“Is this heaven?” asks the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) before dissolving amongst towering stalks of Ray Kinsella’s (Kevin Costner) cornfield. “No it’s Iowa,” Kinsella replies. But for Jackson that cornfield was heaven, not because of the acres of crop Kinsella grew on his Midwest farm, but for the baseball field he inexplicably built in the middle of it. That field offered Jackson, who was banned from the game he loved after being accused of throwing the World Series following a 1919 gambling scandal (a charge he denied until the day he died), a chance to play again. Field of Dreams deploys bold magical realism to tell several stories of redemption: a disgraced ballplayer finds absolution, a jaded writer learns to believe again in the power of his own ideas, an estranged father and son reunite. All of these stories converge seamlessly on a baseball field carved out of a sea of corn in rural Iowa, where a bunch of grown-ups, worn down by the indignities of life, get the chance to be kids again. The film is nothing if not sentimental, but as Caryn James wrote in a 1989 New York Times Review, “[Field of Dreams] is so smartly written, so beautifully filmed, so perfectly acted, that it does the almost impossible trick of turning sentimentality into true emotion.”