I loved "My Life As A Dog" way back when I was in college. It was a movie I wanted to see again. I could always count on it making me cry, but in a good way. Because I loved young Ingmar with his profound sensitivity, his love for his dog, his need to make his dying mother laugh, his two pretty female friends. I loved him for making illicit French toast in the girl's class at school, for his desperate attempts to rouse his miserable mother with the purchase of a toaster. For the way he looked up at the stars for answers to the hard questions. "My Life As A Dog" felt like a perfect movie to me, a simple and moving story.

And then Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallström came to America. He started with the well-done, if a bit cute, "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and from there went on to become the king of the sentimental movie. He made overbearing, artsy films like "Chocolat" and "The Cider House Rules," where small communities were always crowded with eccentrics and the theme music swelled. Hallström turned everything that was unique about "My Life As a Dog" into a cliché and made vapid fare disguised as art movies. I feared that "My Life As A Dog" was sentimental tripe and I knew nothing when I was eighteen.

Thank goodness, the film lives up to my memory. I can continue to embrace "My Life As A Dog." In an interview on the Criterion DVD release, Hallström acknowledges that the film is his best work, the one he compares all his other films to. Young Ingmar is a smart and wonderful sad child who invokes famous tragedies to make his own life more livable. The theme music is just right. The kooks in the small Swedish town are interesting and entertaining without turning my stomach as they did in "Chocolat," and yes, watching Ingmar cry for his dog can still make me teary-eyed.

In addition to the interview with Halmström, the Criterion DVD features a 52-minute film by the director and essays by Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Atkinson.