Spielberg

The overall effect is a worthwhile appreciation of one of Hollywood's all-time greats. [6 Oct 2017, p.55]

Spielberg's unabashed honesty about his accomplishments, failures and frailties ties a bow on all of it.

Mostly, though, with its penetrating look at a career that now spans half a century, Spielberg enriches a series of films that you--or, at least, some of us--never get tired of thinking about. It’s like HBO’s free-flowing version of a PBS “American Masters” doc.

Terrifically entertaining and tremendously moving, yet also critical at times, biography. [2-15 Oct 2017, p.14]

It’s a testimony to Spielberg’s career that a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on his life and work could both feel too long in some places and yet oddly inadequate in others.

It’s somewhat refreshing to see a stolid, workmanlike profile acknowledge artistic shortcomings, or even to hear the director himself admit to chickening out when it came to sex in his adaptation of The Color Purple. And yet, Spielberg is such a known quantity that one almost wishes that this documentary had a contrarian streak, or at least tried to defend commercial and critical failures like 1941.

The slavish adoration of Spielberg is something else--and a surprise, given the rigor with which HBO has generally conducted its documentary programming. ... Spielberg can be a feast for the eyes, even when the clips come from less-than-classic Spielberg films (“War Horse,” to name just one). The subject was as open as he needed to be during the reported 30 hours of interviews he gave Ms. Lacy.