How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog

This film is so very well written & has such a great title that if it were to be widly distributed would be an instant hit.

I don't want to give the plot away (so I wont) but I will say that the performances are real. Branagh is superb, Wright-Penn is excellent & all concerned add to the film with out a bad apple among them.

The use of the English Language is such a welcome treat. So many people write as if the audience are idiots, & so it's refreshing to find an intelligently written, clever movie.

Please go & see this film. It's so very good.

Wow, what a great movie. I had to talk a friend into seeing it, and we knew nothing about it. We were not disappointed at all. It takes a little while to get rolling, but once it does, the dialogue is wittier than anything Hollywood will ever churn out. It is refreshing to see a movie that doesn't play to the lowest common denominator. The acting was perfectly executed, and the writing was some of the best this year. Robin Wright-Penn was at her best, especially in an emotionally intense argument between her and Brannagh over remarks he made to the neighbor. And Brannagh was definitely in his element here, with some wonderfully razor-sharp dialogue that he executed perfectly. There was a handicapped child that was a bit contrived and predictable, but she was a wonderful actor and her role in the plot kept it from being trite. You just don't see writing this good in Hollywood. That fact would just boil inside you as you watch this and realize that it will never get a wide theatrical release. That is until an hysterical interview of the author (Brannagh) unfolds throughout the film. The comments he makes to the interviewer (Ros from Frasier) make light of Hollywood's blindness to anything that is not ignorant drivel and send you from the theater with a great feeling that all hope is not lost. You may have to look around, but you can still find an intelligent movie. And this is one of them.

I saw this movie at the Toronto International Film Festival and it was the funniest movie I had seen in years. The writing was fantastic and the performances were excellent. Kenneth Branagh's timing of his lines were perfect and the audience (of 2000) were literally laughing so hard we were crying. Definitely thumbs up!!!!A Must see!!

I saw this film over the weekend in the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema and thought it was terrific. Intelligently-written, staggeringly well-directed for someone making his feature film debut, with a game cast of name actors and impressive new faces -- too bad it can't find a proper distributor. It deserves to find a bigger audience (and if given the chance, it would).

I liked this movie - for a change we have here an intelligent comedy, smart dialogs, a conventional story that succeeds to almost never fall in the romantic routine. The story is set in Los Angeles. A British-American play-writer goes through a mid-life, mid-career, mid-relationship crisis. He is happily married, but the couple is childless, mostly probably because he is a champion of egocentrism and does not seem to like children very much. All this changes when a neighbor with an eight-year old daughter moves in. You have indeed seen the story in many other movies, but the masterful acting of Branagh with good support from the rest of the team, the sarcastic description of the content-empty life in the artistic circles in Los Angeles, and the witty relationship between the European roots of the character and his Americanized life make the film both interesting to watch, as well as true in message. 8 out of 10 on my personal scale.