'The Fabelmans' Captures the Magic of Moviegoing

A middle-class Jewish family, the Fabelmans are religiously observant and outwardly contented. Yet social change and technological progress are afoot, and Sammy and his kindly but nerdy father are taken with the wonders of the age. An engineer for RCA, Burt is an early proponent of the computer revolution while his son becomes besotted by the movies—a still-miraculous medium when the film opens in 1952, a mere 25 years since the arrival of talkies. In preparing his son for his first sojourn to the movies, Cecil B. DeMille’s enduring charmer The Greatest Show on Earth, Burt expounds on the “persistence of vision,” although Mitzi—who, like most Spielberg mothers, has a softer touch—puts it in terms likelier to be appreciated by a six-year-old: “Movies are dreams, doll, that you never forget.”