Steven Spielberg's (mostly) black-and-white, three-and-a-third-hour Holocaust film. And the nearest thing to a feel-good Holocaust film that a Holocaust film can be. (The real-life hero -- a gentile businessman who spared over a thousand Jews by keeping them employed in his pots-and-pans plant -- is a reassuring figure for American …
Director J.J. Abrams’s spot-on remake of Steven Spielberg’s ’80s ode to the feeling of childhood, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. It’s all there: the broken home, the mysterious Visitor (more frightening this time, but as in Abrams’s Cloverfield, still somewhat beside the point), the looming shadow of grown-up authority. What is new …
Tom Hanks, for the third time under director Steven Spielberg, as a monolingual visitor from abroad, forced to make a temporary home for himself in the International Transit Lounge at JFK Airport (amid numberless corporate plugs: Hugo Boss, Borders, Sbarro, etc.) when a military coup unsettles his fictitious homeland of …
Director Keith Maitland combines eyewitness testimony,16mm file footage, and hack animation to document the afternoon of August 1, 1966, when University of Texas Tower sniper Charles Whitman shot and killed 16 people. One can almost justify the use of animation in cases where no photographic record of an actual event …
Four twenty-minute episodes (plus a prologue), three of which are adapted from episodes of the same-named Rod Serling TV show, and the other an original. Together, they re-evoke the heavy moralizing and ironizing and sentimentalizing that marked, and marred, the entire series. They do not re-evoke the cumulative richness of …
Steven Spielberg's retelling of H.G. Wells's s-f classic. The alien-invasion subgenre, as everyone now knows, blossomed during the Cold War, fertilized by fears of Communist takeover; and it's quite reasonable, quite knowledgeable, to deduce that 9/11 and its aftermath could dump some fresh manure in the field. Spielberg makes damn …
Why? Steven Spielberg can make any movie he wants. Why trace a legend if all that’s to come of it is a blemished face-lift? Some of the more problematic moments from Robert Wise’s 1962 original — Anglo-stars darkened by Max Factor, Marni Nixon’s ghost-singing, Vaselined lenses — have been smoothed …