Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House

Yet another nostalgic invocation of the hippie dream, though at least this one doesn’t pretend to be sexually innocent

Hard Eight is a brilliant little film by Paul Thomas Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay. It is a retelling (sort of) of Shakespeare’s Tempest set in the seedy but ever-atmospheric world of Nevada gambling dens. It begins with a castaway called John (John C. Reilly), washed up outside “Jack’s Coffee Shop” somewhere along a…

Mystery, Alaska, directed by Jay Roach, aspires to be the Rocky of hockey. A small-town hockey team from Alaska (surely they must mean Canada?) takes on the mighty New York Rangers on the neighborhood ice and, against all expectations, goes the distance with them. If you get a lump in your throat when Rocky staggers…

You’ve got to hand it to Nicole Kassell and Kevin Bacon, for in making a hero of a child molester they haven’t taken the easy way to pleasing audiences

A fine war movie in spite of its being pitched to an audience with a pacifist predisposition

Grey Gardens by David and Albert Maysles is a re-release of the film they made in the 1970s about two women made interesting to the camera by the accident of celebrity, yet whose interest for us is owing simply to their strange and rather pathetic humanity. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter of the same…