Back in the family

UNTIL he played Ted Kramer in 1979 family drama Kramer vs Kramer, Dustin Hoffman had drifted away from his buttoned-down character in The Graduate.

Kramer vs Kramer

UNTIL he played Manhattan advertising director Ted Kramer in writer-director Robert Benton's 1979 family drama Kramer vs Kramer (Sunday, 8.30pm, TCM), Dustin Hoffman had drifted away from the buttoned-down Benjamin Braddock of his first big hit The Graduate in favour of more marginalised characters in films such as Midnight Cowboy, Lenny and Straight Time.

Meryl Streep co-stars as the wife who leaves him to "find herself", forcing him to be a better father in the process. The film was immensely successful, winning Academy Awards including best director and best actor

Benton has enjoyed an interesting and varied career as a filmmaker. An art director at Esquire magazine in the early 1960s, he segued to screenwriting with scripts for Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?. He made his directorial debut with the 1972 western Bad Company and subsequently won his second directing Oscar to date for 1984's Places in the Heart.

His 1994 small-town comedy-drama Nobody's Fool (Tuesday, 8.30pm, M Masterpiece) is a late-career diamond in the rough, adapted from the novel by Richard Russo, about a local slacker (Paul Newman) and his mellow adventures with the picaresque townspeople. The all-star cast includes Bruce Willis, in perhaps his best straight dramatic role to date, Melanie Griffith, a young Philip Seymour Hoffman and, in her final performance, Jessica Tandy.

When approaching Robert De Niro's filmography, it helps to understand that as the years have gone by the chaff has come to equal and perhaps surpass the wheat, so to speak. So it comes as a particular pleasure to find two of his better films presented as a double feature. Director John Frankenheimer's propulsive 1998 caper movie Ronin (Wednesday, 8.35pm, Fox Classics, M) headlines him as a mysterious special operations veteran hired to steal a briefcase full of something never revealed, and features a pair of spectacular car chases through Nice and Paris.

Immediately afterwards, Martin Scorsese's 1995 crime thriller Casino (Wednesday, 10.35pm, Fox Classics) stars De Niro as a fictionalised real-life gangster running a Las Vegas landmark in the 1970s and 80s.

In an entirely different vein, writer-director Christopher Guest's A Mighty Wind (Saturday, 12pm, M Masterpiece) may be his magnum opus, a "mockumentary" (he hates that word) in which his entire stock company stars as over-the-hill 1960s folk musicians attempting a comeback concert. So thoroughly does Guest create, and his actors inhabit, this parallel universe that those stumbling on to the film could be forgiven for believing these are real people.

The fabricated songs, many of which are out-and-out folk spoofs but a few of which are quite lovely, add enormously to the verisimilitude.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

Kramer vs Kramer (M)
4 stars
Sunday, 8.30pm, TCM

A Mighty Wind (PG)
4 stars
Saturday, 12pm, M Masterpiece

Nobody's Fool (M)
4 stars
Tuesday, 8.30pm, M Masterpiece