Product Description

Must Love Dogs tells the story of Sarah Nolan (Diane Lane), a newly divorced woman cautiously rediscovering romance with the enthusiastic but often misguided help of her well-meaning family. As she braves a series of hilarious disastrous mismatches and first dates, Sarah begins to trust her own instincts again and learns that. no matter what, it's never a good idea to give up on love.

DVD Features:
Additional Scenes
Gag Reel

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6321 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2005-12-20
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Armenian, English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.com
The combined charisma of Diane Lane and John Cusack gives a lift to Must Love Dogs, a romantic comedy built on the comic potential of internet dating. Sarah (Lane, Under the Tuscan Sun), a preschool teacher and recent divorcee, has her entire family bugging her to get back in the dating pool. Finally her sister (dependable second banana Elizabeth Perkins, Big) puts an ad for Sarah online; a host of questionable prospects respond, but Sarah meets one guy--a boat builder named Jake (John Cusack, High Fidelity, Say Anything)--who shows promise, though he himself is recently divorced and a little tender. Unfortunately, Sarah also feels sparks with the father (Dermot Mulroney, My Best Friend's Wedding) of one of her students, and when paths cross, trouble follows. Must Love Dogs has some amusing scenes, but the tone and quality is wildly erratic--it's as if the movie was broken into a dozen parts and randomly assigned to different writers and directors, some of whom were making a bad sitcom, some of whom were making a good sitcom, and some of whom were making a movie that blended wry comedy with some deft psychological insight. The great cast (in addition to solid work from those mentioned above, there's also Stockard Channing and Christopher Plummer) keep the story moving, but for every amusing moment there are two that are plastic, forced, or wince-inducing. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
It does have a pooch or two, though the writer-director, Gary David Goldberg, doesn't get much out of them-or out of anyone else, either. John Cusack, as a wryly ironic builder of wooden boats, has an easy way with romantic patter, but Diane Lane, as a divorcée, doesn't have the lightness or the sparkle for this kind of middle-aged-dating picture, and the romantic bond between them that would hold the picture together never really materializes. Goldberg sets the movie in anywhere-and-nowhere suburban kitchens and parks, and he likes to have a lot of people barging on and off the sets or just hanging around and talking. The formidable Christopher Plummer, as Lane's widowed dad, is reduced to a poetry-quoting old fart, though Stockard Channing, as one of Plummer's girlfriends, creates a character out of thin air.-D.D. (In wide release.) -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Great movie
I liked this movie alot.It is one of the funniest movies I've watched in a long time.I am also a Diane Lane fan, I thing she did a superb job. The rest of the cast pulled all together. Worth the time to watch !

BORING...
Incredibly slow moving; I almost turned it off mid way. What I did like about it was the interaction Sarah had with her sisters and her father. Other than that, it is low on plot and they could have finished the movie in about 45 minutes. Great actors, poor movie.

A slightly generous four stars
This is a predictable, yet still mostly clever, romantic comedy. The heroine is recently divorced and not quite ready to admit she wants to start dating. Her meddlesome family is fairly endearing, the scenes with the losers they set her up with are mostly comical, and we do start to root for the romance to blossom. But it unravels a bit near the end. We know she's going to go back to the hero and the delays seem forced, almost like they had leftover dating scenes from the beginning that they didn't want to waste. The final mad dash at the end, when a simple phone call would have sufficed, was ridiculous. And the moment she jumped in the water, the movie lost most of its credibility.

Overall, a light movie good for some laughs, but it probably wouldn't hold up to much repeat viewing.

Amanda Hamm, author of Dear Jane Letters