Critics reviews

An intimate, detail-focused film which invites the viewer to extrapolate from individual stories, "Buddy" presents a world where there is less of a social gap between humans and other species than is often assumed, where love for a dog can mean every bit as much as love for a human.

“Buddy” doesn’t need to be as delicate and intelligent as it is to work, but its thoughtful, unsentimental gaze makes an already guaranteed awww-fest into something more substantially affecting.

An artful and crowd-pleasing film... Using long takes and few edits, Honigmann’s films have an elemental simplicity but her real strength is her empathetic curiosity, as, off-camera, she poses the kind of blunt, heart-felt questions we want to hear answered by her subjects.

Another director might have made something more explanatory: Here is how the service industry works... But Honigmann gets right down to the matter of emotional connection in just a shot or two... Without a millimeter of overreach, her movie convinces you that the dogs have kept these people away from overwhelming bleakness by also guiding them into the light.

If Buddy sometimes succumbs to generality, its love for dogs still yields aesthetic rewards. Honigmann doesn’t compromise the dogs’ inherent nature with cuteness; she doesn’t “humanize” them for us with music and pillow shots of animals smiling and yawning for the camera. The filmmaker is viscerally alive to the dogs’ movements, to how their body language expresses their emotions.

Honigmann's conventional, middle-of-the-road style makes for a pleasant if formally familiar viewing experience: Florencia Di Concilio's score includes passages of elegiac slow piano, underlining the tender gentleness of the human/canine relationships depicted.