From Spielberg to Inarritu: Evaluating the season's many styles of personal filmmaking

TORONTO — There's a terrifically self-reflexive gag in Steven Spielberg's new picture, "The Fabelmans," that is hard to imagine anyone but Steven Spielberg pulling off. This might not be saying much, since the entire movie, a rollicking and ruminative look at the director's childhood and teenage years, could hardly have been made by anyone else. His protagonist, a movie-mad teenager named Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle), has just made use of his considerable filmmaking talent to whittle a high-school nemesis down to size. That's satisfying enough on its own, but then comes the punchline, when Sammy promises never to speak of the incident again — "unless," he adds, with just enough swagger to earn some audience applause, "I make a movie about it."

That movie, of course, is "The Fabelmans" itself, which finds the 75-year-old Spielberg looking back fondly at his 1950s and '60s upbringing, with its mix of family upheaval, teenage turmoil and obsessive movie love. Scholars of the director's early life will see much of it mirrored in Sammy's leisurely unfolding story: his time as a Boy Scout, his early short films, the heartrending