Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Steven Spielberg, The Terminal, Schindler’s List, ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, AI, Jurassic Park, West Side Story (2021), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Culture
Title – The best Steven Spielberg films, chosen by directors, critics and super-fans: ‘pure popcorn perfection’
Author – Anne Billson
Link – The best Steven Spielberg films, chosen by directors, critics and super-fans: ‘pure popcorn perfection’
Publish date – 2026-06-07T09:00:29.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/ng-interactive/2026/jun/07/writers-choose-favourite-steven-spielberg-films-jaws-close-encounters-raiders-lost-ark
Steven Spielberg is often described as the inventor of the “event movie” – or as the creator of our new age of IP supremacy, in which the genre property is more important than any above-the-title film star. But that isn’t quite it. He came of age in the American new wave era but in spirit belonged neither to that nor fully to Hollywood’s golden age studio system that preceded it.
In fact, he synthesised both into a directing style that was audacious and fluent. He availed himself of the subversiveness of the new wave, and yet was classically oriented, drawing upon his love of – and alienation from – the all-American suburb, making him the Edward Hopper or the Andrew Wyeth of the movies. Tellingly, it was François Truffaut, the most emollient and Hollywood-friendly of France’s Nouvelle Vague masters, whom Spielberg cast in a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind .
Spielberg’s early achievement was to bring about an evolutionary sea change, reinvigorating pulp-popular themes and ideas and giving them a new maturity and mainstream box office credibility. The idea of a giant shark crazed with a vindictive taste for human flesh or dinosaurs busting out of an amusement park is something that Roger Corman or Ed Wood Jr might have made in two weeks with risible rubber creatures . In Jaws and Jurassic Park, Spielberg’s production values were state of the art. His digitally fabricated dinosaurs were gasp-inducingly real. So was his shark in Jaws, a compellingly villainous character – but we could not be permitted any more than a brief glimpse of the mechanical fake shark. Spielberg arrived at the inspired idea of making John Williams’s legendary two-note musical theme the shark: we then imagined the shark, felt the shark, and shivered with fear at the demonic thumping motor of that musical phrase.
Similarly, derring-do adventures in exotically imagined foreign locations for family audiences were once thought the domain of Saturday morning serials. Spielberg, in partnership with the franchise inventor George Lucas, made them the lifeblood and vital voltage of the movie theatre: they were serious propositions in a way they hadn’t been before.
He has an almost supernatural sense for what an audience is expecting and hoping for in each scene. Like an orchestra conductor, he knows how to bring in the chest-busting timpani of the audience’s gasp, cheer and applause.
In movies such as Lincoln, West Side Story, Bridge of Spies and War of the Worlds, he revived great ideas and great figures and brought to them a rapturous verve. He created one of the great battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan and also declined to stay in his lane by taking on racism in Amistad and The Color Purple.
In what is considered his masterpiece, Schindler’s List, he addressed the Holocaust with absolute seriousness and commitment, and set himself the task of trying to find a candle-flame of hope in the darkness.
And in his late classic, the autobiographical gem The Fabelmans – a self-portrait of the artist as a young man – he takes on the antisemitism he experienced, and shows us the moment when the protagonist removes evidence of his mother’s affair while making a home movie – a template for Spielberg’s more family-oriented treatment of novels such as Peter Benchley’s Jaws and JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.
The Fabelmans includes the stunning scene in which the protagonist almost reduces a blowhard bully to tears of confusion by making him look good in the amateur film he’s made about school life. It’s still the most instructive moment about Spielberg’s film-making procedure that I have ever seen from him. In a sense, he became the movies; he is the tentpole, the icon of cinema. Peter Bradshaw
Duel
Peter Bradshaw Steven Spielberg’s great 1971 debut, conceived for television, famously electrified George Lucas. It is myth-making reduced to an elemental core: a fundamental contest between good and evil with no backstory, no motivation, no afterlife.
Dennis Weaver (known for roles in the TV shows Gunsmoke and McCloud) is an everyman American executive with the symbolic surname of Mann. He is driving solo through California on his way to a business meeting and is rather proud of his car, so when, in a later stage of panic, he is content to damage that car in the cause of his own survival, it is even more disturbing.
Weaver’s character begins the story by overtaking and honking at a truck on the deserted road; innocuous but perhaps high-handed gestures. And it seems that the driver of that truck – an entirely human being mysteriously fused into the metalwork of the vast, fast-moving automotive weapon – has decided to kill Mann. (Every time I watch, I strain to catch a glimpse of the driver’s face behind the windshield.)
To paraphrase another film entirely: he can’t be bargained with; he can’t be reasoned with; he doesn’t feel pity or remorse. And with this, Spielberg created a classic of ordeal cinema, like something by Michael Haneke, only this time the good guys win – albeit without ever finding out quite what was going on. With only the barest essentials in that desert landscape, Spielberg conjured up a mistral of pure fear.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Edgar Wright Few films have shaped my love of cinema as profoundly as Raiders of the Lost Ark . I first saw it when I was seven years old, during the summer of 1981, just before my family moved from Dorset to Somerset. In those days blockbusters stayed in cinemas all summer long, so I was lucky enough to see it in both places I grew up. Because of that, the film is vividly burnt into my earliest big-screen memories, but its impact on me goes far beyond nostalgia.
Watching it at that age was the first time I really became aware of the film-makers themselves; that a movie was not just perfect entertainment, but a creation made by people. I had already seen Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the teaser trailer for Raiders proudly announced it was from the makers of Jaws and Star Wars. This promise of a tantalising blockbuster team-up made me understand the importance of directors and producers. I also realised, perhaps for the first time, that actors could transform completely. Harrison Ford was no longer space cowboy Han Solo; he was the dashing archaeologist Indiana Jones. Better still, the film delivered on all the cumulative excitement, tenfold!
As I grew older and eventually became a film-maker, Raiders became more than a beloved adventure film. It became a masterclass. The pacing, the blocking, the escalation of suspense and action, the tonal shifts; it is an astonishing piece of direction. It’s a film that truly has it all, even the gory bliss of seeing melting Nazis.
I regularly watch Raiders whenever I’m making a film. One of the best ways to learn visual storytelling is by watching great films with the sound off, and Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the finest examples imaginable. The only discouraging part is realising you will never make anything quite that good. For me, it will live for ever as one of cinema’s most precious artefacts, one we can only dream of equalling; entertainment on a grand scale, 115 minutes of pure popcorn perfection. Edgar Wright is the director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Baby Driver.
West Side Story
Scott Tobias In the months leading up to its release, the question that hovered over Spielberg’s West Side Story was, simply: “Why?” Why remake a movie musical from 1961 that had already won 10 Oscars? Why excavate an urban Romeo and Juliet that may feature timeless numbers by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, but would seem hopelessly dated in its then-radical vision of hardscrabble white and Puerto Rican gangs squaring off on the Upper West Side?
Yet the movie musical itself, once a staple of Hollywood, had fallen into such disarray in the 21st century that Spielberg’s West Side Story immediately stood out as a thrilling revitalisation of the form, with a fluid choreography of camera and movement that held the clunkiness of stage-to-screen Broadway hits in sharp relief. It also benefits from the subtle contributions of Tony Kushner’s script, which respects Arthur Laurents’s original book while bringing more balance to the Puerto Rican side of the story and adding meaningful period context to these underclass characters at the mercy of city planners.
Minority Report
Gwilym Mumford Steven Spielberg would be few people’s pick to direct a Philip K Dick adaptation, the film-maker’s sense of saucer-eyed wonder doesn’t exactly dovetail with Dick’s dystopian visions. Which makes Minority Report all the more remarkable: a gloriously grubby aberration in Spielberg’s pristine filmography. Leaning into the loopy paranoid stylings of the source material – crime-predicting clairvoyants powering a presumed-guilty police state – the director produces his darkest, most outwardly anti-authoritarian work, perpetually bathed in an unsettling hyper-saturated light and full of wild techno-noir flourishes (targeted ads shouting down from giant billboards, retina scans on severed eyeballs).
This being Spielberg, though, there’s popcorn pleasure to be enjoyed among the murk, including a megawatt performance from Tom Cruise and some of the director’s most kinetic set-pieces: you’ll find yourself holding your breath alongside Cruise as he hides from a pack of surveillance spiders by submerging himself in an ice bath. Both familiar and daringly different, it’s the capper on perhaps the most underrated era for Spielberg: a purple patch of adventurousness around the millennium that saw him also release Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can and the now slightly underrated AI: Artificial Intelligence. But the dizzying Minority Report is the real jewel.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Joseph McBride When I was a kid, I was so obsessed with space travel that I actually imagined an alien rocket ship had landed in our back yard. I soon let go of that fantasy, but Steven Spielberg has never abandoned his youthful dreams about visitations from outer space. He has never made a more enchantingly personal vision than his 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Other Spielberg classics might have been by other directors with a comparable, if not complete, degree of skill, but only he could have made Close Encounters, with its dysfunctional family, need for escape from stultifying suburbia, concern with communication, and blend of hi-tech with lyrical visual poetry.
Close Encounters made another admirer, Jean Renoir, observe that Spielberg resembles the French concept of the“the village fada … the one possessed by fairies”. It upended the cold war norms of the sci-fi genre by making its aliens benign. This stems from Spielberg’s empathy with aliens of every kind: an expression of solidarity with the refugees from Russia and Poland in his own family, and an emotional identification by this perennial Jewish outsider with minority groups of all kinds. Spielberg gets viciously attacked whenever he makes films about Black people – the underrated Amistad is one of his greatest works. But Spielberg believes we are at our best as “a nation of immigrants”, so Close Encounters speaks directly to us today. Joseph McBride is author of Steven Spielberg: A Biography.
The Terminal
Stuart Heritage Released in 2004, not long after the monumental run of Saving Private Ryan, AI: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report, The Terminal might just qualify as one of Spielberg’s sweetest and most delicate films. The story of a man forced to live inside an airport after falling through the cracks of international bureaucracy, it lacks the obvious blockbuster heft of Spielberg’s surrounding work, but more than makes up for it with sheer heart.
For such a small story, its scale of production was enormous. A colossal airport terminal was custom-built for the shoot, giving Spielberg total command over the space. As a result, the airport becomes an intricate Tati-esque playground for Tom Hanks, playing a man trying to make a home in a place most people pass through.
Really, though, what stands out is the film’s absolute decency. Another film-maker would have leant too hard into the worst impulses of Hanks’s character, either making him too sentimental or too much of a funny foreigner. Here, however, he’s given precisely the right mixture of sweet and stubborn. But the real star is Stanley Tucci, as an airport official who just wants the problem to go away. Spielberg has done bigger, and he has definitely done flashier, but this is by far his most human work.
1941
Anne Billson Six days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a concatenation of wacky incidents fool paranoid Los Angelenos into thinking that the Japanese are invading Hollywood. Hysteria, if not hilarity, ensues. 1941 was not a financial flop, but compared with Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it underperformed. Critics complained it wasn’t funny, and audiences agreed. In some quarters it was condemned as unpatriotic.
But Stanley Kubrick thought it should have been marketed as drama, not comedy. And once you stop expecting 1941 to make you laugh, an often sublime absurdity kicks in. It’s an orgy of slapstick destruction rather than a coherent story. Spielberg parodies the opening of Jaws: Toshiro Mifune, captain of a Japanese submarine lurking off the coast of California, speaks Japanese to Christopher Lee’s Nazi officer, who speaks German back at him. Nancy Allen gets turned on by B-17 bombers. Ninjas disguise themselves as Christmas trees. A brilliantly choreographed dancehall sequence degenerates into a riot. An all-star cast, including Warren Oates and John Belushi, yell their head off while Robert Stack as General Stilwell, voice of reason amid the mayhem, sheds a quiet tear at a screening of Dumbo.
There are elements that haven’t aged well: racial slurs, a blackface gag, and sexual harassment is played for laughs (though the great Treat Williams is such a cartoonish bully it’s hard to take him seriously). And we see so many stocking-tops you begin to wonder if little Stevie has a fetish. In any case, this is Spielberg with his id exposed, before he slipped back into universal audience-pleasing mode.
Catch Me If You Can
Sasha Mistlin What with all the dinosaurs, aliens, beach landings and futuristic gizmos, it’s easy to forget how great Spielberg is at directing actors. The list of people who gave their defining or breakout performance in one of his films is long and varied: action stars such as Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, comic performer Whoopi Goldberg, child actors such as Drew Barrymore and Christian Bale; he even launched a gen Z ingenue in Rachel Zegler.
Catch Me If You Can is a masterclass on this front. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Frank Abagnale Jr, a teenage conman blagging his way across the analogue, take-you-at-your-word America of the mid-1960s in a stolen Pan Am pilot’s uniform. On his tail is the fussy, friendless FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks); pulling at him from the other direction is Frank Sr (Christopher Walken), the father he’s fleeing but still desperate to impress.
Post-Titanic, DiCaprio wasn’t in a slump exactly, but a run of misfires (The Beach, The Man in the Iron Mask) suggested nobody quite knew what he was for. It took Spielberg to build the role that let Leo become Leo, by spotting the cold calculation behind the blue eyes, the steel under the charm.
On first watch, it’s Hanks – and that thick Boston accent (“knawwck knawwck”) – who wins the film. But the masterstroke is getting Walken to dial all the way down. The most imitable of actors has no tics or mannerisms; his bruised, unshowy, Oscar-nominated turn as Frank Sr is simply a diminished man taking shelter in his son’s glamorous fiction.
It’s also Spielberg’s closest thing to a Christmas movie. Frank rings Hanratty every Christmas Eve, two lonely men so committed to the chase that all they’ve really got is each other.
Schindler’s List
Andrew Pulver In this age of social media atrocity footage, it might be hard to understand the impact of Schindler’s List when it came out in 1993. I remember standing outside a theatre after a press screening surrounded by supposedly hardened film critics sobbing in the London streets. Schindler’s List was by no means the first film about the Holocaust, but was the first large-scale Hollywood attempt to depict the events – even if the film itself stopped at the gates of Auschwitz. In those days, the studios steered clear of traumatic recent history, and it took a film-maker of Spielberg’s stature to clobber a way through the executive thickets to get it off the ground.
What “it” was was an adaptation of a prize-winning novel by Thomas Keneally that had the slightly different, less elegant title of Schindler’s Ark. It told the story of German factory owner Oskar Schindler’s attempts to prevent his Jewish employees from being murdered by the Nazis. It might be a classic white saviour narrative, but Spielberg put all his considerable welly into the telling, aided by a pair of unexpectedly brilliant lead performances.
Liam Neeson, at that point known best for comic-book thriller Darkman, was properly heavyweight as Schindler, while Ralph Fiennes, with only a couple of British films behind him, was jaw-dropping as camp commandant Amon Göth, arguably the vilest Nazi ever put on screen. It’s an even more remarkable achievement when you realise Spielberg was editing Jurassic Park during the evenings, having covered the risk by agreeing to make the crowd-pleasing dinosaur film first.
These days, Schindler’s List may look a little punches-pulled next to the all-encompassing horror of László Nemes’s Son of Saul , but of all Spielberg’s prodigious output it’s still the most consequential and meaningful.
ET the Extra-Terrestrial
Ryan Gilbey Steven Spielberg has arguably made five near-perfect movies, all released within a nine-year period at the dawn of his career. Jaws, Close Encounters and the first two Indiana Jones adventures are awe-inspiring. ET the Extra-Terrestrial, though, is in another galaxy of awesomeness. It distils the director’s themes, strengths and obsessions into one rapturous vision. Like ET himself, who is stranded in California’s San Fernando Valley and befriended by young Elliott after his mothership departs Earth, the movie is an odd duck. Its opening eight minutes are dialogue-free; Allen Daviau’s cinematography adheres to a child’s-eye view (no adult males are seen from the waist up until near the end). And despite its blockbuster status, the film is so daringly slow and soulful that it often plays like an intimate indie drama into which a pumpkin-headed alien happens to have waddled. The synthesis of Melissa Mathison’s tender script, John Williams’s stirring score and Spielberg’s miraculous way with child actors guarantees that our tears are honestly earned. This movie is one to phone home about.
AI: Artificial Intelligence
Ann Lee There’s a profound darkness at the heart of AI Artificial Intelligence. The story of a robot boy desperate to win back the love of his adopted human mother after she abandons him in the middle of a forest ends with the destruction of all humanity. It’s unrelentingly bleak. But the film is also incredibly – and at times unbearably – moving.
This is thanks, in large part, to a 12-year-old Haley Joel Osment. As the unblinking android Pinocchio, who’s hellbent on becoming a real boy with only his faithful teddy bear and Jude Law’s flashy robot gigolo to help, he’s unnervingly creepy but also gut-wrenchingly vulnerable.
The backstory behind the film is touching, too – Stanley Kubrick spent decades developing the film but he handed over the project to Steven Spielberg a few years before he died. This mishmash of two distinct auteur styles led to complaints that it’s too jarring and not Spielberg-enough. All I see is a man trying to honour the dreams of his late close friend with ambition and verve, creating a chilling dystopian fairytale about grief, loss and mortality that will leave you obliterated.
Jurassic Park
Simran Hans You may recall Jurassic Park’s opening scene, in which a group of men in orange hard hats chew gum as they await the arrival of a dinosaur. They might as well be the audience, giddily chomping their popcorn as they anticipate the director’s big reveal.
Jurassic Park is Spielberg at his commercial peak, bolstered by John Williams’s soaring, triumphant strings. The director was riding on the coattails of the Indiana Jones trilogy he’d wrapped up four years earlier. The story involves a theme park, and through its creator, Richard Attenborough’s daffy, cuddly, slightly power-mad Hammond, you get the sense that a hugely successful mid-career Spielberg was grappling his own God complex, his own ambivalence about the business of popular entertainment and franchising.
It is also just a perfect all-ages blockbuster, full of humour, wonder, terror and suspense (key ingredients of Spielbergian magic). I watched the film countless times on VHS and on TV as a kid. A white goat chained in a paddock, a rippling plastic cup of water, a velociraptor’s shadow, yellow anoraks and bucketing rain; for me, these images evoke childhood.
Jaws
Catherine Bray Jaws is the perfect shark film, but one of the reasons it works as well as it does is that you could take the shark out entirely and still have a compulsively watchable and beautifully observed study of a small holiday resort in America in the 1970s, filmed on real locations and populated with plausible characters played to the hilt by an array of actors with genuinely interesting faces. This is the stuff that the vast majority of contemporary creature features, from shoestring efforts to the Godzillas of this world, tend to omit.
It’s a critical commonplace to say of a beautiful film that every frame is a picture. For Jaws, it’s a little different. You could isolate any scene from Jaws, and have a brilliant short film: the characterisation, humour and the dialogue are all so strong that any scene in the movie can stand alone. Spielberg achieving this at the age of 26 is phenomenal, but a big part of Jaws’ success is the script by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb and the editing by Verna Fields. Cut the shark, and they basically made a Robert Altman movie. How do you improve an Altman movie? Add a shark.
