darling companion - Movieline

Lists || BY Inkoo || 05 11 2012 12:10 PM

The 5 Types of Animal Movies

At a few West Coast theaters this Friday, Diane Keaton’s dog weepie Darling Companion and the documentary Chimpanzee will make room in the theatrical line-up for one more animal movie, the docufiction Otter 501. That’s right. While the rest of the world was distracted by the latest superhero shawarma scandal, the rapidly growing field of wildlife documentaries produced a transmedia movie in a genre you might have never heard of. About otters. And in a few weeks, this spring’s primates, canines, and water weasels will migrate to the DVD shelf, replaced by their summer counterparts in Madagascar 3, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and Piranha 3DD. There will, in other words, always be a creature feature at the movie theater.
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Review || BY Stephanie Zacharek || 04 19 2012 10:00 AM

REVIEW: Diane Keaton Loses Her Dog — and the Plot — in Darling Companion

There’s too much people and not enough dog in Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion, and even if you prefer people to dogs, that’s a serious problem. It would be bad enough that Kasdan squanders the gifts of two of his lead actors, Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline, in this aimless, tedious and sometimes downright ridiculous comedy-drama about a fractured family brought closer by unusual circumstances. But he does a disservice to an even more striking face: That of a mutt whom Keaton’s character rescues from the edge of the highway, an elegant, spirited creature she dubs — what else? — Freeway.
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