Review: Steven Spielberg digs into his roots in 'The Fabelmans,' a brilliant love letter to family and filmmaking

It takes Judd Hirsch, who only appears for a couple of minutes, to summarize the beauty and brilliance of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical drama “The Fabelmans” — when, as bombastic old Uncle Boris meets the teen Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), he pinpoints the kid’s future: “Family. Art. They’ll tear you apart.”

Sammy is the stand-in for Spielberg himself, as written by Spielberg and his “Lincoln” and “West Side Story” screenwriter Tony Kushner in a deeply touching, sometimes funny, script. 

We see Sammy first as an 5-year-old (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) in 1952, scared about sitting in the dark to see a movie for the first time. His father, Burt (Paul Dano), a computer engineer back when that was a new thing, describes scientifically how movies are still photos flashing by at 24 frames per second, and our mind translates that into motion. His mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a one-time concert pianist, gives the more soulful explanation: “Movies are dreams that you never forget.”

This Venn diagram, between technical genius and yearning artist, is where Spielberg has been his entire career — and meeting his parents, or a reasonable facsimile, explains a lot. But it doesn’t explain everything, and “The Fabelmans” shows an artist’s influences aren’t always so cut and dried.

The train wreck he sees in his first movie, Cecil B. deMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth,” so fascinates and terrifies little Sammy that he asks for a model train set for Hanukkah — so he can re-enact the crash and demystify it. When Dad objects to damaging his toys that way, Mom has an idea: Take Dad’s 8mm Keystone camera and film the crash, so he can watch it again and again until it’s no longer scary. And thus Sammy Fabelman makes his first movie.

As Sammy gets older, he keeps making movies with his friends and his Boy Scout troop (with sequences that seem to foreshadow “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Saving Private Ryan” and other future classics). Meanwhile, the family moves from New Jersey to Arizona to Northern California, as Burt’s talent for computer programming becomes more in demand. But the moves reveal the strains in Burt and Mitzi’s marriage — which the teen Sammy notices when he’s going through footage of a family camping trip and finds footage of Mitzi getting oddly close to Burt’s colleague and friend Bennie (Seth Rogen). 

Filmmaking, then, becomes a refuge for Sammy, a place to hide from the hard adult emotions that grip his family. In school, it becomes a defense mechanism, against harassment by his antisemitic classmates, and a way to impress girls.

LaBelle is a terrific discovery, as his Sammy matures from a wide-eyed movie lover into a thoughtful artist. Dano, as Burt, shows the exasperation of a father who tries to support his son’s passion even when he doesn’t understand it. And Williams, giving one of the most touching performances in a career full of them, drills deep into Mitzi’s longing for artistic fulfillment and true love.

Though “The Fabelmans is deeply inspired by Spielberg’s childhood, Spielberg keeps his own emotions at arm’s length. He doesn’t need to wear his heart on his sleeve to show what shaped him in his early years, and by showing that reserve he lets us to find for ourselves the universal chords of how family can both nurture and confound one’s passion. After a half-century of rewiring the world to watch movies differently, Spielberg knows he can trust us to follow his breadcrumbs to the movie’s emotional core.

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‘The Fabelmans’

★★★★

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use. Running time: 151 minutes.

Review: 'Glass Onion' brings back Daniel Craig's Southern-fried detective for more murderous adventures with the super-rich

There is a hard limit to what I’ll be able to write about “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” because much of the fun and thrill of director Rian Johnson’s murder mystery — a follow-up to his wildly inventive 2019 movie “Knives Out” — comes in not knowing too much at the outset.

Here’s what I can tell you about the set-up: Once again, the renowned detective Benoit Blanc — played with self-deprecating charm by Daniel Craig — finds himself amid a group of very rich people who eye each other with a mix of suspicion and scorn. In this case, he travels to Greece, where tech billionaire Miles Bron (played by Edward Norton) has summoned his old friends and frenemies for a weekend at his secluded island mansion.

The guest list is as follows:

• Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), movie star and party animal.

• Peg (Jessica Henwick), Birdie’s frazzled assistant.

• Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), a rising political candidate.

• Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), men’s-rights activist and YouTube influencer.

• Whiskey (Madelyn Cline), Duke’s girlfriend and social-media co-star.

• Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.), scientist employed by Miles.

• Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), Miles’ former business partner.

Andi’s arrival surprises the others, for reasons that become clear early in the story. And Benoit Blanc’s arrival surprises the host, who rolls with it. Miles has promised a murder for his guests to solve this weekend, and a murder does indeed happen — though not the way anyone anticipates.

That’s about as much as the movie’s trailer reveals, and as much plot information as I’m willing to divulge. Suffice it to say that Johnson, as writer and director, provides plenty of twists to keep everyone — on the screen and in the audience — guessing about how it’s all going to play out.

Johnson’s plotting, and the dispensing of information about the characters and the crime, is as intricate and as clever as in “Knives Out.” What’s different is an added layer of comedy, mostly provided by the continued exploration of Blanc, who has been moody and out of sorts during the COVID-19 pandemic without a good mystery to test his wits. (His circle of Zoom friends is just the first course of the movie’s jaw-dropping cameos.)

Craig is delightfully droll here, whether observing his fellow guests or declaring his disdain for the board game Clue. (Again, it’s in the trailer.) And the ensemble cast of suspects — particularly Hudson and Monáe — generate plenty of sparks leading up to a remarkable ending.

And, as “Knives Out” did, “Glass Onion” allows Johnson to deliver some sharp commentary on the petty motivations of the disgustingly wealthy — and does so more entertainingly and less arrogantly than “The Menu” or “Triangle of Sadness,” two recent dark comedies that mock the stinking rich. Class warfare has seldom been so fun.

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‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters for one week, then streaming starting Dec. 23 on Netflix. Rated R for strong language, some violence, sexual material and drug content. Running time: 139 minutes.

Review: Disney's 'Strange World' is a good-looking but all-too-familiar science fiction tale

Disney’s latest animated movie, “Strange World,” is a visually wondrous but narratively slight movie, a collection of ideas cobbled together from classic adventure tales like “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “The Lost World.”

The prologue introduces us to the explorer Jaeger Clade (voiced by Dennis Quaid), whose thirst for adventure and glory propel him to try to climb over the circle of mountains that isolates his nation of Avalonia. He also raises his son, Searcher, to join him on these expeditions — but as a young adult (voiced by Jake Gyllenhaal), Searcher would rather study the strange energy-producing plant life he finds during Jaeger’s latest push over the mountains. The two argue, and Jaeger continues toward the mountains alone.

Cut to 25 years later, and Searcher is in his 40s, married to Meridian (voiced by Gabrielle Union), a crop-duster pilot — and they have built a successful farm, growing that energy-producing plant, now called Pando, which has turned Avalonia into a technologically advanced country, like Wakanda but with more puffy airships.

Searcher and Meridian also have a teen son, Ethan (voiced by Jaboukie Young-White), who has more of the explorer gene than his dad finds comfortable. (Ethan also has a crush on a teen boy, which makes him the first major character in a Disney cartoon who’s gay. This has nothing to do with the plot, but it’s good to have in there because it will make all the wrong people lose their damn minds.)

Searcher gets a visit from Callisto Mal (voiced by Lucy Liu), the president of Avalonia and a former crewmate of the Clades in their exploring days. Something is affecting the Pando, which is all connected through the roots (just like the real pando, the 107-acre aspen stand in central Utah). Callisto is leading an expedition to save Avalonia’s power supply, and wants Searcher, as the leading expert on Pando, to join her. Soon all the Clades are on the trip — including Jaeger, who they find in this underground world.

Co-directors Don Hall (who’s co-directed “Big Hero 6” and “Raya and the Last Dragon”) and Qui Nguyen (who co-wrote “Raya”) create some stunning visuals for this underground world — a place where everything is both amazing and trying to kill people.

The weak spot is the screenplay, credited to Nguyen, which recycles some well-worn science-fiction conventions (including some I can’t identify without spoiling the film) and then falls back on way-too-familiar father-son tropes. As visually great as “Strange World” is, the story underneath isn’t as strange as it needs to be.

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‘Strange World’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/peril and some thematic elements. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Bones and All' is a bloody and beautiful horror-romance, about young cannibals in love and on the run

In the long list of movies about lovers on the run — from the sweetly innocent (“Moonrise Kingdom”) to the homicidal (“Natural Born Killers”), with “Breathless,” “True Romance,” “Queen & Slim” and countless others in between — it’s hard to think of one that is simultaneously as romantic and as horrific as “Bones and All.”

And, because it’s directed by Luca Guadagnino, who has done both romance (“I Am Love,” “Call Me By Your Name”) and horror (“Suspiria”) exceedingly well, it’s no surprise that the movie is by turns beautiful and chilling.

When we first meet Maren (Taylor Russell), she’s a shy new girl at a Virginia high school in the early 1980s. She’s happy to be invited to a slumber party by one of her classmates, and all seems to be going well, until she starts biting the finger off one of the girls.

Racing back home, Maren’s father (André Holland) tells her to start packing, and within hours they have crossed into Maryland. They’re not there long before Maren discovers her father has abandoned her — leaving behind some cash, Maren’s birth certificate, and a cassette tape in which Dad tries to explain what he’s kept hidden from his daughter.

In short, Maren is a cannibal, and feels the compulsion occasionally to feed on the flesh of her fellow humans. Left on the streets, Maren learns two important facts: 1) She can smell other cannibals from a long distance, and 2) they can smell her, and there’s an underground community of them. The first one she encounters, a creepy dude named Sully (Mark Rylance), explains that they call themselves “eaters.”

After sharing a meal with Sully, Maren hops onto a bus heading to the Midwest — in hopes of finding her birth mother, listed on her birth certificate, and last known to be living in Minnesota.

Maren meets other eaters — even though they tend to maintain their distance from one another, to keep from drawing suspicion. One of them is Lee (played by Timotheé Chalamet), a handsome drifter, and the two soon go from traveling companions to lovers.

The scenes with Russell and Chalamet are hauntingly beautiful, as they travel through the heartland in moments that evoke Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” two young people in love and occasionally killing people.

Guadagnino, working with screenwriter David Kajganich (who wrote “A Bigger Splash” and the “Suspiria” remake) to adapt Camille DeAngelis’ novel, follows the road-movie playbook to stirring effect. Maren and Lee meet some chilling characters, and Guadagnino employs actors he’s worked with before — including Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Harper and Chloë Sevigny — to create some white-knuckle moments. None are more blood-curdling than Rylance’s performance, though.

“Bones and All” is not for the squeamish, but for those who can go the distance with it, it’s bloody brilliant.

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‘Bones and All’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong, bloody and disturbing violent content, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'Devotion,' a story of Navy fliers in the Korean War, is a combat movie at its most sincere

The air-war drama “Devotion” is as sincere as a movie can get, an old-fashioned story of friendship under fire, inspired by true events.

It’s 1950, and a new Navy pilot has arrived at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, to train for the most dangerous flying available: Landing on aircraft carriers. The pilot, Lt. Tom Hudner (Glen Powell), proves himself in the air immediately, keeping up with the best aviator on the base, Ens. Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors), when they’re paired up for the first time.

Brown is the only African-American pilot in the training squad, though the movie doesn’t show any of his squad remarking on his race other than noting the novelty of having a Black pilot. Later, when the squad is assigned to a carrier, some of the ship’s junior officers harass Brown because of his skin color — but Brown keeps cool, tamping down any urge to fight back.

In another important respect, Brown is different from the other squadron pilots: He’s married, to Daisy (Christina Jackson), with a small child. When the squadron is called up to fly missions in Korea, at the start of the conflict there, Daisy asks Hudner to watch her husband and “be there for him.”

Director J.D. Dillard — whose last two movies, the thrillers “Sleight” and “Sweetheart,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival — is quite dutiful in the military training sessions, which resemble what “Top Gun” would have looked like if it was made in 1951. The wartime scenes are more breathtaking, with the ratatat feel of aerial combat footage.

Majors (“Lovecraft Country”) and Powell (“Top Gun: Maverick”) have strong bro-chemistry, as Powell’s Hudner becomes eager to jump into the racism battles that Majors’ Brown struggles to avoid. The other notable performance is Thomas Sadowski as the squadron’s commander, who speaks quietly and philosophically about the horror and necessity of war.

The last image in “Devotion” is a dedication to Dillard’s father, who served in the U.S. Air Force (as my father did). Dillard’s earnest war movie does his family, and the military, proud.

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‘Devotion’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong language, some war action/violence, and smoking. Running time: 138 minutes.

Review: 'She Said' is a gripping account of the reporting that brought down Harvey Weinstein — and a smart look at how journalism gets done

It’s been years — maybe as far back as “All the President’s Men” in 1976 — that a movie has captured the craft and the passion of journalism as precisely and as smartly as director Maria Schrader’s “She Said.”

And, like that Redford/Hoffman movie about Watergate, “She Said” chronicles the real-life efforts of two journalists painstakingly investigating a story about a corrupted leader and the enablers who allowed him to avoid accountability.

The prologue introduces the concept, as New York Times reporter Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) works to follow up on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that almost — key word there, almost — derailed Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign to become president. Twohey is working this story while she is pregnant for the first time.

After the election, the story moves ahead five months, with news that right-wing host Bill O’Reilly was leaving Fox News over multiple sexual harassment accusations. The Times’ editors urge their reporters to start looking around for other instances of workplace harassment, and, as one editor, Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson), puts it, “interrogate the whole system.”

Reporter Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) starts with a tip that Harvey Weinstein, the powerful Hollywood mogul who led two companies — first Miramax, and then The Weinstein Company — had sexually harassed, abused and intimidated women, from famous actresses to lowly assistants. Kantor talks to a skeptical Twohey, who has seen women go public with such claims only to be dismissed, and convinces her to join her in investigating the story.

The two reporters work slowly, methodically, through dead ends, calls that end abruptly, and even a moment where a door is closed in their faces. Some women are willing to talk about their experiences, but for the longest time, no one will speak on the record. 

The way Schrader (who directed the German comedy “I’m Your Man” and episodes of the series “Unorthodox”) and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (“Disobedience,” “Colette”) adapt Kantor and Twohey’s book (based on their reporting with Corbett) is a gripping demonstration of narrative restraint. The movie never re-enacts the scenes of sexual violence, but sometimes shows the location — an empty hotel room, usually — where those events took place. 

The telling of the stories is in the hands of the actresses playing those women, delivering chilling monologues about their encounters with Weinstein and the legal and personal hell that followed. The audience is learning the stories just as Kantor and Twohey did, by listening to them talk about what happened.

Some of those conversations are the best moments in the movie. Samantha Morton steals her one scene, as a former studio assistant who provides crucial documents to Kantor, and Jennifer Ehle is devastating as a woman looking back on what Harvey did to her 25 years earlier. And I have to mention Ashley Judd, who plays herself here, making the accusation that saying “no” to Weinstein in the ‘90s derailed her career.

Mercifully, the film makes no attempt to have an actor perform a full impersonation of Weinstein, which would have been comical and appalling in equal measure. Instead, a voice actor portrays Weinstein in phone calls, trying to cajole an unmoved Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher), the Times’ editor-in-chief, to give more time for Weinstein’s response to the accusations. The only time we see an in-the-flesh Weinstein is when he shows up in the Times’ newsroom, and we see only the back of his head.

In that scene, Mulligan shows extraordinary poise as Twohey, and she maintains that unflappable journalistic calm through the film. (There’s a notable exception, where she blows up at a guy trying to pick them up at a bar.) Kazan matches Mulligan well, as she gently interviews one woman after another, chipping away at the wall of silence surrounding Weinstein.

Together, Mulligan and Kazan make a strong reporting duo — as good as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men” — with an important difference: As women digging into a story about women being harassed and abused and worse, Kantor and Twohey are allowed to show some empathy toward their subjects, and to allow their shared experiences as reporters and moms to let some emotion seep through. Their humanity doesn’t interfere with their journalism; it enhances the story, and reminds us that reporters are people, too.

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‘She Said’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and depictions of sexual assault. Running time: 128 minutes.

Review: 'Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio,' gloriously done in stop-motion animation, is a dark and beautiful variation on a classic tale

Stop-motion is the artisan-crafted branch of the animation genre, and seldom is it as finely crafted as it is in “Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a sumptuously dark and twisted take on the Carlo Collodi classic.

In this telling, the kindly woodcarver Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley) is first shown in happy times, with his son, Carlo. But when Carlo is killed when a bombing run hits their village, during World War I, Geppetto is distraught. He buries Carlo next to the boy’s mother, and plants a tree over the grave. 

Some time later, when the tree falls, Geppetto carves a puppet from the wood — and that night, the Blue Fairy (voiced by Tilda Swinton) gives life to the puppet (voiced by Gregory Mann). The puppet-turned-boy also gets a conscience, in the form of one Sebastian J. Cricket (voiced by Ewan McGregor), who also becomes our narrator.

Pinocchio’s first appearance in the village, during Sunday Mass, elicits screams from the townsfolk and a nasty sneer from the town’s Fascist prosecutor, Podesta (voiced by Ron Perlman). When Pinocchio declares that he’s not a puppet, his nose grows into a good-sized tree branch, a sign that when he lies, the evidence is clear.

Del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson, a veteran animator, throw Pinocchio through some familiar misadventures — including working for a greedy showman (voiced by Christoph Waltz) and being swallowed by a terrible sea creature. What’s new here, in a script del Toro co-wrote with “Adventure Time” scribe Patrick McHale, is that Pinocchio also has to contend with the realities of war and the rise of Benito Mussolini.

The animation is painstakingly created, the stop-motion figures are incredibly detailed, and the story carries a surprising amount of weight for this oft-told story. This is a version of “Pinocchio” that makes one believe that this boy is both completely wooden and completely real at the same time.

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‘Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 18, at some theaters; starts streaming December 9 on Netflix. Rated PG for dark thematic material, violence, peril, some rude humor and brief smoking. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: 'The Menu' leaves a bad taste in the mouth, in spite of strong performances by Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy

A dark comedy that’s not quite as clever as it thinks it is, “The Menu” is a scathing takedown of foodie culture and the shared obsessions of megalomaniacal chefs and the diners who demand to eat their food.

The dinner guests hop onto a yacht headed to a remote island, where they are paying $1,250 a head for the most unique dining experience of their lives, at The Hawthorne. We follow one couple, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), and his date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), as they sample the amuse-bouche, an oyster with some kind of foam and lemon pearls. Tyler, who obsesses about fine cuisine, shows off his knowledge by informing Margot that the “pearls” are made with alginate. Margot isn’t particularly impressed.

Tyler, Margot and the other diners — who include a fading movie star (John Leguizamo) and his assistant (Aimee Carrero), an imperious food critic (Janet McTeer) and her editor (Paul Adelstein), a rich older couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who are regulars, and three expense-account dude-bros (Rob Yang, Arturo Castro and Mark St. Cyr) — are led on a tour of the island’s garden, seafood harvesters, chicken coop and smokehouse by the head waitress, Elsa (Hong Chau), before entering the dining room.

Once inside the restaurant, where the kitchen is in plain view of everyone, Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) starts the show. The movie gradually reveals, course by course, that Slowik has meticulously planned not only the menu but the guest list — and that everyone has some past tie to the chef. Everyone, that is, except Margot, a last-minute fill-in for Tyler’s ex-girlfriend. Slowik recognizes that Margot doesn’t belong, and takes her aside to ask a question: “Are you with us or are you with them?” Margot soon realizes the question has deadly implications.

Director Mark Mylod (a veteran of “Succession” and “Game of Thrones”) works off a script, by comedy writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, that seems wedged between being a dark comedy and being a thriller — and not quite working as either. The comedy elements run toward heavy-handed absurdity, and the thrills are telegraphed too early and often.

The central conflict — between the devilish Slowik and the quick-thinking Margot — brings out some sly acting both from Fiennes and Taylor-Joy, whose cat-and-mouse moments almost sustain “The Menu.” Unfortunately, almost isn’t enough.

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‘The Menu’

★★

Opens Friday, November 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong/disturbing violent content, language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 106 minutes.