Time, Newsweek review “A.I.”

The two national news weeklies Time and Newsweek are out with ambivalent reviews of Steven Spielberg‘s A.I., set for release next weekend amid numerous predictions that it will wind up as the biggest blockbuster of the year. Richard Corliss in Time magazine (a corporate sibling of Warner Bros., the movie’s distributor) writes, “As a movie, A.I. engrosses without quite enthralling. It’s got technological wonders … that are truly wonderful.” But Corliss, writing in an issue that features A.I. on its cover, complains that Spielberg isn’t always “on his game,” noting that “intriguing plot twists … are dropped for excursions that are more about art direction than efficient storytelling.” David Anson in Newsweek first calls the movie, “a rich, strange, problematical movie full of wild tonal shifts and bravura moviemaking,” then goes on to remark that, in the last part of the film, “Spielberg‘s screenplay loses its grip, the film goes limp, and you wonder whether the movie Kubrick envisioned and the one we’re seeing have fatally parted ways.” Nevertheless, Anson concludes: “A.I. exhilarates, frustrates and provokes: it’s the most ambitious Hollywood movie in sight.”