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The Fabelmans Reviews
The Fabelmans is clearly one of if not the most personal film Spielberg has ever done, and I’m really happy that he has the chance to tell a story that means so much to him.
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 2, 2024
With all its self-awareness, its anguish and its beauty, The Fabelmans is a film that it is surely impossible not to love.
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 18, 2024
Not many directors could pull off a film like The Fabelmans, one which could feel self-indulgent to some and follows an often predictable ‘behold, the power of cinema!’ route – and yet, if we ever had any doubts, Spielberg does it with aplomb.
Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 3, 2024
The Fabelmans is a testament to not only the power of cinema but also how family shapes us into the people we are, merits and faults alike.
Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 16, 2024
What Spielberg spotlights about cinema and filmmaking here, above the business and politics that inevitably come with it, is the sheer joy and wonder of the medium.
Full Review | Jul 12, 2024
Directing a story he co-wrote with frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, Spielberg digs deep into the recesses of his memory—and delivers 2½ hours of pure cinematic poetry in motion.
Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 7, 2024
Spielberg’s oeuvre in a nutshell. He’s a director that appeals to the movie lover in all of us because in the midst of the bombast and action, he can find that heartstring to tug.
Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 3, 2024
Spielberg has grown beyond casting blame and moralizing for now. It is all pure emotion and empathy though he holds space for that past self who needed to place people in categories such as villains or heroes.
Full Review | Jun 2, 2024
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’: 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.
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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.”
His 24-frames-per-second safe space has now become tainted. This, too, comes from the source, and it speaks volumes to the director’s dedication to looking inward that he includes a truly gutting sequence of Sammy showing this footage to his mother, the camera staying on Williams’ face as she simply crumbles and, thanks to the “hobby” she’s helped nurture, has made her son complicit in what she claims is an unconsummated yet still damning affair. (Her performance is arguably the linchpin of the entire psychodrama being played out, primal-screen–style, and it’s impossible to underestimate what she brings to both this character and the film.)
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.
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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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- Cast & crew
- User reviews
The Fabelmans
Growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, young Sammy Fabelman aspires to become a filmmaker as he reaches adolescence, but soon discovers a shattering family secret and explores how the ... Read all Growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, young Sammy Fabelman aspires to become a filmmaker as he reaches adolescence, but soon discovers a shattering family secret and explores how the power of films can help him see the truth. Growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, young Sammy Fabelman aspires to become a filmmaker as he reaches adolescence, but soon discovers a shattering family secret and explores how the power of films can help him see the truth.
- Steven Spielberg
- Tony Kushner
- Michelle Williams
- Gabriel LaBelle
- 531 User reviews
- 344 Critic reviews
- 85 Metascore
- 31 wins & 293 nominations total
Top cast 81
- Mitzi Fabelman
- Sammy Fabelman
- Burt Fabelman
- Uncle Boris
- Bennie Loewy
- Younger Sammy Fabelman
- (as Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord)
- Natalie Fabelman
- Younger Natalie Fabelman
- Reggie Fabelman
- Younger Reggie Fabelman
- Lisa Fabelman
- Hadassah Fabelman
- Tina Schildkraut
- Chad Thomas
- Monica Sherwood
- Claudia Denning
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
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Did you know
- Trivia During filming, the cast gained access to home movies, photographs, and recollections from Steven Spielberg 's family's past to learn what they were like and how to portray the fictionalized versions of them (The Fabelman family) on screen, while making them feel fresh and original. Paul Dano reflected: "It was overwhelming and it was sort of a heavy cloak to bear because we were with someone who was having a big experience everyday, revisiting and reworking through a part of their life...For somebody like Steven to share that much of himself with us---with the audience too---it was really a profound experience."
- Goofs Younger Sammy Fabelman's eyes are blue, while the older Sammy Fablelman's eyes are brown.
John Ford : When the horizon's at the bottom, it's interesting. When the horizon's at the top, it's interesting. When the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit. Now, good luck to you. And get the fuck out of my office!
- Crazy credits Two dedications to Spielberg's real life parents Leah Adler and Arnold Spielberg appear after the closing credits.
- Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: This Movie was Shockingly Terrible - Best and Worst of TIFF 2022 (2022)
- Soundtracks The Greatest Show on Earth from The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) Written by Victor Young , Ned Washington Performed by the Paramount Studios Band Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
User reviews 531
Dear diary, it's steven.
- Nov 30, 2022
- How long is The Fabelmans? Powered by Alexa
- Is "The Fabelmans" based on Steven Spielberg's early life?
- November 23, 2022 (United States)
- United States
- Los Fabelman
- 12908 Bailey Street, Whittier, California, USA (Monte's camera shop: Bennie tries to offer Sammy a film camera)
- Amblin Entertainment
- Amblin Partners
- Reliance Entertainment
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- $40,000,000 (estimated)
- $17,348,945
- Nov 13, 2022
- $45,620,703
- Runtime 2 hours 31 minutes
- Dolby Digital
- Dolby Surround 7.1
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