Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House

Thanks to our 21^st century taste for exhibitionism, documentaries are now a better bet for revealing and harrowing portrayals of domestic and family life than fiction

Celebrity is the first good film Woody Allen has made since Husbands and Wives, though it’s still not all that great. It is about celebrity, which is a subject of major concern to the postmodernist sensibility, and it makes use of a central postmodern joke. That is, the celebrity director known as “Woody Allen,” does…

An often funny, less-often satirical satire of the movie business which suffers from the usual weakness of its kind: it’s only kidding

Almost a pastiche of a Truffaut-like coming of age picture, but without Truffaut’s magic touch

Tea With Mussolini is, like so many other works by its director and co- writer (with John Mortimer) Franco Zeffirelli, for movie-goers with rather more of a sweet-tooth than I generally find I have. Adapted from Zeffirelli’s autobiography, it tells the story of a small Italian boy called Luca (played as a child by Charlie…

The English version of the title of Amores Perros, written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is given by its distributors as Love is a Bitch, though this seems to be something of an unhappy compromise, suggesting one of those assembly-line romantic comedies cranked out by Hollywood to exploit the fame of…