Always

For all its state-of-the-art special effects, Always is essentially a remake of the 1943 Spencer Tracy-Irene Dunne fantasy vehicle A Guy Named Joe--minus the wartime context. Richard Dreyfuss stars as a reckless fire-fighting pilot who is killed in what was to have been his final mission. Ascending ...more

One of the smaller films of Steven Spielberg's oeuvre, Always still bears many of the filmmaker's trademark elements: otherworldly magic, gorgeous cinematography, and a childlike fascination with the skies. There are plenty of loving shots of aircraft arcing across brilliant blue horizons, but the rest of the film serves more as a support structure on which to hang these images, too neat and predictable to stick in the memory. The result is that Always feels prepackaged, a sentimental exercise ...more