A Dog's Purpose

What does it all mean? Why are we here? And exactly how many brutal doggy death scenes are we about to be subjected to in the next 100 minutes?

In Lasse Hallström’s screen version of the novel by W. Bruce Cameron, man’s best friend always finds a way home—even if it takes a few lifetimes.

Maybe next time A Dog’s Purpose can be reincarnated as a good movie.

Lasse Hallström's controversial film about an oft-reincarnated pooch is guilelessly mawkish in its celebration of the canine spirit.

A dog is reincarnated several times over in this adaptation of W. Bruce Cameron's best-selling novel.

Even the most forgiving audiences will find a lot of bones to pick with this one. “A Dog’s Purpose” is an awkward, graceless, meandering and unnecessarily cruel dog movie, and t...

Sentimentality overwhelms in this salute to puppy love (and the power of dog death to milk audience tears).

Movies about dogs are always excruciating for dog lovers. Even if nothing terrible happens, the anxiety that something might--ticking away minute by paw-scrabbling minute--is to...

The real problem here, though, is that it's painfully cheesy pablum, relying on hokey burger joint and Friday night football game stereotypes to take the place of character deve...

The purpose of A Dog’s Purpose isn’t to solve philosophical riddles but to warm the cockles of dog lovers’ hearts. That, it does — as well as a wet kiss from a slobbery tongue can.

A Dog's Purpose goes the Collateral Beauty route by preying on sadness and not earning its emotional reactions.

The recording artist Steve Albini once described a particularly onerous music-industry assignment as “a job I wouldn’t wish on a dog I didn’t like.”

Canine reincarnation story tugs at the heartstrings – and hits your gag reflex, thanks to some questionable filmmaking practices.

You don’t need an animal-rights group’s boycott to give you permission to avoid A Dog’s Purpose. You can skip it just because it’s clumsily manipulative dreck.

A Dog’s Purpose, based on the novel by W. Bruce Cameron, combines the philosophical belief that living beings are reborn into a different physical body after biological death wi...

Lasse Hallström's gooey film exists only to offer comforting reassurances about dogs' natural servility.

A misguided and utterly tone-deaf Hallmark card to the canis lupus familiaris and the people who love them.