SENTIMENTAL VALUE

With Here, Robert Zemeckis stays true to his unlikely blend of new technologies and old-fashioned storytelling

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

ROBERT ZEMECKIS' HERE IS THE MOST UNFASHionable movie of 2024-which is exactly what's beautiful about it. In a world where even those who profess to love movies largely stream them at home, Here is a picture that demands big-screen real estate. It's inventive and confident filmmaking from a veteran director whose most recent features have performed modestly at the box office or, worse, sunk with barely a trace. It's so unabashed in its desire to make us feel something that it runs the risk of being called sentimentalsome early reviews have labeled it as such. It's the kind of movie that a whole family-from young teenagers to nonagenarians-could trek out to see on a Sunday or holiday. And it reunites two stars, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, who helped make Zemeckis' 1994 Forrest Gump such a resonant success.

In 2024, all these pluses are almost minuses, relics of things we no longer look for in movies. But Zemeckiswho, in a career spanning more than 40 years, has hit some high highs and a few rather low lows-is optimistic that audiences will find their way to Here, not just because he wholeheartedly believes in it, but because he knows it's a miracle it got made in the first place. "It defies everything that's happening in the corporate whatever," he says in a Zoom call from Los Angeles, "[among] whoever it is that makes decisions about what movies should be made." Maybe because his last film to receive a traditional theatrical release, 2018's tender, innovative, and mildly strange Welcome to Marwen, failed to find an audience, he knows a miracle when he sees one. "Hey, the truth is that I could never make any of the movies I made, today. Not a single one." Why? "Because," he says, with deadpan understated confidence, "they're too original."