A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

The critic sees it as a profound and visually astounding work of Spielberg's genius, blending Kubrickian elements with emotional depth into an unusual masterpiece. The film's philosophical questions about love and reality, along with its CGI and performances, are singled out for praise despite a divisive ending.

The critic describes it as an ambitious dark-toned Pinocchio fable with terrific special effects, highlighting Osment's fine performance and noting it is one of Spielberg's bleakest works rather than a feel-good romp.

The film is a wild, ambitious inquiry into humanity's origins, nature, and end, delivered through the story of a robot boy programmed to love. Despite intrusive narration and occasional over-explanation, its virtues—strong performances and striking imagery—make it a defining, moving work of its time.

The film is ambitious and technically masterful with provocative ideas and wondrous sights, but it miscalculates by asking viewers to invest emotionally in a machine character whose 'love' is only simulated.

The review calls it flawed genius that is bewitching and gripping yet ultimately cold and without emotional pulse due to an over-sentimental finale. Spielberg's daring visual and thematic ambition mixed with Kubrick influences is highlighted as both visionary and frustrating.

Spielberg's film is a strange, muddled mess of multiple episodes that piles on sappy codas and wish-fulfillment after a haunting Kubrickian core. It lingers due to emotional power and visual style but is undermined by distancing artificiality and excess baggage.

The imagery and direction are precise, haunting and masterful in places, but the film is a ponderous death-of-the-world fantasy that milks sentiment from an Oedipal robot and drains vitality from its premise.

The film is a terrible disappointment, a quaint and dated vision of the future with unappealing child acting. It awkwardly combines Kubrick's and Spielberg's sensibilities into a soggy, creaky mess.

The review finds the film one of Spielberg's most ambitious, intelligent and problematic, praising its captivating and emotionally touching qualities, Osment's central performance and visual innovation while noting issues blending sensibilities.

The critic explores the film's origins as a Kubrick project passed to Spielberg and its Pinocchio-like themes of illusion, love and reality. He praises the ambition, visual effects and crowd scenes while noting it is too soft-centred with an uneasy alien resolution.

Spielberg has made his most disturbing, complex and intellectually challenging boy's adventure story, melding Kubrick's chilly style with his own sensibility into a layered fairy tale about abandonment, love and what it means to be real and mortal.

The review calls the film a clumsy but ambitious and personal blend of cerebral sci-fi and fairytale, praising its beauty, wonders, miraculous SFX and anguished expression of rejection, loneliness and love.