Best Films by Steven Spielberg
Although Spielberg’s touch is not always golden – he has made such dreadful turkeys as 1979’s 1941 and 1991’s Hook – his filmography includes some of the biggest hits in Hollywood history. His 1975 adaptation of Peter Benchley’s Jaws was the first “blockbuster” film; for two years it reigned supreme as the top grossing film ever (eventually earning $470,600,000 worldwide) until Star Wars was released in the spring of 1977, and from 1981 on the string of megahits continued…Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Saving Private Ryan have been both financial and popularly successful films.
Initially dismissed by critics and most of the Hollywood community as a creator of technically marvelous yet overly sentimental “crowdpleasers,” Spielberg is now considered to be one of the best active directors ever.
1. Schindler’s List : Based on Thomas Kenneally’s “non-fiction novel” about Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) – German industrialist, womanizer, and bon vivant – and his gradual trasnsformation from war profiteer to a Righteous Person who saved over 1,100 Jews from Hitler’s death camps, this 1993 film earned Spielberg a long overdue Academy Award for Best Director (along with several other Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Original Score) for its unblinking and often raw depiction of the Holocaust’s atrocities.
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark : This first collaborative project by Spielberg and George Lucas is an exciting, fast-paced, and witty tip-of-the-fedora to the Republic serials of the Thirties and Forties. Starring Harrison Ford as adventurer/archaeologist Indiana Jones, Raiders is a globe-spanning tale centered on a race against the Nazis to find the legendary lost Ark of the Covenant.
3.Jaws : Although most people would categorize Spielberg’s first megahit as a horror film, 1975’s Jaws is essentially a study of male bonding under adverse situations as Amity Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), shark expert Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and the colorful seaman Quint (Robert Shaw) go out to sea to hunt down a great white shark that has been terrorizing the summer resort town of Amity, Long Island. My favorite scene (and Spielberg’s) comes in the film’s third act: the three shark-hunters sitting in the galley and drunkenly swapping scar-related tales. Starting on a comical note, it gets deadly serious when Quint recalls his experiences as a survivor of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.
4.Close Encounters of the Third Kind : The first installment of an unofficial “alien visitors to Earth” trilogy (the other films being E.T. and the 2005 War of the Worlds, this 1977 UFO classic depicted a peaceful “close encounter” between humanity and another space-faring civilization in a plausible, almost semi-documentary fashion.
5.E.T.: The Extraterrestrial : One of my favorite films, E.T. The Extraterrestrial is Spielberg’s gentle fable about the unlikely friendship between a boy and a funny-looking botanist from another planet…maybe from another galaxy.
Working from a screenplay by Melissa Mathison (from a story penned by the director), Spielberg tells a very personal tale about the effects of divorce on children (a theme he explores later in 2002’s Catch Me If You Can) and adds a wonderful science-fiction twist.
6. Empire of the Sun : Of Spielberg’s “serious” war-related movies, this 1987 drama (penned by Tom Stoppard and based on J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel) is perhaps his most underrated good film. Starring Batman Begins’ lead Christian Bale, Empire of the Sun depicts a young boy’s passage into early adulthood as a British intern in a Japanese prison camp during World War II.
7.Saving Private Ryan :If Schindler’s List is seen as a depiction of why the Allies had to fight against Nazi Germany, Saving Private Ryan is a visceral, no-holds-barred look at what it took to liberate France and the rest of Europe from Hitler’s tyranny.
Based very loosely on a true life incident, Saving Private Ryan follows Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) and seven GIs on a dangerous trek across Normandy to find Pvt. James Ryan, a paratrooper whose three brothers have been killed in action – two on D-Day, and one a few weeks before in New Guinea. Their mother will be receiving all three telegrams on the same day, and the top brass in Washington, D.C. decides to get Pvt. Ryan “the hell out of there” and back to the States.
8.Jurassic Park : Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster, based on Michael Crichton’s technothriler about cloned dinosaurs running amok on a Costa Rican island, is still an exciting journey of the imagination, even though it’s been 12 years since its theatrical release. Although its computer-generated effects have been surpassed over the past decade, Jurassic Park’s tale of a misguided science experiment fueled by one man’s ambition to create the ultimate theme park still packs a Jaws-like mixture of chills and thrills.
9. Minority Report : Set in 2054, this first teaming of Spielberg and actor Tom Cruise is a multi-layered vision of an Utopian vision of crime prevention gone dangerously amok as Precrime cop John Anderton (Cruise) finds himself caught in a web of intrigue, deception, and betrayal as Precrime boss Lamar Burgess (Max Von Sidow) will stop at nothing to make the project nationwide – while harboring some dark secrets of his own.
10.Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade : Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones) and Sean Connery (Prof. Henry Jones) were perfectly matched in this fun and exciting sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark as Indy is sent to find both the location of the legendary Holy Grail and his missing father, a tweedy expert on Grail lore who has become estranged from his archaeologist/adventurer son for years. Once again, Nazis, rats, a duplicitous femme fatale (Alison Doody) and strafing Messerchmitts are no match for the Jones boys and their friends (John Rhys-Davies and the late Denholm Elliott).
