SOURCE: Adair, Gilbert. “E.T. and a Half.” Sight and Sound 57, no. 2 (spring 1988): 138-39.

In the following review, Adair comments on Spielberg's “cosmic” and supernatural sensibility in Empire of the Sun.

Staying with acquaintances in Paris a few years ago, I fell into conversation with their son, an intelligent little boy of seven and a half, about the current movies he had most enjoyed. The titles he cited were, in the main, dishearteningly predictable: the Star Wars and Star Trek chronicles, Battlestar Galactica and so on. Urged by me to broaden—or rather to curb—his cinematic horizons, he mentioned at last a film that had been doing sellout business in the city, Jamie Uys' South African farce of Coca-colonisation The Gods Must Be Crazy. ‘And where does that film take place?’ I enquired, all innocence. Came the mildly terrifying response: ‘On earth.’

Yet, were I to be...