SOURCE: Cooper, Rand Richards. “Pinocchio Redux.” Commonweal 128, no. 14 (17 August 2001): 20-1.

In the following favorable review, Cooper contends that A.I.: Artificial Intelligence “keeps us nicely off balance, our hearts continually pitted against our heads, Spielbergian images pumped full of Kubrickian ironies.”

One summer day back in the mid-1970s, a woman I know was hitchhiking on Cape Cod with two friends. The three, all college students, got picked up by a geeky guy in his late twenties who told them he was on a crew making a movie about a shark attack. Actually, he said, he was the director. They asked him how he was doing the shark attack in the movie.

“We have a machine,” he said. “We have a mechanical shark.”

They laughed. It sounded so rinky-dink.

From the start, Steven Spielberg has blurred the boundary between machines and animate beings, and the results, as the...