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The Fabelmans are a middle-class Jewish family living in various cities in the middle of the 20th century. Steven Spielberg's film about them centers on the conflict between artistic drive and personal responsibility, as well as the mysteries of talent and happiness.

The matriarch, Mitzi ( Michelle Williams ), is a former concert pianist who became a homemaker and piano teacher. The patriarch, Burt ( Paul Dano ), is a scientist who works for various tech companies and likes to shoot home movies. One night, Mitzi and Burt take their eight-year-old son Sammy ( Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord ) to his first theatrical film experience, "The Greatest Show on Earth." It ends with a spectacular train crash that was created with miniatures. Sammy becomes obsessed with the sequence and asks for a train set, which he crashes in an attempt to recreate the scene, infuriating his father, whose takeaway is that Sammy doesn't appreciate nice things. The mother suggests that the boy shoot the trains crashing with his father's movie camera so that he can watch one crash over and over instead of bashing the trains until they fall apart. Sammy is a prodigy, and possibly a genius. Mitzi can tell that from watching the boy's first film, which employs multiple, dynamic angles to capture the crash, and uses editing to build suspense and set up visual jokes. 

But this is not just a movie about somebody who's already good at something and gets even better at it. It's about the difficulty of marriage, parenting, and being somebody's child. It's also about the miracle of talent, an idea that's explored not just through the central trio of Sammy, Mitzi, and Burt (who has real talent as a scientist and engineer) but through a secondary character, Burt's best friend Benny Loewy ( Seth Rogen ), who is around their house so much that he's a part of the family. It's obvious that Mitzi clicks more with Benny than with Burt, who is a good husband and father but is fundamentally unexciting (and, to his shame, knows it) and can be blandly controlling. Benny is hale and hearty, a guy's guy, witty and self-deprecating and energetic. He's as gifted at being a mate and parent as Burt is at science, as Sammy is at filmmaking, and as Mitzi was at performance until she gave it up. Notice how, during a Fabelman family camping trip, Burt drones on to the sisters about how to light a campfire while Benny is in the background, using his burly strength to pull back a sapling that Mitzi has clung to, then releasing it to create an improvised playground ride. He knows what this family really wants and needs.

Where do these gifts come from? It's not just in the genes, the psyche, the conditioning, or the trauma. It's mysterious. It arrives out of nowhere like the shark in " Jaws ," the UFOs in " Close Encounters of the Third Kind ," the miracles and disasters of "War of the Worlds" and the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park movies, and the eruptions of gore and cruelty in Spielberg's R-rated historical epics. Sammy's Uncle Boris ( Judd Hirsch ), a circus performer and storyteller, lays it out for him one night: people who know that they have talent must commit to it, not waste it; but the more fiercely they commit, the more they may neglect their loved ones, or feel as if they are (which can induce guilt). This conflict will wrestle inside an artist forever. 

From an early age, Sammy figures out—or perhaps instinctively  knows —that a camera can be used not merely to tell stories and make pretty pictures, but win friends; placate or manipulate enemies; woo prospective romantic partners; glamorize and humiliate; show people a better self that they could aspire to become; shield the artist against hurt during painful moments; smooth out or obstruct the truth, and blatantly lie. 

Sammy continues to refine his skills through adolescence (which is when a thoughtful and subtle young actor named Gabriel LaBelle takes over). He gets better filmmaking equipment that can do more things. When he makes a Western with a bunch of neighborhood kids, he figures out from looking at the way his mother's high-heeled shoe punctured a dropped piece of sheet music on the living room carpet that he can punch holes in strips of film to make it seem like the boys' toy guns are firing blanks, like in a real movie. When Sammy directs a World War II combat film starring his fellow Eagle Scouts, it wins him a merit badge for photography, in large part because he's not just a technician, but a showman who has carefully studied the construction of the movies he loves (John Ford's " The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance " is a big one, and it just happens to be about the tension between reality and myth). 

Then Burt moves the family to California. He and his sisters are seemingly the only Jewish kids in a school populated by tall, conventionally good-looking WASPs, some of whom torment Sammy because of his heritage. A fissure opens up in the family, and though it's not anyone's creativity that cracked it open, different manifestations of Fabelman talent pry it further, creating fraught moments in which characters have to decide to reveal an important but hurtful truth or keep it to themselves in the name of domestic tranquility (this film's version of the famous line from Ford's "Valance"—when the legend becomes fact, print the legend). 

"The Fabelmans" ends before it can get to the now-legendary story of Spielberg directing Joan Crawford in an episode of "Night Gallery" at age 19 but substitutes a moment just as thrilling: Spielberg's brief meeting with his hero Ford (played in a masterful stroke of casting by David Lynch ) who takes nearly as long lighting a cigar as he does speaking to his visitor. Of course, there's a lot more to Spielberg's personal story. 

But this is a movie, and movies can't encompass everything, any more than books or plays can. Spielberg and his co-writer  Tony Kushner (who worked with Spielberg on " Munich ," " Lincoln ," and "West Side Story") avoid the fundamental mistake that hobbles so many film biographies (and autobiographies), which is to try to cram every single moment that people might've heard of elsewhere into two-plus hours, making it impossible to linger on any one thing. Kushner and Spielberg (taking his first screenplay credit since "A.I.") refashion the director's life as a work of fiction. That lets them simultaneously tease and nullify a thought that viewers would have had anyhow: How much of this actually happened? And it lets them concentrate on a few milestone moments that have been reimagined for a Hollywood feature aimed at the broadest possible audience, and tie everything back to intertwined questions that any viewer can relate to: How do you define happiness? And is it possible to achieve it without hurting anybody else?

The answer, as it turns out, is no. All of the characters in "The Fabelmans" can be divided into three categories. Some realize they are unhappy and do their best to change their situation. Others remain unhappy because they aren't bold enough (or ruthless enough) to take the necessary steps. And a lucky few don’t worry about it because they’re already happy. 

Kushner and Spielberg shape a lot of the story into self-contained scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends, as in a stage play. But of course, Spielberg doesn't shoot anything in a cliched "stagey" way; on the contrary, he once again demonstrates what Orson Welles noticed about him early in his career: that he was the first major director whose visual sense wasn't shaped by the proscenium arch. Much of the film is told in long takes that don't feel show-offy because Spielberg's blocking is always in service of deepening characters and illustrating themes. Just look at that opening scene outside of the movie theater, which ends with young Sammy silhouetted in the middle of the frame: a human dividing line, with his father (who speaks of cinema in terms of photography and persistence of vision) on one side and his mother (who tells him movies are mainly about feelings and dreaming) on the other.

In the end, it all comes back to people figuring out who they are and then deciding whether to fully commit to the course they think will bring them the most happiness. That the movie leaves deep questions unresolved and presents all the related philosophical and aesthetic issues in a playful way (the final shot is a sight gag!) makes the experience quintessential Spielberg. You think he's giving you everything and that it's all right there on the surface. But the longer you sit with it, the more you realize how many gifts it contains.

In theaters now.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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The Fabelmans (2022)

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use.

151 minutes

Gabriel LaBelle as Sammy Fabelman

Michelle Williams as Mitzi Fabelman

Paul Dano as Burt Fabelman

Seth Rogen as Benny Loewy

Judd Hirsch as Uncle Boris

Julia Butters as Reggie Fabelman

Jeannie Berlin as Haddash Fabelman

Robin Bartlett as Tina Schildkraut

Keeley Karsten as Natalie Fabelman

Sophia Kopera as Lisa Fabelman

Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as Younger Sammy Fabelman

Birdie Borria as Younger Reggie Fabelman

Alina Brace as Young Natalie

Sam Rechner as Logan Hall

Oakes Fegley as Chad Thomas

Chloe East as Monica Sherwood

Isabelle Kusman as Claudia Denning

Gabriel Bateman as Roger

• Steven Spielberg

Cinematographer

• Janusz Kaminski
• Michael Kahn
• John Williams

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Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” and the Madness of Love

By Anthony Lane

A Roman Catholic kid of my acquaintance, on his first trip to the cinema, paused to genuflect in the aisle before taking his seat. A perfectly understandable mistake. The same kind of awe consumes Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord), a young Jewish boy, as he yields to the ineffable mystery of the big screen, at the start of Steven Spielberg ’s “The Fabelmans.” No bending of the knee, but Sammy has never seen a film before, and his eyes widen, in delicious dread, at the sight of a train crash in “The Greatest Show on Earth.” For him, I reckon, that could be the title of every movie ever made.

It is 1952, and Sammy has been taken to the pictures, in New Jersey, by his parents, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams). For Hanukkah, he gets a train set, and he promptly tries to re-create, in miniature, the disaster that he saw in “The Greatest Show on Earth,” using Burt’s cine-camera. Three things are worth noting here. One, Sammy makes a pretty good job of it, igniting a fascination with filmmaking that will take fire throughout his childhood and beyond. Two, Mitzi, who instinctively fathoms his reasons for committing the crash to celluloid (“He’s trying to get some kind of control over it”), suggests that they keep the project to themselves, without telling Burt. Such is the initial hint of a closeness, between mother and son, that will acquire the breathless intensity of a secret. And, three, given that “The Fabelmans” is, to an extent, a semi-disguised autobiography, is it O.K. to glance ahead to the gonzo train wreck in J. J. Abrams ’s “Super 8” (2011), on which Spielberg was a producer? Could it be that his personal past has not merely fed his own work but rubbed off on the films of others?

The Fabelman household comprises Sammy, his parents, and his three sisters, plus, more often than not, Uncle Bennie (Seth Rogen), who isn’t an uncle at all. He is Burt’s best friend; both of them are involved in electrical engineering, riding the swell of the nascent computing industry, though Burt is clearly the smarter of the two. His talent will pull the family (plus Bennie) to Phoenix, and then (minus Bennie) to California, where a plum job awaits at I.B.M. “The Fabelmans,” you might say, is exploring and expanding on the double impulse that has continually tugged at Spielberg: the need for roots, versus the risks and the rapturous promise of uprooting. No other director has dramatized that quandary with greater concision. “Come,” E.T. said to Elliott, bidding him to board the spaceship. “Stay,” Elliott replied. His mother, gazing on, sank to her knees.

With every change in location, Sammy ups his game. As a Boy Scout, in Arizona (now played by the engaging Gabriel LaBelle), he recruits his pals to be extras, or proud leads, in a Western and a war movie. In California, having completed his odyssey from coast to coast, he shoots a beach flick, for the class of ’64, with ice cream standing in for seagull poop and roles for the jocks and the Jew-baiters who have made his final year so purgatorial. What gratifies Sammy is how unmanned the jocks are by viewing themselves writ large, and you can feel Spielberg insisting, via his hero, on moviemaking as a dual-purpose art: a technical adventure that throws an emotional punch. Puncturing the surface of the film with pins, for example, allows Sammy to add a momentary flare to gunshots, and it’s only fitting that “The Fabelmans” should end with Sammy meeting the aged and cranky John Ford —you won’t believe who plays him—and being told where the horizon should lie in the frame. Top or bottom, apparently. Anywhere in the middle, Ford says, is “boring as shit.”

What sort of movie is this? Well, it’s a bildungsroman, co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner , and peppered with incident rather than plotted. Characters get chapters to themselves. Check out Monica (Chloe East), the high-school belle, who comes on to Sammy by praying that Jesus descend unto him, or, back in Phoenix, Uncle Boris, who shows up at the door, uninvited, and preaches creative zeal. “We are junkies,” he says to Sammy. “Art is our drug.” Boris is played by Judd Hirsch , doing his kindly fiery-gruff shtick—the one he gave us in “Independence Day” (1996)—and, reportedly, earning a round of applause when “The Fabelmans” made its début, in Toronto. Yet the movie somehow slackens as it grows most broad, and I’m afraid I could have done without Boris altogether. His function is to spell out feelings that we sense far more keenly when they lie, unspoken, beneath the skin of the action.

That is why the core of the tale resides in an almost wordless scene. (Spirit Spielberg back to 1922, to the acme of silent Hollywood, and he would slot right in.) It seems cozy enough: a peaceful evening chez Fabelman. Mitzi, a fine pianist, who dreamed of a professional career, plays Bach. Burt, devout as ever, listens. Sammy, crouched over his editing machine, cuts and splices footage from a family camping trip. Slowly, however, as he runs the film back and forth, he realizes that whenever his mother, out there in the woods, looked at Bennie—goofy, grinning Uncle Bennie, a pal to all—something flickered between them. For an instant, in the background, they held hands. Many children happen upon a flaw in their parents’ marriage, but the happening, for Sammy, is the bitterest of blows; through the very medium that he worships, and hopes to master in his adult life, he catches sight of a truth he would rather not know. Film is the bringer of pain.

It’s one of the most piercing passages in all of Spielberg—up there with the finale of “Empire of the Sun” (1987), when another boy, marooned by war, is reunited with his parents. His father fails to recognize him and walks on by; his mother sees him, changed utterly yet still her son, and gathers him in. How strange it is that the guy behind Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park should also have delved, fitfully but to a startling depth, into the Oedipal agon; if you want to anatomize Sammy Fabelman as a moody bourgeois Jewish Cold War Hamlet, whose mom nixes his dad for the sake of an “uncle,” be my guest. You could go further, and argue that it’s not actually Sammy but Mitzi, in Williams’s near-to-the-brink performance, who takes possession of the new film. “Do you have any idea how much I love you?” she asks her son. He, in turn, though he treasures his relatives, loves cinema “a little more,” as Boris tells him. “The Fabelmans” may look nice ’n’ easy as it swings along, with a pile of laughs to cushion the ride, and a nifty visual gag in the closing seconds, but take care. Here is a film that is touched with the madness of love.

If anything, the new film from Luca Guadagnino , “Bones and All,” is even more nomadic than “The Fabelmans.” We are in nineteen-eighties America, and the movie is eager to hustle through as many states as possible. Abbreviations flash onscreen: VA, MD, OH, IN. What, you ask, could drive such restlessness? A hunger for home, a fear of the law? Warm. The need for a square meal? Warmer.

On the lam are two young souls in love. They meet in a grocery store, where Lee (Timothée Chalamet) comes to the defense of a customer named Maren (Taylor Russell), who is being harassed. Before long, the pair of them hook up, shackled together by a common plight: they are both Eaters, who feast on human flesh. Every romance requires an obstacle—something to block a couple’s path to happiness and shear them off from regular society. Color, class, clan, creed, and sexual preference no longer cut it; cannibalism, however, is still off-limits, though the Cooking Channel is open to suggestions.

“Bones and All” is adapted by Guadagnino and David Kajganich from Camilla DeAngelis’s novel of the same name, and the opening minutes are a model of narrative swiftness. Maren, who is still at school and lives with her father, Frank (André Holland), attends a sleepover at another girl’s house, and bites off more than she can chew. Frank’s reaction—“Not again”—tells us plenty, signals the need to take flight, and makes it inevitable that his daughter will go her own way.

Some Eaters can smell one another from afar, and Maren is soon sniffed out by Sully (Mark Rylance), who radiates pure threat. (He has a jaunty feather in his hat, which heightens the creepiness—a typical Guadagnino detail.) In a movie awash with blood, nothing is nastier than the spectacle of Sully waiting patiently for an old woman to die before he can tuck in. Sensing danger, Maren flees once more, and her loneliness finds no relief until she encounters Lee. The two of them are like a brace of beautiful scarecrows, and they grab at moments of joy as if snatching purses; look at Lee, breaking into an empty house and dancing wildly to Kiss. “Let’s be people ,” Maren says, aching for normality, as they embrace in a tranquil landscape, but that glimpse of a happy ending is overtaken by events; like Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” (1991), this is an anthem for doomed youth. The horror is genuinely visceral, yet the story, aided by impassioned work from Chalamet and Russell, pushes onward with a rough and desperate grace. “Bones and All” proves difficult to watch, but looking away is harder still. ♦

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By Justin Chang

By Rebecca Mead

Review: Steven Spielberg comes close to a personal best in his luminous ‘The Fabelmans’

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More than once during his fabled career, Steven Spielberg has been dismissed as a technician masquerading as an artist; as the most popular of American filmmakers, the logic goes, he must also be the most impersonal. It’s a judgment that doesn’t quite explain the intensely personal connection a lot of us feel to his movies. Or does it? More than any other director, Spielberg confounds the notion that the personal and the popular, or the technician and the artist, are fundamentally at odds. The intensity of feeling you experienced on your first (or third) close encounter with a Spielberg classic — maybe you levitated out of your seat at “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or had your nerves shredded by “Jaws” — was likely so pure that it felt like yours and yours alone, never mind that millions of moviegoers around the world felt the same way.

And so it’s worth considering exactly what it means to describe “The Fabelmans,” Spielberg’s piercing, rollicking and altogether marvelous ramble through his early years, as his most personal work. That assessment may be correct, if we assume “personal” to be synonymous with “autobiographical,” and also if we overlook the snippets of family history that he’s woven almost subliminally throughout his earlier films. Fire up “1941” and “Saving Private Ryan” and you’ll catch stray glimpses of his father’s World War II stories. “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” endure not only as wondrous alien-visitation fantasies but as portraits of families in disarray, something that emerged directly from the pain of his parents’ divorce.

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But “The Fabelmans” — movingly dedicated to Spielberg’s parents, Arnold and Leah — is his first picture to put that particular divorce front and center, along with various other intimate, semifictionalized details culled from his postwar upbringing. He’s grafted those details onto a young alter ego named Sammy Fabelman, first seen as a young boy played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord. Spielberg, sharing a writing credit for the first time with his regular collaborator Tony Kushner ( “West Side Story,” “Lincoln” ), rummages through a treasure chest of old anecdotes and memories, stringing together road trips and sporting events, summer vacations and Hanukkah gatherings. There’s a death in the family, a couple of bullies, a memorable first kiss and even a prom-night climax.

And of course, there are movies, lots of movies, from Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth” to John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” whose wryly memorable axiom (“Print the legend”) provides a clue as to how to approach this alternately truthy and truthful cine-memoir. It’s hardly accidental that Sammy’s story begins with a life-changing trip to the pictures in the early 1950s and finds him wandering a Hollywood backlot more than a decade later. In between, the story zigzags from New Jersey to Arizona to California, tracking the genesis of a young man’s lifelong love affair with the movies — a romance that will prove mutually beneficial, even if Sammy’s obsession comes at a price.

“Art is no game!” roars his great-uncle Boris (a wonderful Judd Hirsch) in a barn-storming, thesis-underlining gem of a monologue. “Art is as dangerous as a lion’s mouth. It’ll bite your head off.” Boris, a former circus performer with the air of an ancient prophet, knows of what he speaks, just as he knows the reckless creative temperament that runs through his side of the family. Sammy’s own mother, Mitzi (a breathtaking Michelle Williams), gave up a promising career as a concert pianist years ago to help her engineer husband, Burt (Paul Dano, beautifully restrained), raise Sammy and his three younger sisters. Burt, heavily in demand from the burgeoning computer industry, keeps his family on the move; Mitzi adapts as best she can, but she can’t hide her resentment and regret over her dashed professional dreams. A similarly unsatisfying fate, Boris declares, might also befall Sammy, whose passion for moviemaking is destined to clash with, and even eclipse, his love for his family.

But “The Fabelmans,” perhaps buoyed by its own Spielbergian optimism, takes a gentler, more nuanced view of this conundrum. From the beginning, Sammy’s family actively nurtures his movie love, and his parents’ distinct perspectives can’t help but shape his own way of seeing. Burt, an electrical engineer, explains movies primarily as a mechanical phenomenon, a science of reels and frame rates; though impressed by his son’s talent, he wishes the boy would pursue something more practical. Mitzi, by contrast, describes movies as “dreams that you never forget” and urges her son to never stop pursuing his own. Sammy’s sisters, for their part, are gleeful collaborators on his early masterworks of 8-millimeter horror cinema, donning toilet-paper mummy rags and squirting themselves with ketchup.

Before long, the Fabelmans move to Phoenix, providing a welcome change of scenery and an ideal desert backdrop for the ambitious westerns and war pictures that Sammy, now a teenager (an excellent Gabriel LaBelle), makes with his family, friends and neighbors. (His parents’ close friend Bennie, played by a warm, rowdy Seth Rogen, is an especially good encourager.) Filmmaking proves a bustling collaborative endeavor, and Sammy, already skilled at moving the camera and devising ingenious practical effects, is every inch the ringmaster a director needs to be. But filmmaking can also be an intensely solitary pursuit and, as Mitzi intuitively grasps, a therapeutic one: By bending fictional reality to his will, she realizes, her son is learning to make sense of — and exercise control over — his deepest fears, insecurities and other unruly emotions.

There’s a confessional aspect to this revelation, as if Spielberg were conceding some of the accusations — of being a consummate emotional manipulator, a purveyor of cheap sentimentality and forced uplift — that some of his critics have hurled in his direction. An unreceptive viewer might see “The Fabelmans” as the latest evidence of this artifice, citing perhaps a few stretches of overly broad comedy when Sammy finds himself at a Northern California high school, or the carefully plotted mystery hiding beneath the surface of what you only thought was a long, shapeless bildungsroman. (Watching the movie a second time, I wondered how I could have missed the clues, a few of which are planted in Jeannie Berlin’s sly performance as Sammy’s cantankerous grandmother.) They might also point to the shimmer of Janusz Kaminski’s images as the camera glides through scenes of perfectly staged domestic chaos, or the tasteful plinking piano chords of John Williams’ score, merging seamlessly with Mitzi’s own performances of Bach and Beethoven.

But to use the exquisite craftsmanship of “The Fabelmans” as an argument against it is to cheat yourself of its pleasure, and to miss the point of a movie that functions as a playful, prismatic meditation on its own making. How to explain the strange meta-thrill of seeing Spielberg repurpose one of his recurring signature images — faces staring up in awe at an otherworldly spectacle — in a context where that spectacle is playing out on a cinema screen? How to quantify the eerie, almost séance-like magic of the moment when Sammy, running footage through his hand-cranked editing machine, is floored by what he sees in the interplay of shooting and cutting — in a wordless, lyrical sequence that is itself a master class on shooting and cutting? (The editing is by Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar.)

For a filmmaker to use his command of the medium to dramatize his younger self’s command of the medium might have seemed, in other hands, hopelessly self-congratulatory. (And it does come close in one near-climactic scene that hinges on Sammy’s next-level talent — a moment that doesn’t convince, ironically, because the dialogue has to spell out what the camera and the actors don’t make entirely clear.) But there’s also a humility at work here, as well as a deep understanding of human frailty that feels like the opposite of arrogance. The most powerful moments in “The Fabelmans” unfold sans self-consciousness or formal gimmickry, which is fitting, since the most important lesson that Sammy learns about the movies is that, while they can spin elaborate lies, they can also tell the truth. His camera can both distort and reveal reality, catching details that the human eye misses and bringing them, unsparingly, into the light.

The most wrenching of those details concern Mitzi’s slide into depression and denial, and Williams’ performance — one of her many recent remarkable turns as an artist, from “Fosse/Verdon” to Kelly Reichardt’s upcoming movie “Showing Up” — is an astonishing, almost unbearable reservoir of emotion. Leading with a red-lipped grin, fluttering gestures and a velvety croon in her voice, she gives a big, risky swing of a performance, but also a surpassingly delicate one. When she plays the piano or, in one almost too lovely sequence, dances in the light of a car’s high beams, Mitzi seems gloriously lost to the world around her, lost in the art that she loves. But then reality pulls her back, and in the cruel disorientation that follows, you see that the loss is really hers.

Burt’s practical, sturdy resignation makes him no less poignant a figure, and Dano precisely conveys the struggle of a man whose gentleness complements, but cannot assuage, his wife’s unquenchable lust for life. And if “The Fabelmans” is a record of the end of a marriage, it’s also an attempt at reconciliation — between a child and his loving, well-meaning, painfully human parents, and also between the twinned legacies that those parents bequeathed him. Sammy may be an artist and a dreamer like his mother, but he is no less his father’s son, having inherited Burt’s technological vision (Hollywood’s forthcoming blockbuster revolution will demand nothing less) and more than a little of his steady, calming spirit.

Did it all happen this way? Were his parents these people? You might as well ask if Sammy’s real-life counterpart really went steady with an overzealous Catholic girl (Chloe East), if he got his nose bloodied by an antisemitic jock (Sam Rechner) or if things played out exactly as they do in the movie’s deliriously entertaining finale. Such curiosity is only natural, even if it plays into an old canard about art — and especially movies — inspired by real life, that their accuracy is a direct measure of their truth.

Like all great storytellers, Spielberg knows the value — the beauty — of artifice and embellishment, as well as the permeability of truth and fiction. “The Fabelmans” is as slick, transporting and painstakingly orchestrated as anything in his filmography, and also as funny, stirring and implacably sad. What makes it personal isn’t that you believe everything in it happened exactly as you see it. It’s how vivid and enveloping it feels as it’s happening in front of you, and how recognizable and bittersweet an ache it leaves behind.

‘The Fabelmans’

Rated: PG-13, for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use Running time: 2 hours, 31 minutes Playing: Starts Nov. 11 at AMC the Grove 14, Los Angeles, and AMC Century City 15

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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The Fabelmans Is Steven Spielberg’s Most Honest Movie Yet

The director tackles his most challenging material: his own childhood.

The most telling shot in The Fabelmans comes during a family argument. Sammy Fabelman (played by Gabriel LaBelle) spends most of Steven Spielberg’s new film watching his parents’ marriage come apart, but in one pivotal moment, he sees a strange vision that transcends mundane drama. It’s Sammy himself, reflected in a living-room mirror while filming his family; he holds a camera in front of his face like a force field. The image is powerful and expressionistic, from a director who rarely allows things to get so dreamy. It’s also a lancing bit of self-critique: Even as traumatic events play out in front of him, Sammy is wondering how he’d shoot them in the movie version of his life.

Sammy is a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Spielberg, and The Fabelmans is easily the most personal movie the director has ever made. The film follows Sammy from ages 7 to 18, as his observant Jewish family moves from New Jersey to Arizona to California. Sammy falls deeper in love with moviemaking while he reckons with the growing tension between his parents, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano). The Fabelmans defies easy categorization. Viewers expecting a stirring childhood memoir about the power of cinema may be surprised at how bittersweet and raw the story actually is. But that vulnerability is what makes the film a triumph.

Spielberg co-wrote the movie with his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, who has helped generate some of the director’s most impressive and challenging material in recent years— Munich, Lincoln , and West Side Story . Like those projects, The Fabelmans has a dark, sharp edge. The opening sequence suggests pure heart-tugging nostalgia. Sammy’s parents take him to see The Greatest Show on Earth . The young boy watches in awe as two trains crash into each other. Soon enough, he’s crashing his own model train sets and filming the action, the first sign of a budding director’s eye.

But when Mitzi digs into why her son is so compelled to smash his toys together on camera, she finds that he’s primarily trying to overcome his fear of those images, rather than trying to re-create their cheap thrill. That impulse recurs throughout The Fabelmans . Sammy is gifted with a genuine visual sense that will one day turn his budding hobby into a robust career. But early on, he deploys it not to please crowds but to help process his emotions—to put some distance between himself and a world that is often frightening or confusing.

Read: Spielberg can’t see beyond the director’s greatness

In many ways, Sammy’s life looks like a Leave It to Beaver –esque paradise. He has three chatty sisters who are happy to act in his home movies; a soft-spoken but caring computer-engineer dad whose career success moves the family to bigger and nicer houses; and a mother who is fun, accepting, and overflowing with love. Spielberg’s portrait of his parents is steeped in close observation. Dano and Williams give rich performances, but Mitzi is undeniably the more fascinating character, a bubbly housewife who is constantly bumping up against the rigid expectations of prim 1950s domesticity.

Mitzi is a gifted piano player, and she encourages Sammy’s interest in the arts. She’s spellbound by the amateur movies he makes with his high-school friends (many of which are inspired by Spielberg’s own teenage oeuvre ). But her supportiveness belies her insecurities and regrets, and her character is given to extreme mood swings and impulsiveness. In one scene, she comes home with a monkey she’s bought from a pet store because she “needed a laugh”; another time, she packs the kids into the car and drives them toward a tornado out of sheer reckless interest.

Williams offers an energetic and complicated portrayal of a person who clearly mattered immensely to Spielberg. Dano is equally good as Burt, but plays him as far more withdrawn. Both of Spielberg’s real-life parents died in the past few years; his father, Arnold, passed away at the age of 103 in 2020. I can’t help but wonder if that was the impetus for the director to finally plumb his own memories in such a direct way. For years, absent parents and troubled children have populated Spielberg’s films, but The Fabelmans tells the story of the divorce that shredded his family in notably exacting detail.

The key fracture occurs when Sammy realizes his mother’s relationship with Burt’s best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen), is uncomfortably intimate. By making home movies, Sammy gets a more candid look at this dynamic, and at his parents in general. Throughout The Fabelmans , Sammy’s adeptness with the camera grants him new insights, but they’re often troubling ones that drive him further into his editing bay to escape them. Spielberg’s storytelling has plenty of humor and verve, but it has a devastating sense of self-awareness as well. In focusing on a boy who puts a camera between himself and the world, Spielberg essays both the power in that perspective, and the limitations.

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'the fabelmans'.

Bob Mondello

Director Steven Spielberg's new movie, "The Fabelmans," is a fictionalized version of his life story, growing up a budding filmmaker in the 1960s in Arizona.

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The Fabelmans Reviews

It’s brilliantly narrated, shot, and well-directed. Spielberg never fails to deliver.

Full Review | Sep 23, 2023

Steven Spielberg gives us his most personal film ever...

Full Review | Sep 12, 2023

The Fabelmans prove that this is another exciting blockbuster that reminds the audience of the pains and joys and the nostalgia is essential to creating a Spielbergian movie.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

This isn't just Spielberg's most personal film; it's one of the purest and most perfectly told films in his entire career.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 16, 2023

It's a good, solid family drama. I thoroughly loved this movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 10, 2023

What is always clear is that Spielberg is saying that everyone is the director of their own life story.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Aug 9, 2023

The Fabelmans will hit hard and true in the hearts of struggling artists or anyone who has grappled with the seemingly impossible task of making their loved ones proud while simultaneously pursuing their calling in life.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 26, 2023

With The Fabelmans, Spielberg makes the case that retinal impressions aren’t the only thing that persist; movies can forever change who we are and how we see one another.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Director Ron Shelton famously made “Bull Durham” as a way to introduce audiences to the Church of Baseball. Ron Shelton may have his Church, but in “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg has his Temple of Film.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Nothing new or groundbreaking happens in this film, but it is a callback to a more nostalgic time in the director’s life.

Astonishing in almost every category The type of movie that showcases where the love of films comes from & why movies are so important. A little too cheesy at times but still great!

The Fabelmans should feel like a memory, but the images are too crystal clear. There’s no grain, no warm hues, no softness. The film is too digital, too modern, too sterile for the emotion it’s trying to invoke in its audience.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

The Fabelmans is a movie made by a film lover, for film lovers. It's admiration for the craft is it's best asset, yet it's exploration into family is just as well done and has much to say.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 24, 2023

Still, one of his best in several years captured why we fall in love with the movies with a tender, funny, and at times heartbreaking film showing the joy of falling in love with the arts

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 19, 2023

An emotional coming-of-age film, in which Spielberg delivers his love letter to cinema and, at the same time, frames a very personal portrait of a boy searching for his own voice on the path of filmmaking. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 7, 2023

The Fabelmans is an intimate adventure through the life of Hollywood's most important filmmaker.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 1, 2023

Overall, the movie provides an effective mix of comedy and drama, and offers a nostalgic glimpse at the Spielberg family,

Full Review | Apr 21, 2023

Reichert’s movies are a gently burrowing, though never timid, force.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

a probing family drama that is also suffused with a genuine love of the art of cinema and all its potentials

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 27, 2023

These computer guys, Bennie explains to Sammy in The Fabelmans, “they’re gonna change the whole world.” That’s something young Steven absorbed more deeply than Ford’s instructions about where to put the horizon.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

‘The Fabelmans’: Steven Spielberg Turns the Camera on His Deepest, Scariest Subject: His Childhood

By David Fear

The little boy is scared. There’s such a large crowd outside the theater. He has no idea what will happen when he walks through the doors and into the room filled with dozens of seats, all facing a large blank square. Plus it’s in the dark. He’s been told him that there are giants in there, though his dad gently corrects him; the people are normal-sized, they’re just on a big screen.

It’s 1952, Sammy Fabelman in six years old, his parents have taken him to see his first movie — Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth — and he’s about to have his mind blown. After watching trains colliding into each other on that larger-than-life canvas, he spends the entire ride home in a state of shock. He’s left the real world behind. He’s officially entered the world of dreams.

Like Spielberg, this New Jersey kid will graduate from simply crashing toy trains to filming his head-on Lionel locomotive collisions, all the better to control the chaos and replay it over and over again. Sammy, too, will eventually graduate to what Orson Welles once called the biggest electric train set a boy ever had, filming ambitious Westerns and war epics with his sisters and fellow boy scouts in the desert, always going back to the local moviehouse to stare at the giants on the screen, to chase that original high.

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Later, the teen Sammy (now played by Gabriel LaBelle) will be forced to move with his family yet again, this time to Northern California, where his high school years will similarly be filled with angst, anti-Semitism, hormones (sort of), bloodied noses, heartbreak. And the movies. Always the movies. His dad Burt ( Paul Dano ), a computer engineer, keeps calling it Sammy’s “hobby.” Unlike Sammy’s mom Mitzi ( Michelle Williams ), a musician, the man can’t seem to recognize it is, first and foremost, his son’s salvation.

It’s a game you want to play throughout The Fabelmans, the spot-the-real-to-reel-memoir contest, even though this extraordinary family drama is nothing if not an autobiography hiding in plain sight. A deep dive into his formative years, Steven Spielberg’s look back in anger and, ultimately, forgiveness is his own story turned into a Steven Spielberg movie, complete with John Williams score cues, well-known actors (and a star-making performance from a young cast member), heroic low-angle shots, underdog triumphs and happily ever afters.

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If you follow the breadcrumb trail back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind ‘s special edition , you’ll find a scene in which Richard Dreyfus has locked himself in the shower while his son screams “Cry-baby!’ at him. It’s one of the more disturbing moments in Spielberg’s back catalog, and he later admitted in an American Masters documentary that the sequence was indeed drawn from real life. The Fabelmans takes that single thread and pulls, pulls, pulls on it until it all unravels. Sammy is a sort of everyboomer adolescent, biking throughout the Sixties suburbs with his friends and camera in tow, living in a state of Saturday matinee bliss. He gets his problem-solving acumen from his father, the mechanical whiz courted by IBM. The creative bent comes from his mother, a blond-bobbed concert pianist who exists in state somewhere between daffy flightiness and undeniable frustration. “It’s Science versus Art here,” she declares at the dinner table one night. “Sammy is on the Art team.”

The outlet for the expressive side of Sammy’s “split” personality gives him a safe haven, but it’s also where he discovers what becomes the Fabelmans’ — and The Fabelmans ‘ — original sin. There’s a family friend named Bennie ( Seth Rogen ), a constant presence in the household and a fellow engineer who Burt brings along on their move to Arizona. While filming a camping trip, Sammy comes across evidence that his mother and Bennie may be close. Quite close. Very close. If you had “a Blow-Up reference” on your Spielberg bingo card, mark it now.

There’s a lot of other stuff in The Fabelmans, of course, from a whole high school anti-Semitic bully drama taking up the last half to several comic set pieces involving food, monkey business (like literal monkey business), Judaism and the incomparable Jeannie Berlin. You may have heard that David Lynch has a cameo , and all we can say is that whoever thought to cast him in this particular role is a genius. Judd Hirsch blows into the film like a tornado — there’s an actual tornado in here too, by the way — as Mitzi’s former-circus-folk uncle, leaving outrageous hand gestures and pertinent life lessons in his wake before exiting to the sound of a Supporting Actor Oscar campaign you can already hear being tuned up. It exits on a visual gag that plays like the live-action equivalent of “ Th-th-th -that’s All Folks!” kicker from the Warner Brothers’ cartoons, though in Spielberg’s case, it signals not the end but the very beginning of a professional ascent.

Yet it’s Sammy’s two main relationships — with his mother and with the moving pictures — that are at the bruised nucleus of Spielberg’s film. The film may be dedicated to both of his parents, but the reckoning with his feelings about his mom, Leah, is what provides the emotional resonance, and after its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the director credited screenwriter Tony Kushner for “being my therapist” as they worked out the script. It’s already a given that Spielberg’s ongoing partnership with the Angels in America playwright has been one of the single most beneficial collaborations of both their careers, as Munich, Lincoln and West Side Story can attest; their professional bond is arguably the third main relationship of this project. Kushner has given his friend’s back story a structure to explore the messy memories and madness that make up most of our childhood and teen years, while also providing him a place to be vulnerable, personal, enraged. You can’t imagine either of them doing this without the other, and not just because it’s inspired by Spielberg’s real-life pain. He finally felt ready, willing and able to go there thanks to this.

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If the movie does adhere to his signature beats, and feature so many recognizable Spielbergisms, occasionally to its detriment, it’s still one of the most impressive, enlightening, vital things he’s ever done. This is someone who has gifted the public with killer sharks, rampaging dinosaurs, alien ambassadors, high melodramas, rollicking old-fashioned adventures, spills, chills and spectacle galore. The most thrilling thing he could have given us, however, turns out to be a young man with a movie camera, and the chance for an older, wiser man to finally turn that very same camera on himself.

This piece originally ran as part of our Toronto International Film Festival 2022 coverage.

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The Fabelmans Review

27 Jan 2023

The Fabelmans

The young Steven Spielberg — or at least, his on-screen avatar Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) — learns a lot in this film. About his parents, about himself, about secrets, about lies, about death, about art, about anti-Semitism, about horny teenage girls, about chaotic monkeys and, of course, about filmmaking. After a formative trip to the cinema, Sammy begins making home movies, and soon discovers how the camera can comfort, thrill and shock. He also learns what cinema tells us about people; how it can elevate them, reflect them, devastate them. Most of all, he learns how it can give us truth. Or bury it. “You really see me,” his mother Mitzi ( Michelle Williams ) tells him, in the film’s most chilling sequence.

Truth is everything in The Fabelmans , in which the world’s greatest showman finally takes us behind the curtain. As he grows as a fledgling filmmaker, young Sammy (via an appropriately self-assured yet sensitive performance from LaBelle) chides himself for some unconvincing footage. “Fake,” he says. “Totally fake.” Nothing in The Fabelmans feels fake, even if its director (and co-writer, along with Tony Kushner ) maybe embellishes events here and there. With this, Spielberg opens up like never before, telling a story he’s been itching to get to for some time, finally emotionally ready to do it. And he does it with tenderness, with a careful camera, with slow zooms always drawing us in to people, always getting closer.

The overall feeling — and this shouldn’t come as a shock, from Spielberg — is empathy. This is a hugely empathetic, and sympathetic, tribute to his parents, and the film is Spielberg making peace with what went on, with the events that turned a boy into a man. It feels like he’s protecting his mother and father, understanding them, as two troubled individuals with fears and desires and hopes and dreams and just too much on their plates. In turn, it feels as if the cast is protecting a still-wounded Spielberg, playing his family (and him) with painful humanity. As Sammy’s dad Burt, a computer engineer, Paul Dano has the saddest smile. Burt’s best friend Bennie, beloved by the family, is a pitch-perfect Seth Rogen , glowing with warmth. Judd Hirsch ’s Uncle Boris, a former circus lion-tamer who crashes into the film like a one-man truth bomb, roars with charisma before exiting just as sharply. And then there’s Michelle Williams, who… well. We go ten rounds with this one.

Mitzi — who chases a tornado, who randomly buys a monkey — feels everything, and Williams — who radiates old Hollywood glamour and staggering naturalism — is exquisite casting. There’s an intentional theatricality to her portrayal (Google photos of Spielberg’s actual mother, Leah Adler, and you see the same sparkle, the same zest), but Williams is just about the best there is at playing damaged souls, which is very much the case here.

It's charming and it's funny, a sunny disposition offsetting the sorrow.

Mitzi is a classical concert pianist who mostly gave that up to raise her kids, and as the film goes on, cracks appear. An early night-time sequence during a family camping trip has her drunkenly dancing in a see-through gown, backlit by car headlights. It’s a magical moment, beautifully scored by John Williams, who gives Mitzi the same trembling sense of awe and wonder he gave E.T.. Her family is concerned but absolutely bewitched — and Spielberg makes us feel just the same.

Despite the film’s often upsetting episodes, an impish playfulness is never far away. This is not documentary. Though almost entirely based on truth, it often feels a nudge from reality (Spielberg hasn’t renamed his family the Fabelmans for nothing), and there’s a gloss to it. But that’s just love. It’s charming and it’s funny, a sunny disposition offsetting the sorrow. It’s one big broken heart, but throughout there is vibrancy. Life.

After previously seeing them all wrapped up in genre, it feels gently shocking to discover so candidly where some of the thematic elements in Spielberg’s work stem from, especially the fractured family storylines threaded through Close Encounters and E.T. , with their search for connection from elsewhere. Yet also, this film is the result of all of that filmmaking, 50 years of craft culminating in the story of his life. The very final shot makes it all clear: it’s all about perspective. So yes, only now, heading towards 80, was he ready to make this film, and make it this good. It’s a glowing, transcendent tribute to his mum and dad. It finishes joyfully, and your heart is fed.

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Mateo zoryan francis-deford, paul dano, and michelle williams star in the director’s portrait of himself as a young man..

“The Fabelmans” is a semi-autobiographical love letter to movies written by the man who inspired more than one nostalgic ode to the cinema, Steven Spielberg. Throughout his five decades of work, Spielberg has entertained his audience, sometimes with love and, more often than not, with shock and awe. Despite complaints of how syrupy he can be, there are few directors who gleefully enjoy killing people onscreen as much as Spielberg.

Think about the disgusting crunch that accompanied Quint falling into Bruce the Shark’s mouth in “Jaws,” or those melting faces at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Sentimentality and sadism make strange bedfellows, and Spielberg has never kicked either of them out of bed.

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“The Fabelmans,” in Boston theaters Nov. 23, provides an explanation for the director’s fascination with carnage. His young stand-in, Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord), is taken to the movies by his dad, Burt (Paul Dano), and mom, Mitzi (a superb, slightly too quirky Michelle Williams). They’re worried that 1952′s “ The Greatest Show on Earth ” may be too intense for their son. Like Cecil B. DeMille, the director of that god-awful Oscar-winning best picture, Spielberg is a maximalist showman — he puts you in young Sammy’s head courtesy of Francis-DeFord’s widening eyes reflecting DeMille’s staging of the film’s brutal, climactic train crash.

Sammy is so seduced by the movie magic inherent in this jarring violence that he asks for a Lionel train set for Hanukkah. He doesn’t tell his parents he intends to emulate what he saw onscreen. His father, a computer engineer, is horrified that his son has so little respect for an expensive toy. His mother, a classically trained pianist, hears a fellow artist’s heart beating in her son and buys him his first camera. She tells him he can stage the crash once and watch it as many times as he wants. Reality is fleeting; film is forever.

Fast forward 10 years, and Sam (now played by an excellent Gabriel LaBelle) is inspired to make a Western after seeing John Ford’s “ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance .” The Fabelmans have moved to a neighborhood in Arizona that looks ripped out of “ Poltergeist ,” the 1982 film Spielberg co-wrote. His group of friends/co-conspirators enters the frame on bicycles, reminding us of “E.T.” The wistful score by John Williams — one of his best — makes a lovely complement to the visuals by Janusz Kaminski.

But all is not hearts and flowers. Anyone familiar with Spielberg’s work knows of his penchant for exploring divorced families. The director’s own parents split, but the screenplay by Spielberg and Tony Kushner provides a deeper reason for his consistent return to that subject. Mitzi describes her young son’s desire to restage DeMille as a way to control a chaotic situation. The camera makes Sammy Fabelman the ringmaster in his own Greatest Show on Earth.

Sammy also has to deal with several instances of antisemitism in his high school. That subplot is harrowing, but not without humor, albeit of the gallows variety. Sammy’s “revenge,” such as it is, plays as a complex and fascinating delve into the mind of a future filmmaker’s philosophy about the images he creates.

This is Spielberg’s most personal film, and it’s intriguing to watch him pay homage to the directors who made up his group of friends in the early 1970s. There’s more than a bit of George Lucas in the film’s later, California-set high school scenes. The comic, religious guilt that pours out of Sammy’s Christian girlfriend, who prays to an enormous crucifix on her wall before jumping his bones, has all the mischief of Marty Scorsese.

A fantastic, extended cameo by Judd Hirsch as the bonkers Uncle Boris, a man who once worked in the circus, features some advice that sounds scripted by Francis Ford Coppola. “Art is not a game,” he scolds. “Art is like putting your hand in the lion’s mouth.”

Spielberg saves his biggest directorial nod to a friend for the heartbreaking, emotional centerpiece of “The Fabelmans.” Throughout Sammy’s life, his family has always had one extra member, Burt’s best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen in a fine performance). Though a fellow techie, Bennie has a sense of humor and demeanor that align more with Mitzi’s personality than Burt’s. While editing footage from a camping trip, Sammy discovers just how close these two are. Spielberg reveals this devastating truth using a recognizable Brian De Palma technique: a series of visual cycles that expose more truth with each repetition.

“The Fabelmans” ends with a cameo by John Ford, embodied here by a very funny David Lynch. Spielberg’s own career proves that he followed the real-life advice “Pappy” Ford gave him the day they met. His latest film follows the advice of that Ford Western that Sammy saw: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

What a fine legend it is.

THE FABELMANS

Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner. Starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Gabriel LaBelle, Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord, Judd Hirsch, and David Lynch. At AMC Boston Common 19, Landmark Kendall Square Cinema, Coolidge Corner Theatre, and suburbs. 151 min., PG-13 (F-bombs, slurs, violence, DeMille-ready close-ups)

Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe's film critic.

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Jeff Daniels rages as a crooked real-estate mogul staring into the abyss of bankruptcy in this lavish take on Tom Wolfe’s novel. It’s just a shame the swearing can’t compete with the real deal

A Man in Full is largely about dicks. Metaphorical, mostly, but with the occasional real one popping up to cause trouble here and there.

The biggest metaphorical dick in this six-part Netflix adaptation by David E Kelley of Tom Wolfe’s satirical novel is Charlie Croker (Jeff Daniels). He is a good ol’ boy, Atlanta born and raised, turned real-estate mogul who has enjoyed swinging his appendage all over the state for his many years on the rise. Shortly after his lavish 60th birthday, however, he is summoned by the bank for what he thinks will be a simple refinancing meeting, only to find that they are calling in the nearly $1bn of loans they have made to him. Why? Because, explains banking head Harry Zale (Bill Camp), who could not be enjoying this more, “I am talking to a shithead about one of the worst cases of mismanagement I’ve ever seen.” The bank reckons too much has been spent on private jets, lavish 60th birthday parties and – above all – a private quail plantation for hunting and not enough on actual business. Croker is technically bankrupt. The party, and the quail hunting, is over.

Also at the meeting and barely able to keep his grin of satisfaction to himself is Croker employee turned nark Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey, producing an absolutely skin-crawling performance throughout). It’s not all fun and games for him though, as his own (actual) dick has recently impregnated a young eastern European woman (“Also, I let him put it in anus”) who now wants $700,000 to compensate for the inconvenience of giving birth to his son.

Among the others involved and/or invested in Croker’s impending fall are his first wife Martha (Diane Lane, most recently seen in Feud: Capote vs the Swans and cementing here her welcome mid-life career resurgence), whose assets may not be as disentangled from her ex-husband’s as she had hoped, Martha’s best friend Joyce (Lucy Liu) who becomes a vital part of a second plot strand emerging slightly later on, and – most harrowingly – his receptionist Jill Hensley (Chanté Adams) and her husband Conrad (Jon Michael Hill). They are Black, and when Conrad becomes caught up in a police brutality case, his situation – aggravated by the furiously racist judge overseeing it – rapidly descends into nightmare. Charlie provides the pair with one of his lawyers, Roger White (Aml Ameen) and with other help, but as he is further distracted by his own problems, the Hensleys only suffer more.

White has his own problems too. His old college pal Wes Jordan (William Jackson Harper) is the mayor of Atlanta and running for office again, this time against a dangerous Maga-esque candidate, who could win. Unless the rumours that he sexually assaulted a women back when he used to pal around with White’s boss are true … Could Roger dig around and see if Charlie knows anything he could use? An unethical thing to do, sure, but it’s for the greater good of Atlanta, and its Black population especially.

With Kelley at the helm and Regina King directing, it was hardly in doubt that a smart, propulsive drama would unfold and A Man in Full is very much that. And, of course, although Charlie Croker is a better man than Trump (and, fictional or not, a deeper and more nuanced character), the tale of a man who has built most of his overvalued empire on confidence, bullying and bluster rather than sound business sense is timely. Though (possibly unlike Trump) Daniels’ Croker is not quite unpleasant enough to have you rooting for a painfully humiliating financial demise; you feel you won’t be shedding many tears if it comes to pass.

If, however, as seems likely, A Man in Full is Netflix’s attempt to capture the post-Succession audience, it may have a way to go. The new series is a solid, satisfying thing but it lacks a true satirical edge and it lacks flair. Every line in Succession was whetted to the finest edge and the whole thing was fired by an extraordinary rage, fierce intelligence and a profound knowledge of its characters and the world in which their real-life counterparts live. A Man in Full is a fine adaptation of Wolfe’s novel, but even the plentiful invective (“Time to take a Clydesdale piss on that man’s head”) cannot measure up to that side of Jesse Armstrong’s creation. A Man in Full is workmanlike in comparison. But perhaps that’s invidious. Standing alone, it is more than good enough.

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Elisabeth Moss Stuns in FX’s Fascinating Spy Thriller ‘The Veil’: TV Review

By Aramide Tinubu

Aramide Tinubu

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Armed with a mostly believable English accent, Moss is exceptional. Imogen is the persona her character now inhabits. Yet in hauntingly quiet moments when the secret agent is alone, the shadows of her true self and anguish-tinged fragments of her past briefly make themselves known. Despite her profession and personal experiences, Imogen never comes off robotic and unfeeling, a testament to Moss’ mastery of the character. Driven by her desire to understand Adilah, Imogen never stops searching for her humanity in the face of her perceived egregious transgressions.

Despite the comedic scenes involving gripes about France’s 35-hour workweek, the CIA’s often overblown reactions to any new revelations and a tech guy with putrid body odor, “The Veil” is no comedy. Stuck together in a tenuous truce and deeply skeptical of each other, Imogen and Adilah slowly reveal the shocking pieces of their different lives. These mirroring paths make them more similar than not, although they might be reluctant to admit it. Episode 5, “Grandfather’s House,” concludes with a breathtaking confrontation between the two women. It showcases how individual experiences and perceptions contribute to our interpretation of what’s true and possible.

The six episodes of “The Veil” are flawlessly paced and thoughtfully executed. Elegantly placed clues gradually shed light on Adilah and Imogen’s past lives, which are fully exposed in the final hour. In the end, the show is a reminder that though we may be taught to navigate life in black and white, our choices are frequently born somewhere in the gray.

The first two episodes of FX’s “The Veil” premiere April 30 on Hulu  with new episodes dropping weekly on Tuesdays.

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‘Nowhere Special’ Review: Old Bonds, New Family

This understated tear-jerker sees a dying single father making future family plans for his toddler son.

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By Glenn Kenny

“Nowhere Special” is an unusual, and unusually understated, parental tear-jerker in which a father prepares for the loss of his young son. The son isn’t going anywhere. But the father, a single dad, is dying, of an unspecified disease, and he’s at first eager, then later a little desperate, to get his boy placed with the right adoptive family.

The picture was written and directed by Uberto Pasolini, the Italian-born filmmaker who was the producer of the 1997 crowd-pleaser “The Full Monty.” Although he shares a surname with the acclaimed director Pier Paolo Pasolini, Uberto is in fact a nephew of the neorealist cinema giant Luchino Visconti. Pasolini doesn’t seem directly influenced by his actual relative or his namesake. But his movie does have a style: slow, quiet, measured. It takes its time before bringing the emotional hammer down.

Set and shot in Northern Ireland, the film focuses on a window cleaner, John (James Norton), the loving father to a very cute but often sulky 4-year-old, Michael (Daniel Lamont). We never see John at a doctor’s office, but we get a look at his packed medicine cabinet and we see him getting more ashen as the picture goes on. One location he does spend a lot of time in is a child placement agency, whose staffers escort him to speak with approved-to-adopt candidates. There are childless couples, intimidatingly big families and single aspiring parents to consider. John resists putting a “memory box” together for his boy. “I don’t want him to understand death,” he says.

After being admonished by a snotty rich client because of slow work, John, taking the adage “you only live once” to heart, eggs the fellow’s house. It’s one of the few moments when the movie deigns to deliver a conventional satisfaction. But the mostly low-key mode of “Nowhere Special” is the right one. Norton is spectacular, but little Lamont delivers one of those uncanny performances that doesn’t seem like acting, and makes you feel for the kid almost as much as his onscreen parent does.

Nowhere Special Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.

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