Max

Max, a military dog trained to find explosives in Afghanistan, survives the ambush that kills his handler Sergeant Kyle Wincott, but does not get past the trauma. Because the dog will let nobody near him, putting him down comes up. The one exception is Justin, Kyle's younger brother. The family takes Max to Texas. Carrying his brother's death, Justin has to put both the dog and himself back together, and his friends drifting into petty crime complicates it. Boaz Yakin directed and wrote it with Sheldon Lettich. It opened on 26 June 2015. The dog is the most technical thing in the film. Max is not played by one animal: five Belgian Malinois worked on it. In roughly eighty percent of the shots the dog on screen is Carlos. The rest was divided by speciality, with Dude doing the fence jumps, Pilot the takedowns and play-fighting, and Pax the bared teeth and the fast running shots. The production received full certification under the American Humane Association's No Animals Were Harmed programme, with all five dogs monitored throughout filming. It opened in midsummer, in the weeks when Inside Out and Jurassic World were filling the cinemas. Who it is for: viewers who like family films with children in them and stories about dogs. Who it is not for: anyone critical of military narratives. The film uses the war as background and does not question it.