The Fabelmans (2022)

Direction: Steven Spielberg
Country: USA 

The Fabelmans, a notably sharp semi-autobiographical drama mounted with proficiency, evokes Steven Spielberg’s youth years, dwelling in his great-to-watch family dynamics and early passion for cinema. Spielberg's declaration of love for the seventh art is sincere, funny and tender, with some magical moments that will easily conquer the viewers’ heart. 

Never in the same vein of his previous works, Spielberg shows how versatile he is, a fact confirmed through his alter ego, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle acts with class and gravitas), who makes low-budget westerns, WWII battles, and homemade movies with the same acuity. We follow him with amusement from age seven to 18, a specific life period that starts in New Jersey, passes by Phoenix, Arizona, and ends in California. Observant, Sammy captures a secret within the family that confounds, hurts and scares.

After the disappointing and unnecessary remake of West Side Story, it’s good to see master Spielberg back in business with an intimate, personal chronicle that is as much endearing as it is eye-popping. The melancholic grace of the image is superb and benefits from the obvious pleasure of staging, while the story itself - another successful collaboration with playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner (Lincoln, 2012; Munich, 2005) - contains real finds, intense moments of happiness, and painful struggles proper from the adolescence.

The Fabelmans is forged with a developed sense of narrative, harmonious composition, and an unblemished command of the actors, with my favorite episode occurring in the final minutes, when the young filmmaker meets the renowned director John Ford (impeccably impersonated by David Lynch) at CBS Studios. Spielberg hasn’t lost sight of the engaging, practical nature of his style, and benefits from the excellent performances of LaBelle, Paul Dano and Michelle Williams.

West Side Story (2021)

Direction: Steven Spielberg
Country: USA 

The celebrated director Steven Spielberg, who had never directed a musical before, takes the 1957 Broadway success West Side Story in his hands and makes it darker and unemotional when compared to Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ quintessential version from 1961. This version maintains both the music of Leonard Bernstein (here re-arranged by David Newman) and the lyrics of the recently departed Stephen Sondheim intact while adding a new choreography by Justin Peck.

With a screenplay by Spielberg’s regular collaborator Tony Kushner, the film deals with the same topics - Manhattan’s Upper West Side gang rivalry in the mid-1950s, gentrification, racial prejudice and forbidden love - while presenting a sumptuous artistic direction and some elaborate choreography. However, this 21st-century reading only delivers half of the emotion generated by the original, with the two leads - Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler - lacking the chemistry that Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood once achieved to make this story famous on the screen. Particularly interesting is the fact that the Puerto Rican-born American actress Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the 1961 version, appears here as Valentina. She also serves as an executive producer. 

Visually, it’s basically the same thing, only more expensive and not so well done. Some scenes even drag while keeping that swaggering posture typical from the Broadway musicals.

Spielberg's West Side Story didn’t thrill me, and I’m still wondering why this half-hearted, unimaginative film was even made in the first place.

Ready Player One (2018)

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Country: USA

Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” is a busy sci-fi adventure punctuated by dark atmospheres and cathartic agitation in the form of wild action sequences filled with flashy, rowdy, and usually tiresome battles. The script, co-penned by Zac Penn and Ernest Cline, was based on the latter's 2011 novel of the same name. Despite the intelligent story, which alerts for current concerns about the addictive power of the ‘unreal’ world of the Internet and video games, the film’s visuals are hyper-saturated, assaulting our brain with the same uncontrolled trepidation as when you loop vertically on a rollercoaster.

Set in 2045, the story follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an 18-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, who lives fascinated with an immersive virtual world called The Oasis, where he is one of the many compulsive players. As a place of the imagination, the Oasis allows you to be who you want to be, do anything, and go anywhere under the guise of an avatar. That way, you can feel every emotion of the experience while escaping from the desolation of the planet.

Our hero chose the Arthurian figure Parzival as his imaginary incarnation, here depicted with a David Bowie-ish hairstyle. He is prepared to plunge into a gaming contest in the Oasis that can change his life forever. The creator of the massively popular game was the venerated James Halliday (Mark Rylance), a quirky dreamer whose posthumous message to the world stated that his fortune and control of The Oasis would be given to the winning player of The Quest, a tough multi-phased contest. With the support of his team, The High-Five, Wade will explore many unknown and dangerous places, as well as fighting personal battles on both sides, the virtual and the real. 

The competition will also serve as a rebellion to free the Oasis from the hands of Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the cunning CEO of a video game company, and his evil allies i-R0k (T.J. Miller) and F'Nale Zandor (Hannah John-Kamen), bounty hunter and operations assistant, respectively. In addition to the challenge, an extra motivation turns up when Wade falls for Samantha Cook (Olivia Cooke), the clouded woman behind the well-known player Art3mis, even before seeing her real face.

The film makes a nostalgic cult to the 70's and 80's, giving it a special flavor. An amazing soundtrack, rich pop-culture elements, and a horrifying recreation of Kubrick's “The Shining” with bloodbath and everything, are some of the good aspects you'll find.

It’s understandable that Spielberg wants to ride the fashion waves of trendiness, after the sobriety and formalism of meritorious dramas such as “Lincoln”, "Bridge of Spies", and “The Post”. However, he does with sensorially exhausting pyrotechnics. In the end, I couldn’t agree more with Halliday: “the real world is the only place you can get a decent meal.” Maybe there’s some truth in the film's tech prognostication, but for now, I rather focus on our planet, where huge problems have urgently to be fixed. Especially when the virtual world depicted wasn’t so attractive.

The Post (2018)

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Country: USA

"The Post", a well-depicted journalistic drama based on true events, marks the awaited return of Steven Spielberg to direction, and stars the fantastic duo Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep as the main protagonists.
Written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer (“Spotlight”), the story is a reconstruction of the 1971 battle between Richard Nixon’s government and the respected American journalists of the Washington Post and New York Times, who decided to publish the Pentagon papers that disclose the embarrassing truth behind the Vietnam War. The facts had been concealed from the public for thirty years.

The marvelous Ms. Streep embodies Katherine Graham, the first female newspaper owner and publisher, who has the power of decision when in possession of such incriminatory documents. On one hand, as a person of contacts, she has a few friends in the government that would be implicated in the political scandal, plus the possibility of losing everything her family had built if the major investors withdraw their money; on the other hand, she faces the responsibility of defending press freedom and ensure the true mission of an independent newspaper.

Persuaded by her tenacious editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Hanks), who got his hard-working team sorting through four thousand unnumbered pages, Katherine, with tears in her eyes and a flickering voice, will have to make the most difficult decision of her life. Pressures and tension are everywhere, from battles for information and revelation of sources to Supreme Court’s deliberations. 

Besides tremendously elucidative, “The Post” is detailed but not boring, triumphant but not ostentatious, disciplined but not tacky. Still, it lacks that emotional knockout punch that other major journalistic films such as “Spotlight” and “All The President’s Men” can brag to have delivered. Hence, if the moments of indecision and resolve are the working organs that make this body of work function correctly, then Meryl Street is both its heart and soul.

Although better in the message than in the art of entertaining, this conspiracy disentanglement is pure respect for freedom and an ode to righteousness.