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100Pure magic, a three-act movie fantasy that transports us -- as the best films do -- to a world of its own, a place of ambiguous joy and delirious terror.
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100A film that might make you cry watching it is just as likely to give you the creeps thinking about it afterward, which is as it should be.
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91There aren't many at all like Spielberg and Kubrick, directors willing to lasso dreams (that's Steven) and nightmares (that's Stanley) or die trying. A.I. is a clash of the titans, a jumble, an oedipal drama, a carny act. I want to see it again.
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91The movie is exactly what it's billed to be: the successful blending of two distinctly different filmmaking sensibilities from two different generations. But the stronger, and more pessimistic, sensibility -- Kubrick's -- carries the day.
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90(Spielberg) tells the story slowly and films it with lucid, mesmerizing objectivity, creating a mood as layered, dissonant and strange as John Williams's unusually restrained. modernist score.
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90The result is fascinating -- a rich, strange, problematical movie full of wild tonal shifts and bravura moviemaking.
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90This is not "E.T.," nor is it a kid's film nor even necessarily a major mass-audience film, although Spielberg's name, high public anticipation and the child-oriented campaign will make it perform like one.
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80Actually, it's a childhood "A Clockwork Orange," a reverent realization of the late Stanley Kubrick's final obsession.
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80A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe.
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75Audacious, technically masterful, challenging, sometimes moving, ceaselessly watchable. What holds it back from greatness is a failure to really engage the ideas that it introduces.
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75Be warned that the violence-prone Spielberg of "Saving Private Ryan" and "Schindler's List" is also on display.
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75This is speculative, heady stuff, far removed from traditional Hollywood summer entertainment, which alone will earn A.I. a devoted following.
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75Most of its features work fine, and it will dazzle you with its tricks and illusions. But it is not what it claims to be on the package.
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75Audiences may find that the deliberate, Kubrickesque pacing -- without his intellectual rigor -- causes them to tune out.
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75This is a movie to be knocked, chewed and gummed, but not dismissed. It's the first 2001 release I've rushed to see twice.
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75Spielberg has said that in their collaboration, cut short by Kubrick's death, Kubrick had opened his heart as never before. Although the fingerprint of each is upon A.I, there are times when the prints are blurred and merged. And this film will blur the hitherto distinctive profiles of each.
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70For everything wrong with it, A.I. is not a dismissible film. It's too richly imagined, too accomplished. Even as he botches the emotions and the issues he raises, Spielberg goes headlong into them, wrestles with the picture's conflicting impulses. It's the kind of screw-up you get only from a master filmmaker.
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70Whether audiences are pleased or vexed, very vexed, by A.I., any movie buff worth his salt will want to sift through this fascinating wreck of a movie.
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70Less a movie than a seething psychological bonanza.
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70The skill involved holds us in our seats, the project's inability to transcend its built-in limitations keep it from achieving the kind of overarching impact it is after.
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63A fascinating but flawed work that demonstrates that, contrary to popular wisdom, great minds do not think alike.
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60A slickly crafted fable, however dark, but it's shot with haunting poetry.
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60It's one of the weirdest achievements in film history: Temperamentally, Spielberg and Kubrick are such polar opposites that A.I. has the moment-to-moment effect of being completely at odds with itself.
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50What's a shock is the crudeness with which Spielberg fills the scenario in -- how he neuters his protagonist and short-circuits the inner workings of his human characters.
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50The result is fascinating, if uneven and ultimately rather silly. Problems with the ending, so common these days, dog this visionary film as well.
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50Intriguing, inspired, flawed, misbegotten and fascinating -- all of these qualities apply to the movie, at one point or another.
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50It's by turns poignant and cold, twisted and sweet, dreamy and drab, effortless and overwrought. In short, the movie is a stunning, ambitious mess that leaves you wondering how much better it might have been without Kubrick's specter peering over Spielberg's heavy shoulders.
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40What we're left with -- Kubrick or no -- is a muddled, messy disaster of a film, something that seems more like a drastically edited miniseries, cut down to incomprehensible levels with whole sections missing.
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40Spielberg's infidelity to Aldiss (and perhaps to Kubrick, who knows?) would be pardonable if it didn't ruin his movie. In the end, he has failed to make a persuasive, smart movie about robots and people.
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38Ends up neither fish nor fowl. It's a misanthrope's "E.T."
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30A grim disappointment for grown-ups, and far too violent for young kids. I found it to be clumsy, misanthropic and intractably lifeless.
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25By the end A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 66 out of 100
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Mixed: 9 out of 100
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Negative: 25 out of 100
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