‘The Fabelmans’ review: Spielberg’s latest is the best movie of the year

With hundreds of stunning beaches and expansive coastlines, Scotland is one of the best places in the UK to get out for walks by the sea. One hidden gem beach, in particular, has just been named as one of the best in the UK for taking a walk with your dogs.

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalogue titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This twice-monthly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

Is any race for a nomination in this category moot? Has Steven Spielberg already won it for his personal, Hollywood industry-friendly drama “The Fabelmans”? Possibly, but not probably. The Director’s branch of the Academy has become one of the most international of all the branches.

Want to know why the Toronto International Film Festival is so special?

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalogue titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This twice-monthly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

Of all the directors making TIFF debuts this year, none are more revered or accomplished than Steven Spielberg. The highest-grossing director of all time normally premieres his films in late fall.

“The Fabelmans” made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, and a new trailer offers a glimpse of the latest film from acclaimed director Steven Spielberg.

Sift through some of his best work, and you will find that Steven Spielberg has always been a filmmaker charged by notions of love and ache for families, both those we are born into and those we select for ourselves. Though his tender devotion to domestic, often suburban bonds and rhythms—a well-documented and endlessly discussed through-line in his filmography—has perhaps never been as evident as in the soul-baring “The Fabelmans.” It’s Spielberg’s most personal film, one that gorgeously revives the memories of his childhood and youth with a lavish sense of wistfulness and an aptly Hollywood-ized, fable-like touch.  That beautiful Hollywood sheen is fitting for the on-screen autobiography of an escapist filmmaker, one whose name we came to pronounce synonymously with the magic of movies.

Carson Burton Steven Spielberg is taking audiences on an intimate stroll through his childhood in the first trailer for “The Fabelmans.”The semi-autobiographical film follows the formative years of a young man as he discovers a shattering family secret, causing him to use movies as a means to help him see the truth about others and himself. Spielberg based the film on his own early years in Arizona and co-wrote the script with “Lincoln,” “Munich” and “West Side Story” screenwriter Tony Kushner.On Saturday, “The Fabelmans” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, earning a standing ovation in the crowd of movie lovers, who cheered loudly for the Oscar-winning auteur as he made his first appearance at the Canadian gathering. 

Of all the directors making TIFF debuts this year, none is more revered or accomplished than Steven Spielberg. The highest-grossing director of all time normally premieres his films in late fall, but this year he’s changed tack, with his long-awaited semi-autobiographical film, “The Fabelmans,” set to headline TIFF’s Special Presentations section on September 11.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic No director has done more to deconstruct the myth of the suburban American family than Steven Spielberg. Dissertations have been written and documentaries made on the subject. And now, at the spry young age of 75, Spielberg himself weighs in on where his preoccupations come from in “The Fabelmans,” a personal account of his upbringing that feels like listening to two and a half hours’ worth of well-polished cocktail-party anecdotes, only better, since he’s gone to the trouble of staging them all for our benefit. Spielberg’s a born storyteller, and these are arguably his most precious stories. From the first movie he saw (“The Greatest Show on Earth”) to memories of meeting filmmaker John Ford on the Paramount lot, this endearing, broadly appealing account of how Spielberg was smitten by the medium — and why the prodigy nearly abandoned picture-making before his career even started — holds the keys to so much of the master’s filmography. More similar to Woody Allen’s autobiographical “Radio Days” than it is to European art films such as “The 400 Blows” and “Amistad” (the more highbrow models other directors typically point to when re-creating their childhoods), “The Fabelmans” invites audiences into the home and headspace of the world’s most beloved living director, an oddly sanitized zone where even the trauma — which includes anti-Semitism, financial disadvantage and divorce — seems to go better with fresh-buttered popcorn.

There is definitely a trend of late for film directors to take a look in thinly disguised cinematic memoirs of their early influences that shaped the artist and person they have become. Kenneth Branagh with Belfast and Paolo Sorrentino with The Hand Of God did it last year. Of course there is Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, others over the years. Sam Mendes, while not drawing a portrait of his younger self revisits the movie palaces of his youth in another 2022 offering, Empire Of Light, which premiered last weekend at Telluride and will also hit the Toronto International Film Festival. TIFF is also where the man I recently described as the GOAT, Steven Spielberg, has chosen to debut his own story where the names have been changed but the story is  clearly his. The Fabelmans basically chronicling his early Jewish family life and infatuation with making movies  had its World Premiere Saturday night, the first of Spielberg’s directed movies ever to premiere at a film festival. This one seems entirely appropriate, and it has been gestating in the director’s head ever since he and his co-writer Tony Kushner started kicking it around during the making of Lincoln over a decade ago. He says he finally made it primarily as a way to bring his late parents Leah and Arnold (to whom the film is dedicated) somehow back to his life. Movies can do that, and no one knows it better than Steven Spielberg.

Every director, it seems, has a deeply personal coming-of-age story to tell, from Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” to Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari” to Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma.” And lately every Toronto International Film Festival has made one of those films a centerpiece of its lineup. Last year, it was Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” which won TIFF’s audience award and went on to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture; this year, it’s Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” which had its world premiere on Saturday night in the Visa Screening Room at the Princess of Wales Theatre.Based on Spielberg’s childhood in New Jersey (briefly), Phoenix (longer) and Northern California (for a stormy stretch in high school), “The Fabelmans” is a sweet look back at a boy who was transfixed by the movies from the moment he saw “The Greatest Show on Earth” in 1952, and who started his own adventures in filmmaking with the help of his dad’s camera and a Lionel train set in the basement.

Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” earned a roaring standing ovation at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, as the crowd of movie lovers cheered loudly for the Oscar-winning auteur as he made his first appearance at the gathering. “I’m really glad we came to Toronto,” a visibly moved Spielberg said after taking the stage as the credits rolled.  The director said he was inspired by the COVID pandemic to tell his most personal story yet, a look at his early filmmaking efforts, his childhood in Arizona and Northern California, and the dissolution of his family. However, he reassured the crowd at TIFF that this would not serve as his farewell to movies.“This is not because I’m going to retire and this is my swan song,” he said. “Don’t believe any of that.”

A young couple who bought a derelict mansion instead of a flat after an auction mistake have restored the 120-year-old property to its former glory.

Toronto International Film Festival.Bri (Jamila C. Gray), a 16-year-old aspiring rapper, rises from late-night rap battles at an underground venue called the Ring in her fictional hometown of Garden Heights to having the most-played song on the radio. Running time: 115 minutes.

EXCLUSIVE: Melissa Barrera (In the Heights) has signed on to star alongside Jeremy Pope, Paul Bettany and Daniel Brühl in Muse of Fire’s Warhol-Basquiat pic The Collaboration, based on the acclaimed play by four-time Oscar nom Anthony McCarten.