putting it on track to top War Horse.” 2ĢBeyond the traditional criticism of Spielberg’s sentimentality, infantilism and family-friendly values, the science fiction film genre is often seen as symptomatic of his willingness to avoid confronting reality and provide audiences with the worst kind of SF: special effects-laden escapist spectacles. Such censure has continued unabated to the present day, going indeed far beyond his SF and fantasy movies-a recent Guardian review of War Horse called the film “coercively sentimental,” 1 while Variety dismissed Bridge of Spies as “feel-good time for the whole family. to a sentimental fantasy of escape” in the worst sense (loc. 4125). In what is perhaps the most famous dismissal of Spielberg, Andrew Britton in the 1980s rebuked “the politics of Reaganite entertainment,” of which Spielberg was seen as the figurehead, his films “catering. Robin Wood famously labeled his films “compensatory fantas,” berating the “Lucas-Spielberg syndrome-films catering to the desire for regression to infantilism” (158, 155). His science fiction (SF) and fantasy films have often been framed as paradigmatic of everything that is allegedly wrong with his cinema. 1Spielberg has traditionally been dismissed by film critics as a commercial director associated with the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster in the late 1970s.