Steven Spielberg's latest movie The Fabelmans has started its cinema run with a near-perfect score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. The semi-autobiographical movie is inspired by Spielberg's own childhood in post-World War 2 Arizona, the first time the director has properly explored his early years on screen.
Gabriel LaBelle and Mateo Zoryna Francis-Deford play sixteen and seven-year-old versions of Sammy Fabelman, an aspiring filmmaker based on the director, while Paul Dano and Michelle Williams are fictionalized versions of Spielberg's parents.
The film currently holds a critics' score of 95% based on 97 reviews. Reviews are predicting another Oscar win for Spielberg, with Variety saying the filmmaker is operating at "the top of his game", while Deadline praised Williams for her "astonishing" and gut-wrenchingly great" performance.
This makes The Fabelmans Spielberg's seventh best-rated movie on the site, ranking behind beloved titles like Jurassic Park and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. His most highly-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes is E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which has a score of 99%.
The Fabelmans marks the first time since 2001 that Spielberg was involved in writing the screenplay for one of his movies – his last screenwriting venture was for AI: Artificial Intelligence. He co-wrote this movie with Tony Kushner, who previously penned the Spielberg movies Lincoln and West Side Story.
