Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House

As he did in Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur tries to make his historical characters less like themselves and more like us. Why the self-congratulation?

An austerely beautiful film by the Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski that could hardly be a greater departure from his earlier My Summer of Love

The comic insight at the heart of Jay Roach’s Meet the Parents lies in establishing the nexus between humorlessness, paranoia and sentimentality in Robert De Niro’s portrayal of every bachelor’s nightmare of the father of his intended. The late Adolf Hitler, I believe, had the same three qualities, though this is not a comparison in…

A new Hollywood metaphysical so lacking in imagination that omnipotence is only a means to the end of  stardom as a local TV news anchor

Shall We Dance? by Masayuki Suo is a Japanese film with all the charm and delicacy of the best French movies. It surprises and delights with the subtlety of its observation and the skill of its construction, and it moved me deeply at several points. Koji Yakusyo stars as Mr Sugiyama, a rumpled and tired-…

A star vehicle for Glenn Close that also scores progressivist points for importing today’s gender-bending ideas into Victorian times