War of the Worlds

Tom Cruise packs his oversize screen presence into a human-scale portrayal of Ray Ferrier, a divorced dockworker with weekend custody of his teenage son and young daughter, in Steven Spielberg’s big-budget, high-octane take on the titular 1898 H.G. Wells novel about invaders from outer space. Transposing the action to the modern day, our greatest pop filmmaker mines American anxieties of destruction and invasion that defined the post-9/11 era.