Film

Hotel for Dogs is the story of a couple of orphaned kids who take in stray pups and make a home for them in an abandoned New York hotel. You see, the kids feel a kinship with these cast-off mutts because they, too, have no one to look after them. Bighearted social worker Bernie (Cheadle) is doing his best to find Andi (Roberts) and the precocious Bruce (Austin) a good family, but he really screws the pooch when he lands the siblings with foster parents Lois and Carl Scudder (Kudrow and Dillon), a dim-witted couple who intend to form a band and drop their “rock manifesto” on an unsuspecting world.

It’s a mutt movie more in the spirit of Benji the Hunted than Homeward Bound, but the lack of actors lending their voices to the canine conversations isn’t a detriment—the hounds themselves are very expressive without flat celebrity quips about it being a dog’s world. As Benji proved, the human element can be more of a hindrance than a help. The film would’ve been better served, however, if the maudlin human struggles and teenybopper romance had been cut and replaced with a bunch of Shiba Inu puppies rolling around the hotel lobby. (Opens Fri.)—Drew Toal