How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog | |
---|---|
Directed by | Michael Kalesniko |
Written by | Michael Kalesniko |
Produced by | Michael Nozik Nancy M. Ruff Brad Weston |
Starring | Kenneth Branagh Robin Wright Penn Jared Harris Lynn Redgrave David Krumholtz |
Cinematography | Hubert Taczanowski |
Edited by | Pamela Martin |
Music by | David Robbins |
Distributed by | Lonsdale Productions |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 107 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $7.3 million [2] |
Box office | $73,510 [3] |
How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog is a 2000 American black comedy film written and directed by Michael Kalesniko. It stars Kenneth Branagh and Robin Wright Penn.
Peter McGowan is a chain-smoking, impotent, insomniac British playwright who lives in Los Angeles. Once very successful, he is now in the tenth year of a decade-long string of production failures. His latest play is in the hands of effeminate director Brian Sellars, who is obsessed with Petula Clark; his wife Melanie is determined to have a baby; 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 who claims to be Peter McGowan and develops a friendship of sorts with him.
Petula Clark's recordings of "I Couldn't Live Without Your Love" and "A Groovy Kind of Love" were heard during the opening and closing credits respectively, and "Downtown 99", a disco remix of her 1964 classic "Downtown", was heard during a party scene. Additional songs originally recorded by Petula Clark were sung by the character of Brian Sellars throughout the film.
The film holds a 59% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 34 reviews. [4]
In his review for The New York Times , Stephen Holden described the film as "a Hollywood rarity, a movie about an icy grown-up heart-warmed by a child that doesn't wield emotional pliers to try to squeeze out tears…. It is a tribute to Mr. Branagh's considerable comic skills that he succeeds in making a potentially insufferable character likable by infusing him with the same sly charm that Michael Caine musters to seduce us into cozying up to his sleazier alter egos…. Mr. Kalesniko's satirically barbed screenplay, whose spirit harks back to the comic heyday of Blake Edwards, stirs up an insistent verbal energy that rarely flags." [5]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the movie a B and said, "Branagh, in his most forceful non-Shakespeare screen performance, grounds even the softest moments in the angry revolt of his wit." [6] Justine Elias of The Village Voice stated it was "slight but unendurable…its fractured time frame gets confusing". [7]
The film was the closing night film at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival and won multiple festival awards. [2] [8] It was released as Mad Dogs and Englishmen in Australia. [9]
Man Bites Dog is a 1992 French-language Belgian black comedy crime mockumentary film written, produced and directed by Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde, who are also the film's co-editor, cinematographer and lead actor respectively.
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Petula Clark CBE is a British singer, actress, and songwriter. She started her professional career as a child performer and has had the longest career of any British entertainer, spanning more than 85 years.
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Owen Gleiberman is an American film critic who has been chief film critic for Variety magazine since May 2016, a title he shares with Peter Debruge. Previously, Gleiberman wrote for Entertainment Weekly from 1990 until 2014. From 1981 to 1989, he wrote for The Phoenix.
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Focus is a 2001 American drama film starring William H. Macy, Laura Dern, David Paymer and Meat Loaf based on a 1945 novel by playwright Arthur Miller. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was given a limited release on October 19, 2001.
Vote for Huggett is a 1949 British comedy film directed by Ken Annakin and starring Jack Warner, Kathleen Harrison, Susan Shaw and Petula Clark. It was written by Mabel Constanduros, Denis Constanduros and Allan MacKinnon. In this, the third in the series of films about the Huggetts after Holiday Camp (1947) and Here Come the Huggetts (1948), Warner reprises his role as Joe Huggett, the head of a London family in the post-war years who decides to run as a candidate in the municipal election. It was followed by The Huggetts Abroad (1949).
The Gay Dog is a 1954 British comedy film directed by Maurice Elvey and starring Wilfred Pickles, Petula Clark and Megs Jenkins. The screen-play was by Peter Rogers based on the 1952 play of the same title by Joseph Colton; also starring Pickles and Jenkins, it had run at London's Piccadilly Theatre for 276 performances from June 1952 to February 1953.
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Jude Hill is a Northern Irish actor. He is known for his lead role in Kenneth Branagh's film Belfast (2021) based on Branagh's childhood, for which Hill won the Critics' Choice Award for Best Young Performer. He has since starred in Branagh's A Haunting in Venice (2023).