No Pets (DVD)

 

Tony Buba’s first fiction feature film – based on a short story by the writer Jim Daniels – is a story about work and love and animals. It’s about the end of an age, mythical or real, when a job was a job, love was true, and everybody had a dog.

 

Graceful, modest, beautifully-acted, and increasingly moving, it’s a frank, perceptive, unvarnished portrait of working-class American life – the kind of film that, sadly, is exceedingly rare.

 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette film critic Marylynn Uricchio noted: “Buba’s greatest gift has always been to find humor in the most dismal circumstances, and to find hope at every dead end – Buba finds everything that is noble about the human spirit and celebrates it as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”