Steven Spielberg
Adam Sweeting
“Are they all like that?” asks a shaken Major Bucky Egan (Callum Turner), after he’s completed his first bombing mission over Germany as a guest of the US Eighth Air Force’s 389th Bomb Group. They’ve been battered by flak and lacerated by German fighters, and the front half of their B-17 bomber looks like an abattoir. His pilot looks ahead with a thousand-yard stare, and says “don’t tell your guys anything, they’ll figure it out.”And history does indeed repeat itself after Bucky’s compadres from 100th Bomb Group catch up with him at their airfield at Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk, having flown in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) revived Thirties adventure serials’ simple thrills, a George Lucas notion adrenalised by Spielberg. Its hero Indy Jones wasn’t built for depth or pathos, and the struggle to find reasons for his return notoriously sank Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and left this final chapter in production purgatory till Harrison Ford was 79.Ford wanted this sequel, disagreeing with Spielberg on its premise, and driving it to completion when the director gave up. Indy’s humanity wholly resides in his lopsided, ironic grins at peril, rugged but Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spielberg sometimes directed The Fabelmans through a film of tears, as he recreated his cinema’s origins. Lightly fictionalising his own family history, it turns an autobiographical key to previous films, while being fundamentally different to anything he’s made before.His destiny’s zero hour is October 1, 1952, as nervous six-year-old Sammy Fabelman prepares for his first cinema trip, to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show On Earth. Dad Burt (Paul Dano) tries to demystify moving pictures’ illusion. Mum Mitzi (Michelle Williams) drops to Sammy’s level so he dwarfs her on screen, and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Franchise burnout continues apace, in this asteroid strike of a finale. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness showed the previously agile and humane Marvel machine weighed down by plot mechanics and fan service, and this Jurassic Park/World trilogy unification bout proves a pointless, often ponderous 146 minutes. As post-pandemic cinema moves to total dependence on such sequels, their creative entropy could be an extinction event for filmgoing itself.Mainstream cinema has long been based on childhood nostalgia, and is now aimed at adults weened on Jurassic Park, the Star Wars prequels Read more ...
Nick Hasted
West Side Story’s cinema release crashed into Omicron and never recovered. Maybe Ariana DeBose’s Oscar will help the world wake up to this Spielberg masterpiece, which definitively betters 1961’s Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version.Spielberg loves West Side Story as much as its Romeo and Juliet, Tony and María, love each other. The material is part of his childhood, as personal as upcoming semi-memoir The Fabelmans. A film about romantic transcendence that ultimately falls to earth, this is one of his most exuberant and serious works, propelled by Leonard Bernstein’s music, ironised by Stephen Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On the Other Hand, We’re Happy Summerhall ****This affecting co-production between Paines Plough and Theatr Clywd of Daf James’s play takes a sideways look at adoption.Twentysomethings Abbi (Charlotte Bate) and Josh (Toyin Omari-Kinch) have been together for almost their entire lifetime. They’re solid, so it’s a shock when they can’t have a biological child, and they decide to adopt.The long drawn-out nature of the adoptive process is neatly essayed here, with endless discussion about what kind of child they wish/will be allowed to adopt, and the pitfalls to be avoided. One wrong step and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Stravinsky: Petrushka, Agon (arranged for piano duet and two pianos by the composer) Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo (Wergo)Stravinsky's long career is traversed in black and white here, with ballet scores early and late accompanying a pair of shorter works. Petrushka and Agon are both masterpieces of orchestral colour, but the composer's piano duo reductions are so skilfully wrought that you never feel short-changed. Helen Bugallo and Amy Williams give us Stravinsky's piano duet transcription of the fuller textured 1911 score. It's as tight a performance as you'd expect from two players Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spielberg’s prequel to All the President’s Men was filmed at speed, and aimed squarely at the press-hating Trump, not the late Tricky Dick. This contemporary intent is already fading. What remains is the director’s second return, after Munich, to the sort of Seventies conspiracy thriller dabbled in by his own great hits of the decade, Jaws and Close Encounters. The story of the 1971 exposé by government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed the US government’s true, knowingly doomed conduct in Vietnam, is framed here by a less important question: whether the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Suddenly Steven Spielberg movies are plopping off the production line like Ford Fiestas or Cadburys Creme Eggs. It seems like only seconds ago that we were greeting The BFG and the breast-beating earnestness of The Post, and now the director comes steaming back with this huge and hectic tribute to the gamer-world and his own long-lost youth.Based, albeit with a fair bit of latitude, on Ernest Cline’s bestselling novel (Cline wrote the screenplay with Zak Penn), it’s set in a dismal, overcrowded 2045. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is not only named like a superhero’s alter ego, but he escapes into Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It beggars belief that, from the moment Steven Spielberg took delivery of the script by first-timer Liz Hannah, it took a mere 10 months to get The Post in the can. Its subject being the race to publish, that's a fitting rate of production. Introducing the film at its London premiere, Spielberg stressed the urgency of a story about the media under renewed attack. For Richard Nixon, who tried to suppress the bad news about Vietnam, read Donald Trump’s confected concept of fake news.The Post has since acquired an extra timeliness. There’s an indelible image towards the end of Katharine "Kay" Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two cultural giants from different spheres align to occasionally sublime results in The BFG. Steven Spielberg's film locates the beatific in its (literally) outsized star, Mark Rylance, but lapses into the banal when its eponymous Big Friendly Giant – Roald Dahl's 1982 literary creation made motion-capture fresh – isn't careering across the screen.As a sort of companion piece to E.T., which shares this film's screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, who died last year, the film brings an otherworldly presence into our world of the everyday. And yet there remains something pro forma about the abiding Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Next week the seventh episode of George Lucas's famed space saga will be released on a wave of hype and eager anticipation. Star Wars: The Force Awakens no longer has Lucas at the helm, the man with the Jar Jar Binks way with words having passed his company to Disney and the creative mantle to others, in the first instance JJ Abrams. We can expect homage and nostalgia accompanied by a frisson of fresh faces and new tricks. It ought to be a blast.But for whom, exactly? Star Wars was a groundbreaking phenomenon in 1977, helping to introduce the blockbuster movie, the marketing monster and Read more ...