Avis des critiques

It’s a sappy, saccharine story, using and reusing cliches that have been seen in other films on grief... It isn’t a movie that’s trying to reinvent the wheel. It brings the audience into a story where the beats are known, but still purposeful.

Hardly a false note is sounded throughout The Friend, but it operates within such a limited emotional range that it drifts into monotonic plainsong. McGehee and Siegel let in a few moments of levity with Bing’s antics, but these never rise above a chuckle when the humor could easily go for belly laughs without compromising the story’s rueful core.

The Friend is meta enough to know it’s just a story—but it works, the way stories work, shaping the rough stuff of life into a satisfying whole.

The Friend functions perfectly well as a dog picture, a movie about a frazzled single woman learning to care for a gentle but unruly animal in the big, bad city. But it truly comes alive in its ability to go deep on what it really means to care for something.

There’s a version of The Friend that is incredibly boring and borders on trite. And while the cathartic climax of this film may fall a bit flat, McGehee and Siegel carry The Friend in subversive, interesting ways right up until the credits roll. It’s the type of charming film that can be recommended to virtually anybody, and that’s always a beautiful discovery in the ever-expanding world of cinema.

[T]he film is a tonal jumble – part relationship tangle, part dark comedy, part vague reckoning with the sins of an older man – that never truly coheres as a human drama... But it succeeds when it boils down to its two main characters – a sweet, naturalistic tale of this odd couple who learn to adore each other, with a few montages that feel fully out of a dog adoption ad.

Watts and Bing’s dynamic is cute but never sappy, thanks in large part to McGehee and Siege’s framing...

While Watts does her best to carry the movie through some mundane, repetitive plot devices and uninspired filmmaking, it’s Bing who keeps your attention. When the movie lags – and boy does it – Bing has a natural charisma that some of the more recent cinematic dog standouts such as “Anatomy of a Fall’s” Messi or “The Artist’s” Uggie (RIP) can’t match.

While the filmmaking pair’s latest might sound squarely aimed at Naomi Watts super-fans and intense animal people, what they actually present in “The Friend” isn’t so very niche at all: instead, it’s the sort of witty, wise, and warm character study we seem to be running out of these days.

Scott McGehee and David Siegel have avoided all the pitfalls of adaptation while remaining faithful to the source material... The Friend is just their style, with its beautiful, light-handed approach to big issues like life, death, friendship and whether a giant dog belongs in a small New York City apartment.

“The Friend” juggles the happy, the sad and the bittersweet while somehow managing not to lose the lightness that has kept it afloat.

The Friend would still melt the coldest of hearts had its rewards stopped at introducing us to Bing, and giving us a fabulously humorous nod to Midnight Cowboy... But its classical and kind vision of New York... is also something of a nostalgic and perfectly visualized miracle, unexpectedly soothing and cozy across a town melancholically gearing up for the sad yet colorful holiday season.