Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005)
Some day soon, perhaps, Steven Spielberg may be able to make adult and dark movies without prompting raised eyebrows. The undertone of much recent writing about Spielberg seems to be that his recent films amount to some sort of con: deep down he is still that saccharine confectioner that he was pigeon-holed as in the early 1980s, and all these challenging and important films he has made are just a kind of veneer that hide the real director underneath. This attitude doesn’t seem to be dislodged by the fact that his exercises in pure cornball schmaltz (I’d nominate The Color Purple, Always, Hook, and The Terminal) are now massively outnumbered by films that bear little or no relationship to the cliché of Spielberg as a relentlessly cheery sentimentalist. At some point, however, his resume is going to have to stop being treated as a series of aberrant examples, and critics are going to have to roll up their sleeves and start the belated task of reappraising his work.
