Super 8

Fairly good. I had seen coming attractions of it several months back, and had been trying to get the film since then. It wasn't quite what I had remembered, or thought I remembered, but it was fun to watch. Better than much else.

A. O. Scott in the NY Times does not quite like it: Inescapable comparisons to Steven Spielberg (a producer of “Super 8” and something of a mentor to Mr. Abrams) are apt, but they go only so far. Themes of childlike resistance to authority and intergalactic compassion are evident here, as they were in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” The visual and emotional poetry of those films, however, never quite blossoms, despite having been copied out carefully, line by line. But, and here I agree: Still, “not as good as E.T.” is not so bad. (“Better than ‘Thor’ or ‘X-Men: First Class’ ” may be a more relevant judgment at this moment in the history of air-conditioning.)

Sci-fi is not my thing, but this is an enjoyable movie. That is not a bad thing, at all. I mean it as a compliment.