War of the Worlds
The world's greatest technical director, and perhaps its finest storyteller, has created yet another riveting piece of summer entertainment. While the characters in the story have been dramatically altered, Spielberg's version of H.G. Wells' classic keeps many of the very first sci-fi novel's technical logistics intact. The alien tripods obliterating millions of human lives as though we were nothing but insects to be stepped on drives home the true emotional horror of the situation. But all of that is just the frame for the picture.
The real weight behind War of the Worlds is how Spielberg uses the backdrop of the catastrophe as a unifying force between two children and their lousy father, who suddenly has to worry about someone other than himself. War of the Worlds has a wonderful ebb and flow, producing at first a frantic, relentless invasion sequence that can't and won't let up until the father is forced to demonstrate just how far he will go to protect his children from all enemies, foreign and domestic, in the face of extraordinary hardship.
Tom Cruise keeps getting better and better at playing a wider range of characters, here evolving selfish obstinacy into a sense of ultimate irrelevancy when juxtaposed with the importance of his children. Dakota Fanning, meanwhile, is another in a remarkable line of child actors for which Spielberg seems to have a sharp eye, either discovering them outright (Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, Christian Bale) or getting even more out them than we had previously seen (Haley Joel Osment and now Fanning).