The sighting of a stray Japanese submarine off the California coast ignites a slapstick panic which might more revealingly have been titled The Japs Are Coming, The Japs Are Coming. Steven Spielberg must have figured that if Stanley Kramer could resuscitate slapstick comedy (cf. It'a a Mad, Mad [etc.] World), …

Three of the Franco-Belgian comic-book yarns by Hergé are smoothly poured into a pretty, motion-capture animation by Steven Spielberg. Short on real cartooning, long on quaintness, short on story, long on hectic action, it is for unimaginative boys 7 to 12. For the rest of us, it is a kind …

Steven Spielberg's futuristic tale (a project taken over from the late Stanley Kubrick) of the first robot programmed to love. Not, let's be clear, one of those old-hat technological advances on the porn-shop inflatable love-doll, equipped with "sensuality simulators" and such. But rather, a "mecha-child" (short for mechanical child), placed …

Well, once in a while, maybe. Steven Spielberg's remake and update of Guy Named Joe, a WWII fantasy about the ghost of a recently deceased flyer who (unbeknown to anyone alive) tutors a neophyte flyer and even plays matchmaker between that neophyte and his own former sweetheart, loses some of …

In America, little Fievel Mousekewitz learns while growing up in Russia in 1885, "there are no cats. And the streets are paved with cheese." This establishes, immediately and neverendingly, the monotonous pattern of rodentized clichés and stereotypes: especially ethnic clichés and stereotypes, Jewish, Irish, French, Italian. There has been no …

In America, little Fievel Mousekewitz learns while growing up in Russia in 1885, "there are no cats. And the streets are paved with cheese." This establishes, immediately and neverendingly, the monotonous pattern of rodentized clichés and stereotypes: especially ethnic clichés and stereotypes, Jewish, Irish, French, Italian. There has been no …

Just as Steven Spielberg followed Jurassic Park (very soon) with Schindler's List, he follows the Jurassic Park sequel (equally soon) with something to do with the African slave trade: these would be the Good Works that counterbalance the Money Lust. The true case of rebellious, slaughterous blacks on a Spanish …

Just what the world needs: more bugs! Better bugs, besides: a lethal prehistoric spider from Venezuela, imported in a coffin and mated with the common American house spider. Frank Marshall, who had often enough served in the Producer role for Director Steven Spielberg, reverses the arrangement here, but has prudently …

Whether or not you are a fan of fart jokes, you will almost certainly feel something during the protracted run-up and almost equally protracted execution of the one that director Steven Spielberg delivers in his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved story of a runty giant who seeks to atone for …

More than ten years and $25 million in the making, and at those figures, rather a large disappointment. The Disney studio's attempt in the Eighties to reassert itself in the animation field seems to have an eye as much on George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as on Pinocchio or Peter …

Call it Mr. Donovan goes to East Berlin. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks team up for a handsome piece of very pointed nostalgia (with help from the Coen Brothers and Matt Charman, who handled the script, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, lens set to "stately."). Hanks is private citizen and shrewd …

The title identifies the room number of the Hotel Martinez in Cannes, in which Wim Wenders entertained a gaggle of his fellow filmmakers one at a time, sat them down in front of a camera and with their backs to a soundless television (the enemy), and confronted them with the …

Steven Spielberg surpasses all of his sci-fi forerunners in the only way he knows how in material things. He has costlier, more spectacular special effects, including some really wonderful nighttime skies; he has bigger and brighter spaceships; he has louder sound effects and background music; and he has the largest …

Science fiction, but only by the technicality of containing several characters who are said to be aliens. They could as easily have been somebody's fairy godparents or genies from a bottle or the sort of lubricious Cupids who used to get things going in Thorne Smith's fantasy novels of the …

A new take on the Steven Spielberg prestige pic.