forget," Claudia Puig remarks in USA Today. "At the end of Marley & Me you don't leave the theater with a sense that anything much has been learned," A.O. Scott concludes in the New York Times. "There is so little truth, not to mention plot, in Marley & Me, that it starts to feel like animal cruelty because of how much director David Frankel relies on the dog," comments Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. And Kyle Smith in the New York Post writes his review as if he were a dog out on a date. It's written, of course, in doggerel. "It's when the couple goes to Ireland/Things turned so dull I took a snooze/The movie's fit for me to pee upon./Like the Sunday Daily News." Nevertheless, other critics are charmed by the movie. "A dog movie that isn't a dog of a movie -- what a pleasant Christmas surprise," says Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe & Mail. And Chris Kaltenbach in the Baltimore Sun remarks that the movie appears aimed at "all those enlightened souls ... who have experienced the redemptive joy of coming home from a hard day at work feeling like the saddest sad sack in the universe, only to be greeted by a dog who just knows you're the best thing in the world. ... It understands."