Four score and 150 minutes ago, Steven Spielberg shifted into his John Ford mode with this giant, myth-bolstering Golden Book of a movie. As the Civil War rages on, we open with a moment lifted from Saving Private Ryan: a shorter, but equally anonymous massacre. Inasmuch as it fails to …
Nipponese bodice-ripper, from the best-seller by Arthur Golden, though it plays as if it could just as well have been by Danielle Steel, a Cinderella story of the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of a blue-eyed geisha in pre-war and postwar Japan. "A story like mine," …
A Steven Spielberg vision of the future, via Philip K. Dick, with a legitimate science-fictional idea in it. The idea has to do with an experimental crime-prevention unit in Washington, D.C., in the mid-21st Century -- the Department of Pre-Crime -- whose task is to stop the murders foreseen by …
Getting off on the right foot is vital to a comedy, much more so than to a tragedy, which can afford to put off making you feel miserable. This one -- a comedy, one surmises, about a young couple's travails in fixing up a million-dollar dream house -- starts out …
Steven Spielberg's profoundly pessimistic account of the terrorist massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and the bloody aftermath of tit-for-tat reprisals. The director, while he plainly wants to pay his respects to all parties, has not rid himself of his grandiosity and his self-indulgence. The overextended running …
In what has been billed as "the first real ghost story," the titular poltergeist is somehow allied with ghosts of the white-sheet variety, with zombies and skeletons, with Satan himself and various sub-demons, with animated dolls, with octopus-like trees, with God knows what all. There is no connection, no logical …
In what has been billed as "the first real ghost story," the titular poltergeist is somehow allied with ghosts of the white-sheet variety, with zombies and skeletons, with Satan himself and various sub-demons, with animated dolls, with octopus-like trees, with God knows what all. There is no connection, no logical …
Director Steven Spielberg and executive producer/co-writer George Lucas pay homage to the cliffhanger serials of the Thirties and Forties — and they pay handsomely, pumping the project so full of money, production values, and technical razzle-dazzle that it no longer remotely resembles its grade-B models. Not intending exactly a spoof, …
Director Steven Spielberg and executive producer/co-writer George Lucas pay homage to the cliffhanger serials of the Thirties and Forties — and they pay handsomely, pumping the project so full of money, production values, and technical razzle-dazzle that it no longer remotely resembles its grade-B models. Not intending exactly a spoof, …
Steven Spielberg goes back through the future with the story of Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, looking not unlike a young version of the director), a Willy Wonka for his time. He’s a poor kid from the stacks in 2045 Columbus, but he’s super-good at gaming, so there’s hope that he’ll …
Steven Spielberg goes back through the future with the story of Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, looking not unlike a young version of the director), a Willy Wonka for his time. He’s a poor kid from the stacks in 2045 Columbus, but he’s super-good at gaming, so there’s hope that he’ll …
Steven Spielberg goes back through the future with the story of Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, looking not unlike a young version of the director), a Willy Wonka for his time. He’s a poor kid from the stacks in 2045 Columbus, but he’s super-good at gaming, so there’s hope that he’ll …
A piece of retro science fiction, seemingly rooted up from an early-days issue of Amazing Stories, and set appropriately in the very period, or at the very end of the very period: 1938. You have for starters your straight-arrow hero, a daredevil aviator with never-combed hanks of hair framing his …
Steven Spielberg's blood-and-guts war movie is at its best when it is most conventional and at its worst when trying for more (Spielberg in a nutshell), and it is very often very conventional. Whether or not the filmmaker has achieved his flag-waving, trumpet-blowing goal of honoring the survivors and the …
Steven Spielberg's blood-and-guts war movie is at its best when it is most conventional and at its worst when trying for more (Spielberg in a nutshell), and it is very often very conventional. Whether or not the filmmaker has achieved his flag-waving, trumpet-blowing goal of honoring the survivors and the …