Metascore

Mixed or average reviews - based on 25 Critics What's this?

User Score

Mixed or average reviews- based on 37 Ratings

  • Starring: Emma Roberts, Jake T. Austin, Lisa Kudrow
  • Summary: Hotel for Dogs is a smart comedy adventure that shows how far love and imagination can take you. When their new guardians forbid 16-year-old Andi and her younger brother, Bruce, from having a pet, Andi has to use her quick wit to help find a new home for their dog, Friday. The resourceful kids stumble upon an abandoned hotel and using Bruce's talents as a mechanical genius, transform it into a magical dog-paradise for Friday - and eventually for all Friday's friends. When barking dogs make the neighbors suspicious, Andi and Bruce use every invention they have to avoid anyone discovering "who let the dogs in." (Paramount Pictures) Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 25
  2. Negative: 2 out of 25
  1. 75
    A lively, funny, imaginative film that should appeal to kids and their pet-loving parents.
  2. Reviewed by: Rory L. Aronsky
    60
    What’s most surprising in Hotel for Dogs, is Don Cheadle co-starring as Bernie.
  3. Even the youngest viewers, not to mention their parents, will appreciate the buffoonish villainy of the dogcatchers (still useful villains more than half a century after "Lady and the Tramp"), and the movie's nice anti-kill shelter message is as it should be.
  4. Look, I love dogs. But this film tried my patience almost beyond endurance.

See all 25 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 10
  2. Negative: 3 out of 10
  1. AlexW.
    10
    I really liked it, it was very cute and I hope the next one comes out coon!!
  2. Good over all movie. Granted there are alot of morals being broken in the movie. But if you have raised your kids right and they know the difference between right and wrong. This is a good MOVIE. Expand
  3. ChadS.
    7
    There's truth in advertising: "Hotel for Dogs" is indeed, a movie about a hotel for dogs. But despite the "Snakes on a Plane"-like title, this prosaic moniker delivers more than it promises; the film could easily be called "Utopia for Orphans", or "Hold Me Now: An Appreciation of the Thompson Twins". Carl(Kevin Dillon) and Lois Scudder(Lisa Kudrow) are foster parents who play music for a living; they're an aging male/female rock duo in the tradition of Animotion, Timbuk 3, and Roxette. Needless to say, they're from the eighties(the early-to-mid-eighties are the new late-sixties). What makes this husband and wife team specific to the Thompson Twins, is how the personal lives of(drumroll, please) Alannah Currie, Tom Bailey, and Chris Leeway informs the hotel personnel's. While Heather(Kyla Pratt) puts on a brave face, Andie(Emma Roberts) and Dave(Johnny Simmons) hook up, which was Leeway's fate(who is black like Heather) when Currie and Bailey became an item. Is it mere coincidence that the band was named after characters in the Herge comic strip, "The Adventures of Tintin"? Snowy(the protagonist's dog) was a fox terrier; in "Hotel for Dogs", Friday, a Jack Russell terrier, is white, the color of snow. The eighties tropes don't end there. Heather's willingness(the film hides her masochism, her angst) to help Dave at the dog hotel, strongly recalls Watts, the Mary Stuart Masterson character in Howard Deutsch's "Some Kind of Wonderful". When Heather steps in dog poop, the action itself works as a metaphorical encapsulation of Watts' doggone loyalty for Keith(Eric Stoltz). "Hotel for Dogs", by no means, is White Stripes-good, but the Thompson Twins weren't strictly for the dogs, just like this disposable film. So it's one "woof" for recasting PETA's rhetoric in a filmic language that might galvanize, rather than offend the non-converted, with it's pro-animal message, and one "woof" for being geuninely fun to watch. "Hotel for Dogs" is "King for a Day", or ninety-and-some-odd minutes. Expand
  4. Cliche, boring and only entertaining to kids. Hotel for Dogs falls in the cattagory for one of the worst film ever made. I give this movie 17%. Yeah it is that bad. Expand

See all 10 User Reviews

Trailers