Like a shark hunter who has lost track of the shark, or an adventurer unable to locate the Ark of the Covenant, Steven Spielberg has been drifting for the better part of the decade.

In recent years, Spielberg has seemed far removed from the glories of Jaws (1975) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), to say nothing of what I consider his masterpiece, the impeccably rendered, intimately scaled World War II drama, Empire of the Sun (1987). The director’s skeptics each mark the start of his decline in their own way, but his four most recent films seem a logical place to start: The Post (2017) was a particularly lame example of legacy media cheerleading, while Ready Player One (2018) represented a devastating concession to the most pernicious forces in modern movies, including CGI, video games, and pop culture nostalgia. More recently, Spielberg’s version of West Side Story (2021) was defiantly unnecessary, and his admittedly skillful autobiographical saga, The Fabelmans (2022), was a souffle of boyhood anecdotes.