Steven Spielberg
Jasper Rees
Nostalgia for the good old days of mutually assured destruction? You’d have got long odds on such a thing on 9 November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall was breached. A quarter of a century on, the Americans and the Russians are entangled in a whole other theatre of war in which the idea of negotiating with the enemy is unthinkable. The Soviets may have been abominable commie bastards but, hey, our guys could still clink a glass with them. So Steven Spielberg is able to visit the Cold War in something like a spirit of levity.Bridge of Spies is much more overtly an entertainment than Schindler’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
Whether Lincoln can pip frontrunner Argo to this year's Best Picture gong is in the hands of the Academy, but its 12 nominations are a notable achievement in director Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career. It's sometimes been easy to dismiss Spielberg as a sentimentalist, an entertainer first and an artist second but his films are pure cinema, and for every work of groundbreaking spectacle he's delivered something equally as thought-provoking.Over the years Spielberg's films have secured a not-to-be-balked-at nine Best Picture nominations, and his sterling stewardship has been rewarded with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A rum aspect of the Oscar nominations has been the inclusion of two films that concern American slavery, and which could not be more different: in Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino gives the American slave exactly the sort of empowerment he offered the Jews in Inglourious Basterds – blood-splatter violent and fantastical; in Lincoln, Steven Spielberg is happy to lean on the history books, for a respectful biopic. Lincoln might not be as inventive, or as much fun as Django, but its seriousness and maturity are a welcome alternative to Tarantino’s excess.Spielberg is no stranger to the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Joe Dante feeds the idealised small-town America of his producer Spielberg into the mincer of an anarchic Warner Bros. cartoon in this riotous 1984 hit. Chris Walas’s creature designs are crucial to it, as mysterious, lovably big-eyed pet Gizmo spawns scaly-backed lords of impish mayhem the Gremlins. Whether “carol”-singing Jerry Goldsmith’s capering theme or riding the back of the screaming local Santa, as triple-cigarette-puffing barflies or the world’s most anti-social cinemagoers, you soon warm to their tireless delinquency. Teenage hero Zach Galligan’s mum admittedly thinks otherwise as Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The thrilling does battle with the banal and just about calls it a draw, which is a synoptic way of describing the effect of Steven Spielberg's film of War Horse, based on the Michael Morpurgo novel that spawned the now unstoppably successful play. Those nay-sayers who said it couldn't be done will find their prejudices confirmed, preferring the imaginative reach infinitely more easily arrived at by the use of puppets on stage. On the other hand, no one does epic screen moments quite like Spielberg, which on occasion means wincing through various passages while you await this director's long- Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In JJ Abrams’s retro sci-fi Super 8, a group of budding film-makers are terrorised by a mysterious creature. With credible camaraderie and poignant performances from its young leads, it’s as much about growing up and the thrill of first-time film-making as it is a dalliance with the fantastical.It’s 1979 in the small American town of Lillian, and Joe Lamb (saucer-eyed newcomer Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother in an industrial accident. Neglected by a father struggling to cope with his own grief, Joe escapes by helping with his friend’s zombie film and, in the process, he falls for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been a long time coming, and an extremely nervous wait for millions of fans who grew up on the boy reporter and his alliterating whisky-soaked maritime sidekick. Steven Spielberg first acquired the cinematic rights to The Adventures of Tintin in 1982, the year ET came out. In the interim he’s gone off on tangents featuring war and genocide, dinosaurs and sci-fi. They’ve all been thrillingly different, but all clearly bearing Spielberg’s kitemark. Spielberg may always be faithful to himself, but has a director only now making a habit of adapting from known sources (coming soon: War Horse Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A reporter can be certain of two things: death, and the ephemerality of journalism. Written yesterday, published today, an article will usually be forgotten by tomorrow. The one exception who proves the rule hasn't been heard of in years, but his image adorns T-shirts and watchfaces, dangles from keyrings and greets people on birthday cards. Yes, the only guarantee of wholesale and everlasting fame is in merchandise, and it is a fate not reserved for many of us in the profession.theartsdesk has traced Tintin to the city of Wadyasah in Khemed, where he runs a shop down a side alley of a busy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is it back from the future or forward to the past? We start in the year 2149, and Earth is overcrowded, polluted and staggering towards extinction. Nobody can breathe outdoors without using a rebreather mask, and most plant and animal life has withered away. Near-derelict tower blocks rot in the sickly ginger twilight, like out-takes from Blade Runner. By an amazing stroke of luck, scientists at the FERMI Particle Accelerator have discovered a fissure in the fabric of time (sheesh, not again), and they've used it to construct a gateway back to the primeval world that existed 85 million Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The title is the film. In a new low point for high concepts, producers Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg only needed to see the cover of the titular, unfinished comic book to give Cowboys & Aliens the green light. Iron Man’s director Jon Favreau, JJ Abrams’ writers, Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig similarly found the prospect of the sort of six-shooter/laser dust-up last seen when 1980s schoolkids tipped up their toy boxes irresistible. It’s nothing like as much fun as it should be, the strain of turning the concept into an actual film overwhelming everyone.It’s 1873 and we’re in Absolution Read more ...
howard.male
It’s ironic that we TV critics were only allowed one viewing of this new sci-fi series before having to pass judgment, because even those only casually acquainted with the genre will feel they’ve seen the like of this part-Spielberg-conceived space invasion series many times before anyway. In fact, I can imagine the heads of sci-fi geeks exploding Scanners-style as their brains overheat with the effort of trying quickly to reel off all the films referenced by either concept or design in this opening episode alone.So let me save you from cranial meltdown by pointing out just a few of them: Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For The Pacific, the 10-part saga of a group of US Marines involved in the campaign to drive back the rampant Japanese army in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Spielberg has resumed the executive producer role he adopted to make Band of Brothers nearly a decade ago, once again in partnership with Tom Hanks. Filmed on location in Australia at a cost of $230m, it's reckoned to be the most expensive TV series ever made, and the screen is duly crammed with wall-to-wall action – naval fleets and landing craft, dogged Marines digging in against charging hordes of Japanese soldiers, squadrons of Read more ...