Spielberg believes in magic all right, Christmas or otherwise.
When I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark as a kid, I didn’t know a thing about tracking shots, composition, or visual framing—I only knew I wanted this film in my brain forever.
I wanted to be like Roy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wanted something huge and inscrutable to choose me out of the billions of people on Earth.
Spielberg’s dystopian vision in A.I. retains a sincere humanity at its heart, even while acknowledging that that heart isn’t beating.
Spielberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel, about his time in a Japanese-run internment camp in China, comes at us less as an argument than as a series of cinematic intensities.
Jurassic Park began as a novel, a cautionary tale about genetic engineering. On screen, it became a metaphor for reproductive fears and patriarchal control.
Spielberg is a great filmmaker, not a great thinker. And that's the problem.
on The Sugarland Express (1974)
