We Bought a Zoo

We Bought a Zoo is perhaps the best movie that could be made in which the story of a recent widower who transfers his past determination to keep his wife alive upon an old, sick tiger—thus coming face to face once again with the grief he has tried so...

However calculated to meet the demands of family-friendly holiday movie fare, "We Bought a Zoo" does everything it sets out to achieve. Some supporting characters, such as Patrick Fugit's zoo-keeper Robin Jones, get short shrift but it's all in the...

"We Bought a Zoo" has a peculiar title that you usually don't see in Hollywood films (or in any film at all). It is weird yet catches your attention. It is straight-forward yet daring. Ironically, the film itself proves to be far-off from its namesake.

Sometimes, reacting to a movie is all about the expectations you bring with you walking into it. “We Bought a Zoo” is about a family that . buys a zoo. It’s as high-concept as you can get, outside of maybe “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” or...

Only an unnecessary sappy ending works against it. Some language and thematic elements give this movie its PG rating. But there's no real sex and violence. As a family get-together, "We Bought A Zoo" may be one of the best buys this holiday season.

Sometimes, reacting to a movie is all about the expectations you bring with you. “We Bought a Zoo” is about a family that buys a zoo. It’s as high-concept as you can get, outside of maybe “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” or “I Now Pronounce You Chuck...

"We Bought a Zoo" is much more than just another cuddly family film.

We Bought a Zoo This isn’t a great movie, but it does feature a strong performance from Matt Damon, and a bunch of cute and impressive animals, making it a pleasant enough experience and a step in the right direction for director Cameron Crowe after the d

If this sounds a bit saccharine and slight, I can’t really disagree with that assessment. Based on Mee’s own memoir, We Bought a Zoo is hardly moving in unfamiliar directions or trading on emotional nuances we haven’t seen numerous times before.

If you have a high tolerance for cutesy, feel-good pap, We Bought a Zoo slickly fills the bill. Yes, the British story has been expediently Americanized and rewritten for maximum tear-jerkage. Yes, it lazily uses wall-too-wall popular music to make...

No actors' egos were hurt during the filming of We Bought a Zoo. People are feeling sorry for Matt Damon, wondering why he even signed up for a family drama involving zoo animals, but Zoo isn't the embarrassing disaster you might fear.

Then there's Cameron Crowe, whose attitude with "We Bought a Zoo" seems to be that he doesn't care if we see exactly what he's doing every step of the way, because the movie's charm will win us over.

“We Bought a Zoo” feels like a movie that’s at odds with itself; much of the film is so cloying and obvious that it’s difficult to believe that Cameron Crowe directed it. He’s a guy that I think has made some genuinely affecting films and is one

In We Bought a Zoo, a man grieving the loss of his wife and his children's mother decides to move out of the city and buy a zoo, because studies show that the best way to get over the death of a loved one is to buy a multi-acre property full ...

“We Bought A Zoo” is an earnest, endearing yarn about a bereft father of two who stupidly buys a zoo and forces his family to move to the middle of nowhere to fix it up. If Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) were my father, I’d be pissed.

Cameron Crowe’s “We Bought a Zoo” is an undeniably manipulative crowd-pleaser but there’s something about being manipulated in such an expert manner that makes the tugging on the heartstrings easier to take.

While the concept of dotting the i's and crossing the t's is a wonderful one to pass along to small children just learning how to write, it earns Cameron Crowe a failing grade for rigidly applying it to We Bought a Zoo, a film whose fussiness about...

Cameron Crowe's We Bought a Zoo has a bubble gum, after school inanity to it that makes it rather inconsequential. In telling the true story of a father that has just lost his wife to cancer and is left to raise his young daughter and teenage son...

Can a film work as a family film and still be a bad film? WE BOUGHT A ZOO is an interesting test case because it’s a film parents and kids will enjoy, but has so many problems that it will entirely earn the negative reviews it gets.

“We Bought A Zoo” is a film for the entire family. It is funny, romantic, dramatic and sentimental. It is also the best thing actor Matt Damon and director Cameron Crowe have done in years. Each brings out the best in the other.

The tone of We Bought a Zoo veers from feel-good to maudlin. Some of the problem may devolve from the original material, but Crowe's screenplay was not original - he re-wrote one credited to Aline Brosh McKenna, who claims an uneven body of work ...

As straight down the middle Hollywood sentimentality, “We Bought a Zoo” shouldn’t have trouble finding an accepting holiday season audience ready to have their tears jerked and hearts warmed. The creative disappointment comes from knowing Crowe’s

Pap, but easygoing pap with a cast you can live with for a couple of hours, "We Bought a Zoo" is co-writer and director Cameron Crowe's adaptation of a memoir by Benjamin Mee entitled "We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family...

As a result, film fans have been eagerly anticipating Crowe‘s follow-up feature project, We Bought a Zoo – an adaptation of writer Benjamin Mee‘s memoir, We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild.

Pap, but easygoing pap with a cast you can live with for a couple of hours, "We Bought a Zoo" is co-writer and director Cameron Crowe's adaptation of a memoir by Benjamin Mee entitled "We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family...

There's a moment in director Cameron Crowe's We Bought a Zoo that's indicative of the whole. A character asks a man why he—with no experience with animals or with running a business—bought a failed zoo. His flippant answer: "Why not?" ...

If you’ve ever seen a Cameron Crowe film, you know the man has an ear for music, and a wonderful sensibility when it comes to integrating songs into his narrative. With We Bought A Zoo, probably his most grounded and natural film to date...

With We Bought a Zoo, he returns to form to deliver a feel good, family appropriate, sentimental crowd-pleaser that should play very well to the holiday crowd.

IN INTERVIEWS, Matt Damon wrinkles his disapproving nose and says he signed on for "We Bought a Zoo" on the condition that it not turn out to be a "Disney movie."

To be underwhelmed by a Cameron Crowe movie feels awful. He’s a filmmaker with such an open heart, a defenseless master of the soulful ache, and it kills me to admit that I was rarely moved by “We Bought a Zoo,” painfully aware of its well-oiled...

Clichés and contrivances and corniness, oh my! With We Bought a Zoo, writer-director Cameron Crowe dives headfirst into the schmaltzy slop barrel, delivering one aw-shucks incident after another via the true-life tale of Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon)...

We Bought a Zoo, based on an unusual true story, wanders shamelessly into fawning family entertainment territory. While not always cloying, it's clear Crowe is no longer an approaching auteur.

We Bought a Zoo is the most formulaic movie Cameron Crowe has ever made: It is so generic, you could review it with a flow chart. This is Crowe's first feature since 2005’s unfairly reviled Elizabethtown and also the first time he has shared...

In "We Bought a Zoo," Matt Damon plays Benjamin Mee, a widower who's been alone with his kids for six months when he decides to upend their lives and buy a broken-down zoo in Southern California.

The moment in any family film when dignity goes out the window is an animal reaction shot. In “We Bought a Zoo,” there are shots of a grumpy bear, a sad tiger, an ostrich whose emotions are unknown to us and a capuchin monkey covering his face with a

Formula, however, is the enemy of sincerity, and in We Bought A Zoo, the two engage in a film-long struggle. Adapted from Benjamin Mee’s book of the same name that chronicled his family’s decision to take over England’s struggling Dartmoor Wildlife

Genuinely charming, treacle-free family films are tough to find these days, so I’m happy to heartily recommend “We Bought a Zoo’’ as heartwarming holiday fare that even jaded adults can share with the kids.

Pap, but easygoing pap with a cast you can live with for a couple of hours, "We Bought a Zoo" is co-writer and director Cameron Crowe's adaptation of a memoir by Benjamin Mee entitled "We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family...

We Bought a Zoo is loosely adapted from a true story about a family who bought a down on its luck animal park. It's a heartwarming family film that might go over-the-top with sentimentality a couple of times, but it's also a movie that will tug at your...

Now Crowe has returned with We Bought A Zoo, but sadly it’s more of a faint cry than a bang.

After five years, Crowe’s finally back with WE BOUGHT A ZOO, and significantly, he’s directing from someone else’s script with his sharing a writing credit with hotshot screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (DEVIL WEARS PRADA, MORNING GLORY).

We Bought a Zoo (in theaters Dec. 23). From the high-concept title to the family-friendly story line, it's basically a Tim Allen movie, only made with taste and feeling. Matt Damon plays Benjamin, a lonely widower with two kids...

With We Bought A Zoo, probably his most grounded and natural film to date, we see the evolution of that talent, an original score composed of songs by Sigur Ros frontman Jonsi, or known tracks from the band itself, that builds an emotional foundation...

With We Bought a Zoo—his first outing since the disaster of Elizabethtown—filmmaker Cameron Crowe won't suffer another total commercial and critical flameout, but this is no return to form.

"We Bought a Zoo" may have been schmaltzy to the point of being unwatchable, but Crowe finds just the right blend of easy crowd-pleasing moments while maintaining the strong sense of drama and character dynamics in which he excels.

That's what happened to me seeing Cameron Crowe's new movie We Bought a Zoo at the sneak previews held Saturday evening; it's one of the most endearing, heartwarming, joyful films I've seen this year (so far). Part of this is thanks to Crowe...

The surface-level concept of We Bought a Zoo is fairly ridiculous-sounding: Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) buys and decides to rebuild a broken-down zoo. I’m not sure how We Bought a Zoo differs from Dave Blank’s true life story, and while watching the film...

A single father buys a house with a zoo to help his kids heal after his wife's death in We Bought a Zoo.

ภาพยนตร์ We Bought A Zoo นั้นดัดแปลงจากหนังสือที่เกิดขึ้นจริงของ เบนจามิน ลี ซึ่งถูกวางขายในปี 2008 ก่อนที่ผู้กำกับมากฝีมืออย่าง Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire,Vanilla Sky ) จะเข้ามาสร้างเรื่องราวให้เกิดขึ้นจริงๆในโลกของภาพยนตร์

"We bought a zoo!" squeaks Rosie (frequently). Indeed they did, and Benjamin has all the legal and financial headaches to prove it. Oh Mee, oh my.

We Bought a Zoo is just as cutesy as his previous flick, if not even cutesier. It seems you just can’t reason with an unflinching optimist.

We Bought A Zoo is based on the memoir of Mee, a British journalist whose wife died of cancer in 2007, but the story has received the full Hollywood treatment from director Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire) who co-wrote the screenplay with...

You can’t get more obvious what your film is about with a title like ‘We Bought a Zoo’, but fortunately director Cameron Crowe’s adaptation of British journalist Benjamin Mee’s autobiography possesses much more subtlety and nuance than what its

Cameron Crowe returns from movie exile with We Bought a Zoo, a sweet and sentimental ode to new beginnings that features a charming performance from Matt Damon.

Crowe crashes his understated car of sentiment several times over in We Bought a Zoo.

The bitter cynic within me — located just left of the pancreas, if we’re being precise — would want nothing more than to rip into the manipulative emotional rollercoaster that is Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo, the kind of on-rails Hallmark drama

Crowe's first feature since the godawful Elizabethtown is based on the true life tale of Benjamin Mee, the former Guardian DIY columnist who upped sticks with his family and took over Dartmouth Wildlife Park as a going concern.

Six months after his wife’s death, adventure-writer Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) is having trouble coping with his truculent 14 year-old son Dylan (Colin Ford), who’s been expelled from school not only for drawing grotesque pictures that illustrate...

Writer-director Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire) buys a zoo and let's Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson run it! Very much the kind of film that plays during the holiday season—although not directly linked to Christmas—the whole look and feel is warm...

Do you want to see a formula movie about a grieving widower with two kids who buys a rundown zoo and learns valuable life lessons? Probably not. Which means you're in luck.

My grown-up Christmas list: 1. I wish never again to see, and that means forever, a movie sold with billboards depicting cuddly animals, whether they're zebras or tigers or golden retriever puppies, with big red bows wrapped around their heads.

A comedy with youthful wonderment on its side, the latest film from perpetual teen Cameron Crowe heals a broken family in the quasispiritual gaze of the natural world. (It’s basically The Tree of Life, decoded.) Widowed father Matt Damon takes his two..

The one-time wunderkind, who won an Oscar for writing "Good Will Hunting" with his long-time buddy Ben Affleck, has become one of the most-versatile actors working today, whether he's playing an action hero in the "Bourne" series...

More than half a decade after landing in what some industry observers call "movie jail" with his overreaching romantic dramedy "Elizabethtown," writer-director Cameron Crowe applies for parole with an accessible wannabe family crowd-pleaser,...

Post-disaster comebacks are tricky things. Cameron Crowe’s last flick, Elizabethtown, was liked by nobody and even fewer people paid to see it – so where now for his headily romantic, none-more-unironic aesthetic?

In the end, Crowe tries to make the film about something altogether different, as he begins to wallow increasingly in a sentimentalised exploration of the grief Benjamin and his children are trying to adjust to. But since this is never explored with...

FOUR of Bourne star Matt Damon’s last five leading roles haven’t done much to keep him at the top of the box office.But after Green Zone, Hereafter, The Adjustment Bureau and Contagion, he’s roaring back to life with...

The film is based on British journalist Benjamin Mee’s account of buying Dartmoor Zoo, transplanted by Crowe to California, where even grief is dappled in warm sunlight and mellowed by Cat Stevens. Benjamin buys the tumbledown menagerie on a whim...

Cameron also gets good work from the likable ensemble — Scarlett Johansson’s Zoo Keeper makes for a grounded, tentative love interest, Thomas Hayden Church is an affable older brother and keep ’em peeled for Almost Famous’ Patrick Fugit, all grown up...

It feels as if Cameron Crowe is still weathering the fallout from his last two, critically derided movies, Vanilla Sky (2001) and Elizabethtown (2005), the career impact of which was like a particularly devastating left-right combination to his own face.

Obsessed by his passion for rock 'n' roll, Crowe has a nagging habit of pinning every single moment to a given tune for specific effect. It's not a huge problem if it's done right, because it's not noticeable: The melody only adds to the moment...

Those with discerning children who love animals are in for an uplifting blast with this tender-hearted Disneyesque dramedy in which Matt Damon ups his family-movie cred as a widowed dad who quits journalism to run a run-down zoo.

His beloved wife died six months ago, leaving Benjamin Mee alone with a moody teenage son, a relentlessly cute daughter, a big lump in his heavy heart, and a concerned brother who tells him: “You gotta’ let a little sunshine in.” Oh, not to worry.