Cinema: This Way to the Children's Crusade

Spielberg presents two movies with guts, brains and a little heart

Ah, the rites of summer! Baseball and sunbathing. Picnics by the old swimming hole. Heat prostration and killer mosquitoes. Steven Spielberg movies. For the fifth consecutive summer, this tireless auteur-mogul has placed his name on a fantasy adventure or two designed to turn sentient adults into wonder-lusting children. Spielberg directed neither of the inevitable hits before us: he wrote the story and served as an executive producer of The Goonies; he shepherded Back to the Future toward production, then pretty much left the film's creators on their merry own. But his candy-smirched fingerprints are evident on both projects. Like Spielberg's Raiders...

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