Something to watch tonight: Friday 9 May

Pets (Howard, 2025)

Returning home from a trip to the vet with one of our cats this morn­ing – blood tests to hope­fully explain why her weight is slowly drop­ping but also con­firm­a­tion that her eye­sight is “min­im­al but she’s com­pens­at­ing well”, thanks for ask­ing – I was reminded that I had talked about this film on Nights with Emile Donovan a couple of weeks ago but failed to include a men­tion in the weekly new releases column.

Pets is, indeed, very new and makes excel­lent fam­ily view­ing (unless you are con­cerned that young­er mem­bers of the fam­ily will use it as lever­age to get a domest­ic pig which is a very real risk).

The film comes from Ron Howard’s Imagine pro­duc­tion com­pany but the Howard that gets the director’s cred­it here isn’t Ron but his daugh­ter Bryce Dallas Howard. The sub­ject is com­pan­ion anim­als and the impact they have on our lives which is a top­ic that is like shoot­ing fish in a bar­rel as far as easy tar­gets go (although not com­pan­ion fish, don’t do that).

I watched this by myself and texted the editor-in-chief about five minutes in:

I’m such a sook for stuff like this but I really did appre­ci­ate that the char­ac­ters that Howard has found here – linked by very cute kids explain­ing why their pets are so import­ant to them – are actu­ally really inter­est­ing. There’s a Spanish solo kayaker who adopts a dog who travels around the Mediterranean with him, a couple who adopt a pig who encour­ages them to start a res­cue farm for anim­als with spe­cial needs, and a former Washington D.C. gang banger who now keeps falcons.

Pets is easy to recom­mend, easy to watch, but with a sol­id enough ped­i­gree – see what I did there – that every­one will get some­thing out of it.

Where to watch Pets

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: Streaming on Disney+