The Fablemans is Steven Spielberg's admirable love letter to cinema and a tribute to his early devotion to filmmaking. The movie bursts us with artistic passion, making choices between art and reality, it explores strong and relatable family relationship themes, and captured moments that play as a bonding thread in the household and ultimately reshape the meaning of the family's emotional conflicts and dynamics.

A subtle masterpiece, this may not be Spielberg's biggest or most show-off kind of movie but it certainly hits all the right spots brilliantly and will stay with you for a while if you connect with it.

Spielberg takes us on a very nostalgic felt journey with a close look at how his love for film was influenced and his role within the household and their crisis with living life, pursuing professional choices, and Sammy's own fascinations and priorities, onto the beginning of his emerging career following his aspirations and dreaming big.

Cinema is a powerful tool and we can that here. The narrative is very simple yet holds deep emotional layers that can pierce through your heart. The way I connected with it evoked so much in me on a personal level, I felt a resemblance to my younger self nostalgically recalling a vivid childhood memory of watching one of Spielberg's movies which highly affected me at an age where I didn't even understand any bits of what I watched.

This relatability factor I think is what makes the movie stand out on a certain level and helps amplify the cinematic experience and the premises it explores.

Though I think the runtime might've been a bit long for this type of movie that is not necessarily driven by huge dramatic moments but rather the feelings of it, not the biggest thing to worry about because it was beautiful still.

The nostalgic aesthetic wasn't limited to the story, on the contrary, it was driven further by the visuals where Janusz Kaminiski's cinematography makes you wonder beyond the surface.

The exquisitely composed frames with the simple blocking of the camera, the long takes, and the classic lighting style translated so much depth both in creating beautiful mesmerizing imagery and in shaping the character's performances and emotional delivery, and help in translating the story through the screen.

Michelle Williams's performance was outstanding, the way she embodied her character's complexity was beautifully executed. Gabriel LaBelle also did a beautiful job, his emotional depth was on point, and so did Paul Dano.

Symbolically, I believe the "camera" as an object also had a performative role in the movie, the way Sammy used it wasn't just to capture regular memories, but it was also his way to discover life through glamorized visualization that showed realities and determined his future pursuits.