Ready Player One

When the creator of a popular video game system dies, a virtual contest is created to compete for his fortune.

Spielberg's pop-culture spectacular sits in genuinely contested territory: technically dazzling, with the Shining sequence drawing near-universal admiration, but critics split hard on whether the relentless nostalgia bombardment amounts to anything emotionally or thematically substantial. The film's bleaker undercurrent — a society escaping into junk fantasy rather than fixing the real world — went largely unnoticed on first release, leaving a gap between the crowd-pleasing surface and what a minority of critics argue is a sadder, more self-critical film running underneath it.