Critic Reviews

Pure 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.

The 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.

A.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.

Audiences may find that the deliberate, Kubrickesque pacing -- without his intellectual rigor -- causes them to tune out.

This is speculative, heady stuff, far removed from traditional Hollywood summer entertainment, which alone will earn A.I. a devoted following.

Most 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.

It'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.