The Fabelmans | Steven Spielberg | ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 

This mesmerising film is the one that Steven Spielberg has been working on since his parents took him to see Cecile B De Mille’s The Greatest Show on Earth as a six year-old in 1952. It’s the semi-autobiographical origin story of one of the greatest filmmakers, which Spielberg describes as a love letter to his family and to the art of cinema.

In the film, it distressed his computer engineer father Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano) that young Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) was intent on recreating the spectacular train crash from the film with his new train set. It was his pianist mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) who gave him an old camera so he could film the crash and watch it over and over again.

Spielberg’s alter-ego Sammy is soon making short films with the help of his three sisters, school mates and Eagle Scouts buddies, and is even able to successfully shame an anti-Semitic bully in his graduating year at high school via the medium of film.

While is mother encourages him, his father thinks his hobby is taking up too much of his time. That is not the only thing his parents don’t agree on and the parental disagreements and fracturing of his family was something that would take centre stage in many of Spielberg’s films.

Oozing with nostalgia and humour, time has enabled Spielberg to draw positivities from the trauma of his teenage years. He said in an interview with TIME Magazine that there is a little bit of himself in every movie he has made, but he found it difficult to tell his own story.

Spielberg has fine-tuned his ability to take his audience through every emotion and his 33rd feature film, The Fabelmans, showing the childhood influences that have propelled the consummate storyteller for sixty years, takes the audience through all these emotions.

Lezly Herbert

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