Steven Spielberg

The Fabelmans: The Art of a Lion

Jeremy BeckReviews
Gabriel LaBelle in The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is undoubtedly a valentine, but who is the target of its affection? Is it an ode to the movies—a celebration of the populist art form’s beauty and magic? Is it a self-congratulatory testament to Spielberg’s own genius, given that it chronicles a lightly fictionalized version of his childhood? Or is it meant as a gift to you, the audience—the appreciative populace that regularly crowds into auditoriums to stare upward at a silver screen? Early in the film, a young boy makes his first visit to the theater in 1952 in what proves to be a transformative experience; surrounded by hundreds of strangers, he gapes in awe, making the same wide-eyed face that he will spend the rest of his life earnestly recreating.

Watching The Fabelmans in a half-empty 53-seat multiplex, I felt a twinge of irony at that image; the notion of throngs of ticket-buyers piling into giant caverns to watch movies would seem to be less a halcyon vision than a distant memory. (Unless you’re talking about superhero flicks; across the hall, in its third week of release, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was gobbling up $64 million, more than 20 times The Fabelmans’ gross.) But one of the lessons of this sweet, enchanting movie is that cinema can retain its power in settings that are intimate as well as expansive, and that art can be a vehicle for personal expression in addition to a commercial product. It may find Spielberg operating in a gentler register than typical, but that sensitivity hasn’t dulled his instincts as an entertainer or hampered his gifts as a storyteller. Read More

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West Side Story: There’s Still Grace for Us

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ariana DeBose and David Alvarez in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story

Is West Side Story Steven Spielberg’s first musical, or his 30th? For nearly half a century, one of cinema’s greatest directors has been concocting robust sequences that bear the indicia of musical numbers: nimble choreography, balletic grace, syncopated rhythm. To survey his most impressive achievements—the vigorous chases of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the rampaging dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, the futuristic mayhem of Minority Report, and countless more—is to witness the work of a filmmaker who applies his craft with the precision of an inveterate composer. In essence, Spielberg has been making musicals for 50 years; West Side Story is just the first one that happens to include songs.

One of the ironies of his new feature is that those songs are virtually the opposite of original creations. Instead, viewers with even a cursory knowledge of Broadway hits will instantly recognize the soaring melodies of Leonard Bernstein and the snappy lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, which (as if you need me to tell you) were repurposed six decades ago by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins into an Oscar-sweeping smash. This familiarity necessarily dilutes the frisson of anticipation that attends any new Spielberg picture—how can Hollywood’s preeminent dazzler dazzle us when we’ve already been dazzled?—yet it also makes a certain sense. Spielberg’s virtuosity as a director lies not in his talent for pure invention (he hardly ever writes his own scripts), but in his gift for wielding the traditional elements of cinematic action—running, jumping, driving, dancing—in exhilarating new ways. Read More

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Ready Player One: For These Teens, It’s Game On or Game Over

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke in Steven Spielberg's "Ready Player One"

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: An intrepid young man, living in a dystopian future, must use his pluck and ingenuity to defeat a powerful villain whose mercenary greed threatens our hero’s livelihood, along with the rest of the planet’s. In so doing, he will assemble a ragtag team of similarly disenfranchised youths, one of whom will catch his eye as a potential love interest, another of whom will support him with weapons and wisecracks. Foes will be vanquished, bonds will be forged, and while setbacks will surely be suffered (tertiary characters may even be killed), in the end, the world will almost certainly be saved.

Ready Player One, the robust and flawed film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s immensely popular book, doesn’t so much follow this familiar script as live inside it. It envisions a universe where the very act of engaging with popular art—mostly playing videogames, but also watching movies and spotting references—becomes the fulcrum of its story. It’s a recursive premise that’s less interesting than it sounds, primarily serving as the excuse for a non-stop parade of pop-culture allusions and winking asides. And perhaps in an alternate dimension—maybe one reached by traveling through some sort of vaguely defined wormhole whose laws are breathlessly explained to us in a bout of foggy exposition—Ready Player One would have been a piece of hackwork that turned out to be a tedious, imitative slog. But in our reality, it’s better than that, because in our reality, it’s been directed by Steven Spielberg. Read More

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The Post: Stop the Presses, or Else

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in Steven Spielberg's "The Post"

Describe The Post in terms of its plot, and you risk making it sound like a bore. Here is a based-in-fact film about a band of huffy journalists who squabble with a cadre of wussy pencil-pushers about whether to publish a newspaper article; these are not typically the raw materials of exciting drama. Yet because we currently live in a society where the government openly wages war on the press, The Post is one of the most important political movies of our time. And because it has been directed by Steven Spielberg, it is also one of our most enjoyable.

In recognizing the former, one should be careful not to ignore the latter. The unnerving topicality of The Post threatens to overshadow just how effortlessly it works as a piece of cinema, how sharply crafted and exquisitely performed it is. Employing his characteristic care and vigor, Spielberg has almost imperceptibly transformed the film’s bustling narrative—a thicket of murky backroom meetings, lavish dinner parties, and complex legal proceedings—into a rousing and supremely entertaining production. Contemporary circumstances may have rendered The Post regrettably relevant, but this movie would be a delight to watch regardless of who’s sitting in the Oval Office. Read More

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The BFG: Off to Giant Country, and Packing Light

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ruby Barnhill and Mark Rylance, in Steven Spielberg's "The BFG"

For a director who is renowned for purveying inspirational entertainment, Steven Spielberg’s resume is surprisingly light on kid-friendly pictures. Sure, E.T. imprinted his inimitable brand of humanistic fantasy upon an entire generation, but beyond that, The Beard has largely eschewed family-oriented fare, preferring to smuggle his predilection for warmth and decency inside colder, darker films. (The only real exceptions are the ill-received Peter Pan sequel Hook and the underloved animated romp The Adventures of Tintin). Hell, he turned down Harry Potter. Still, Spielberg at his core is a crowd-pleaser, and in adapting Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s classic The BFG, he’s clearly invested in delivering excitement and wonder to a new era of wide-eyed kids.

Judged against these lofty goals, The BFG is a failure, even if it is also, on different terms, a worthy accomplishment. This weird, amorphous movie is by no means going to become a staple on cable television, destined to be re-watched over and over; it will not be endlessly quoted in the schoolyard or relentlessly imitated at the multiplex. (In fact, it is already fizzling at the domestic box office.) But in failing to craft a cultural touchstone, Spielberg has done something arguably more impressive: He’s made a children’s movie that’s interesting. Read More

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