The Fabelmans (2023)

The poster says, "Capture every moment," but a more appropriate line would be "capture just a series of moments from mostly one formative year in the life of a young schoolboy who dreams of making movies, and really wallow for most of the time in the uncomfortable matter of the boy's involvement in his mother's love, sex, and fidelity, while only treating very cursorily the much more interesting ideas of the camera's fidelity - its equal ability to tell truth and lie - leaving bemused viewers wondering why, if this is Steven Spielberg's deeply personal life story, the lead is Sam, not Steven, and why the life story abruptly ends with a shrug (and a playful wink) in the middle of Sam's teens - perhaps this was to be a Wonder Years-style TV show gone wrong; perhaps seventy other years' worth of cinematic genius are on the cutting room floor.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Super 8 (2011)

 

A Goonies gang accidentally captures government secrets on their Super 8 camera as they make a zombie film, and while the kids revel in making their zombie movie, you get the sense director J J Abrams himself is revelling in making  the sort of movie Spielberg made in the 80s with kids on an adventure  in a richly detailed small-town America, but J J Abrams is also paying homage to the paranoid scifi invasion B-movies of the 50s and this dual, conflicting purpose strips some Spielberg heart from the kids' adventure.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ready Player One (2018)

The ragtag bunch of best friends has been replaced by a ragtag bunch of avatars of virtual strangers; the Fratelli family is an evil mega-corporation; One-Eyed Willy's treasure is an Easter Egg worth trillions hidden in a virtual world stuffed full of unamusing pop culture references - and the fun is in short supply in Steven Spielberg's busy but soulless millenial update of The Goonies.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Jeff Goldblum does his zany thing, reprising his role of zany chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and taking the lead in this sequel, a darker, more violent, headache-inducing and overall lesser Jurassic Park movie which has Malcolm sent by John Hammond to a second island of the park to research and document dinosaurs but he finds mercenaries from the InGen corporation are also there with less sensible, more short-term commercial interests in mind.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Poltergeist (1982)

The Conjuring franchise and all its spin-offs owe everything to this Steven Spielberg-written and -produced supernatural horror of the 80s which starts quirkily with a family enjoying the supernatural oddities it experiences at home but then has family members growing more and more screamy as whatever it is that is haunting them grows malevolent and sucks the daughter into a Mike TV limbo world - putting up with the shrillness of everyone yelling is worth it for the Spielberg set piece serving as the horror-lite movie's climax.

★★★☆☆

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Jurassic Park (1993)

I won tickets to see this in 2017 with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performing the John Williams score live, and the movie - about a dinosaur breakout in an ill-conceived Jurassic themepark - is so full of thrilling Spielberg setpieces and humour, and special effects still impressive today, that I forgot to stop even for a moment to appreciate the orchestra.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011)

Marvellous to look at and full of hilarious details that kept me and my nephews laughing, this elaborately rendered animation from Steven Spielberg brings the characters of Herge's Tintin comics to amazing 3D life but while scenes are fluid and exciting like Indiana Jones setpieces, the greater story is an anticlimactic vacuum: a drunk sailor, Haddock, needs to quit the bottle in order to be able to recall vital family history which isn't actually vital at all - at last remembered, it just catches him up with what audiences pretty much knew from the start.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Minority Report (2002)

Philip K Dick's 1956 sci-fi short story, The Minority Report, about three future-seeing "pre-cogs", is brought to the big screen by Steven Spielberg who wrangles the themes and details into his own uneven creation - an occasionally engaging, occasionally ridiculous (especially the video-upload-at-a-gala-dinner denouement) crime mystery with Tom Cruise not in top form as Detective John Anderton, Head of the Pre-Crime Division and - according to the precogs - murderer-to-be of a man he is yet to meet!

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

The Goonies (1985)

A group of kids hopes to save their home from demolition with a last ditch adventure that proves to be a riotous treasure hunt involving pirate ships, bats, maps, codes, caves and the not so sinister Fratellis!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A.I. (2001)

A.I. is like two movies in one: the first half is like a Stanley Kubrick movie and is rich and thoughtful, cinematic, and cool in tone, about loss and maternal love, and the second half is like a Spielberg movie and is a sloppy childish mess with a disney-feel and with so many ideas in it none of them get any adequate consideration.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS