Spielberg's glossy, cliched American family sit-com and High School coming-of-age trope-fest. A dubious oedipal obsession with his creepy mother. Rose tinted self mythologising of his phoney growth as a filmmaker (on the evidence here, the borrowed, the bland and the superficial were early tenets).

I also found the young filmmaker's manipulation of his schoolmates through film rather unpleasant. Homo-erotic pandering to the principal bully and downright meanness to the less attractive sidekick was a misuse of editing for personal and petty result. Riefenstahl-lite.

Maybe it's meant as a confession, or an excuse... The Fablemans has nothing to say and is absent of truth - other than a confirmation of Spielberg's limited horizons.