The Fabelmans

With all its self-awareness, its anguish and its beauty, The Fabelmans is a film that it is surely impossible not to love.

Even though the film is based on Spielberg's life, it manages quite artfully to not feel too artful; it refuses to turn itself into a fable.

The Fabelmans is a film that shifts something inside you. Working through one of the most crushing events of his own life, Spielberg exhorts us to discover, yet again, the enduring magic of the movies.

Possibly the most lavishly mounted home movie ever made. Appropriately enough, that is its great strength and its fatal weakness.

The result is neither as sentimental nor as moving – if those adjectives can be separated – as the director’s more personal 20th century films. It does, however, feel complete in itself. Cleanly shot. Immaculately performed.

The Fabelmans’ fictional parts feel just as honest and revealing; seamless syntheses of life and art. That is Spielberg’s extraordinary gift: at 76, he’s still the boy cradling an entire medium in his hands.

The Fabelmans is clearly one of if not the most personal film Spielberg has ever done, and I’m really happy that he has the chance to tell a story that means so much to him.

Not many directors could pull off a film like The Fabelmans, one which could feel self-indulgent to some and follows an often predictable ‘behold, the power of cinema!’ route – and yet, if we ever had any doubts, Spielberg does it with aplomb.

The Fabelmans is a testament to not only the power of cinema but also how family shapes us into the people we are, merits and faults alike.

What Spielberg spotlights about cinema and filmmaking here, above the business and politics that inevitably come with it, is the sheer joy and wonder of the medium.