A popular writer-director of comedies in his native Sweden, Lasse Hallstrom segued to a fairly successful Hollywood career in the early 1990s without abandoning his European sensibilities. Hallstrom has demonstrated an impressive flair for directing actors in general and children in particular. He is attracted to emotional family-related material but deftly avoids sentimentality. Hallstrom gained an international audience with "My Life as a Dog" (1985), an irresistibly bittersweet comedy adapted from Reidar Jonsson's autobiographical novel about the misadventures of a 12-year-old sent to live
