Spielberg follows in Kubrick's footsteps to make summer's first intelligent blockbuster

Ten days before its commercial release, American critics have given their first pronouncements on AI, Stanley Kubrick's last unmade project that has now been nursed to completion by a different idol of the modern cinema, Steven Spielberg.

The verdict is that the film is a beguiling, heady mixture of the two men's styles that, while lacking the crowd-pleasing, box-office promise of an ET or a Jurassic Park, will give audiences some unaccustomed complexities to chew over at the multiplex this summer.

David Ansen, writing in Newsweek, called it "a rich, strange, problematical movie full of wild tonal shifts and bravura movie making. It's like nothing else Spielberg has done." The film, based on a short story by Brian Aldiss, is about a boy robot endowed with human emotions who embarks on a long search for his flesh-and-blood adoptive mother. Although it revisits some of the themes of the inter- relationship between humans and machines that Kubrick explored in his 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is also meant to be taken as a Pinocchio-like fairytale.

Several years before his death in 1999, Kubrick asked Spielberg to direct it, believing him to have the right fantastical touch, in contrast to his own cold, almost clinical style. Both men became distracted by other projects, but production began in earnest within weeks of Kubrick's death.

Spielberg drew on Kubrick's notes and about 1,000 storyboard drawings to write his own version of the screenplay. Haley Joel Osment, of Sixth Sense fame, was cast as the boy, with Jude Law, Frances O'Connor and Brendan Gleeson given key supporting roles.

Richard Corliss wrote in Time magazine: "AI will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser." Of the contrasting styles of Kubrick and Spielberg, Corliss added: "The resulting fugue is like a piece composed for brass but played on woodwinds, a Death Valley map on which Spielberg has placed seeds, hoping they will somehow blossom."

Anticipation over the film has reached fever pitch in America. The hype has combined the cult veneration long associated with Kubrick's rare works and the movie industry's adulation of every project connected to Spielberg.

The marketing for AI has included the creation of about 50 internet sites intended to beguile by hinting at little nuggets from the film. A web search of a certain Jeanine Salla, credited in the online trailer as a "sentient machine therapist", leads to a complicated world of pro-robot and anti-robot sites and other sorties into the film's science-fiction setting.

AI is released in America on 29 June and is expected to open in Britain sometime in July.