Steven Spielberg's much lauded, Oscar nominated memory piece from last year. The youngest son of a 'on the surface' normal family has his life changed when he goes to see Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. As he grows older & gets a gift of a home camera, he, Gabriel LaBelle, develops an affinity for making films that are crowd pleasers (as we see when he screens his war opus made w/his boy scout buddies to a large audience) but on the home front his parents, Michelle Williams (Oscar nominated here) & Paul Dano, are drifting apart as Williams is having an affair w/Dano's work partner, Seth Rogan & Dano is none the wiser. Even after making a move from New Jersey to Arizona to California, the family soldiers on but when Williams finally follows her heart w/Rogen, LaBelle becomes despondent about his dream (at one point he puts down his camera) until an opportunity to film a school outing (where he's become something of a pariah due to his being Jewish) finally grants him the respect & awe he deserves as he mulls his future (w/his query letters going out to studios for him to ply his craft). Spielberg has never been one to shy away from showing his roots & growing pains in his films (E. T. & Close Encounters come to mind) so here going full hog in a not too thinly veiled autobiographical account, we get a rousing American account of a immigrant family going through the motions & eventually making good for themselves at the other end warts & all using the love of cinema as a conduit to tell this particular story w/Spielberg getting winning perfs across the board especially LaBelle, Spielberg's nominal stand-in, who has to carry the film squarely on his back as we get a definitive insight into what makes Spielberg's style tick. Also starring Judd Hirsch (also nominated) as the black sheep uncle who comes for a visit, James Urbaniak as LaBelle's principal, Julia Butters plays one of LaBelle's siblings, Greg Grunberg as a TV exec who takes a meeting w/LaBelle & finally (at this point the cinematic cat is out of the bag!) David Lynch playing John Ford in a vignette culled from Spielberg's own recollections when he used to storm film studios to meet the masters.