Space Dogs

The film draws us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature.

It’s an exercise in empathy––and a spellbinding one at that.

Space Dogs commits to its art-house pretensions. The result isn’t pleasant, but it does effectively provoke.

Dog-lovers are the obvious target here; but the slow, meditative doc holds appeal for some of the rest of us as well.

The alienness of humanity, when seen from another perspective, is evident throughout the film.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that a genuinely arresting documentary was cast adrift somewhere along the line.

Lacking any thematic direction or narrative momentum, the film wanders around like so many Muscovite strays on the streets of Russia: aimless yet not exactly lost. A tough sit on top of all this, and lacking anything resembling a coherent point, this one should be shot into space without a return trajectory.