Has an unusually high ratio of laughs per minute.
How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
2002 · 1h 47m · R
Comedy, Drama
Directed by
Michael Kalesniko
Overview
The story of Peter McGowan, a chain-smoking, impotent, insomniac playwright who lives in Los Angeles. Once very successful, he is now in the tenth year of a decade-long string of production failures. He finds himself bonding with a new neighbor's lonely young daughter who has mild cerebral palsy; and during one of his middle-of-the-night strolls, he encounters his oddball doppelgänger.
Director and cast
- Michael Kalesniko Director
- Kenneth Branagh as Peter McGowan
- Robin Wright as Melanie McGowan
- Suzi Hofrichter as Amy Walsh
- Lynn Redgrave as Edna
- Jared Harris as False Peter
- Peter Riegert as Larry
- David Krumholtz as Brian Sellars
- Johnathon Schaech as Adam
- Kaitlin Hopkins as Victoria
- Suzy Joachim as Allana
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
Falsehoods pile up, undermining the movie's reality and stifling its creator's comic voice.
Kenneth Branagh's energetic sweet-and-sour performance as a curmudgeonly British playwright grounds this overstuffed, erratic dramedy in which he and his improbably forbearing wife contend with craziness and child-rearing in Los Angeles.
... comes alive only when it switches gears to the sentimental.
Audiences conditioned to getting weepy over saucer-eyed, downy-cheeked moppets and their empathetic caretakers will probably feel emotionally cheated by the film's tart, sugar-free wit.
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