Forty-two years ago a little-known, a 30-something actor named Steven Spielberg played a Cook County Assessor clerk in “The Blues Brothers.” He had a few lines, such as “Can I help you?” and “Here is your receipt.” His on-screen career came and went so fast you never noticed. But that filmmaking career — well, it’s hard to overstate its importance and reach. At the 94th annual Academy Awards on March 27, Spielberg, now 75, will be a contender for best director for the eighth time. It ties him with Billy Wilder for number of nominations in the category, placing him ahead of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, but just behind Martin Scorsese (nine nominations) and William Wyler (12 nominations). Spielberg is also the first director to receive a nod in six different decades.
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In other words, we have been watching Steven Spielberg movies for 50 years.
To be specific, his first feature, “Duel,” a nasty little road-rage thriller, debuted on ABC in fall 1971, then in theaters internationally a few months later. A half-century on, he’s nominated now for a remake of “West Side Story,” which is far from the work of a guy drafting on legend.
Despite what the history of Hollywood and creativity itself tells us, for half a century, Spielberg has known no real dry periods, or extended declines, creatively or financially. He’s become simultaneously synonymous with Hollywood blockbusters, Oscar gravitas, studio craftsmanship and a certain soulless commercial pandering. He’s been taken for granted, and he’s been impossible to avoid. He’s come to define his medium, for better and worse. Though remarkably, when he’s directing, it’s usually better.
Fifty years begs for a thorough accounting.
So I ranked Spielberg’s 33 films.
Think of me as a Cook County assessor.
I have rules: Though his work as a producer is towering (“Back to the Future,” “Band of Brothers,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”), though he directed TV (notably “Amazing Stories”) and often gets credit as the true directing vision behind the original “Poltergeist,” I’m going to stick with official feature directing credits. Which, holy moly, are hard enough to rank. Despite potholes here and there, the top two dozen films on this list are terrific. Even the worst of the rest have their moments. This is no cold Cook County assessment. This is the list of a fan. I played trumpet bursts of John Williams orchestras as I wrote. I adopted a gape of wonder. That said, since this is in ascending order of greatness, we start in the doldrums:
33. “Ready Player One” (2018): Exhausting, and not in the breathless way associated with vintage Spielberg. Adapted from Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel about a dystopia where virtual reality is king, IP is God, and avatars are preferable to actual consciousness, the idea is promising — a critique of the world Spielberg’s critics accuse him of creating. But other than Ben Mendelsohn’s baddie, it plays like charmless name-dropping, rather than engaged storytelling.
32. “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008): What part of hero-already-rode-off-into-the-sunset did Spielberg not understand on the previous Indy flick? Hints of old pulp magic remain — Cate Blanchett’s Soviet agent, a beaming Karen Allen, killer ants — but it sits in your chest like an obligation, as cynical as the churn-it-out B-films Spielberg found inspiration in.
31. “Always” (1989): I distinctly remember needing to love this, insisting to friends it was good. They didn’t get it, they were just in high school (so was I), and here was a loving remake of a Spencer Tracy classic (“A Guy Named Joe,” which I hadn’t seen). Yet until the other day, I couldn’t remember a thing about it. Other than a forest fire, Audrey Hepburn as an angel and a golden schmaltz that might be Spielberg’s most egregious case of phoning it in. Still, Holly Hunter is a delight, and those flight scenes are so captivating you wish Spielberg directed “Top Gun” instead.
30. “Hook” (1991): Another shrewd match of material and director — the keeper of your inner child directing Robin Williams as Peter Pan, Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook, Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell. What could go wrong? Well, speaking of insistent. It’s hard to avoid the feeling there’s not a lot to do but soak in clever casting. The production design is old-school live-action Disney kitsch, and I know (younger) people who regard this a childhood milestone, but it’s more like a bloated supergroup of a family film. Fittingly, David Crosby also shows up (and then takes a wooden plank to the crotch).
29. “Amistad” (1997): Again, I felt a personal stake in rooting for this. Spielberg was coming off “Schindler’s List,” working in a tougher-minded register. It was shot in Rhode Island, my home state. Spielberg has an invigorating purpose, to pair the righteousness of ’50s-era Oscar favorites with the rigor of hindsight, to tell the story of rebellion on a slave ship as it moves through the Middle Passage. Then once on dry land, he turns a longer focus to Matthew McConaughey as a lawyer for the Africans. More touching than brave, it’s no disaster.
28. “The BFG” (2016): A perfectly fine, sweet, Roald Dahl adaptation squarely for kids, with a whimsy that honors children’s book illustrations and gives the CGI a dreamy soul. A motion-captured Mark Rylance bursts through his digital facade as the giant. But it’s all so slight, you wonder why Spielberg wanted to make it at all.
27. “The Terminal” (2004): Another big-hearted, light-as-air stab at something different. Spielberg revives ’80s slapstick era Tom Hanks, adding the poignance of an immigration tale and a splash of international politics. Hanks plays a tourist from Eastern Europe whose country collapses. Passport no longer valid, he lives in the airport — a recreation of JFK in New York. Hanks, in an underwritten role, pushes the “America’s Most Beloved Actor” thing too hard, but not enough to smother a welcome sense of Spielberg striking a minor chord of pleasant fun.
26. “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” (1997): It is what it is: Spielberg taking the reigns of the inevitable, half-invested sequel. It’s predictably lead-footed, takes way too long to arrive in San Diego for a fleeting Godzilla homage. The cast is stocked (Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn), but there’s energy in the scares, from an opening that’s pure horror to the cliffhanger that outdoes the T. rex attack in the first “Jurassic Park.”
25. “The Color Purple” (1985): Spielberg’s first historical drama is fascinating despite its mismatch of sensibilities, the most egregious being an opulence that overlays Alice Walker’s harsh story of poverty and abuse with that signature twinkle. On the other hand, it’s also a reminder of how wise Spielberg can be with great faces. He lingers on the expressions of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey (in her first film), and though the tone is erratic — rapturous, furious — that attention to actors is heartfelt.
24. “War Horse” (2011): Sometimes it’s easy to forget Spielberg is a boomer’s boomer, raised on earnest matinees about brave animals who navigate vast wilderness to reunite with owners. The WWI vistas, silhouettes and landscapes here not only recall those lushest of Disney memories, but impressionistic John Ford sunsets and the painterly, studio backdrops that electrify Oscar reels. It’s emotionally pushy, but also a casually skillful showcase of Hollywood craft and tradition.
23. “The Adventures of Tintin”
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(2011): Who said film criticism is good for nothing? When “Raiders of the Lost Ark” debuted, writers compared its graceful action with the long-running Tintin comic, a European favorite. Spielberg was intrigued. Which is curious: There’s redundancy to an animated Spielbergian Tintin; for a guy with not much to lose, I wish he’d risk more. Still, here’s an (occasionally wearying) example of Spielberg collaborating well (with filmmakers Edgar Wright and Peter Jackson),while discovering pockets of joy in the pliable Buster Keaton-likecontortions that a CGI body allows.22. “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984): Actually a prequel to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” set in the 1930s where Harrison Ford could still pull off a white tux. It’s less a movie than one damn thing after another — monkey brains, dance hall number, human sacrifice, bug tunnel. It’s Spielberg in one of his best registers: freewheeling. And often, closer to the anything-that-works ethos of the serials that Spielberg and George Lucas initially conceived. That rope bridge showdown is a heart-stopper.
21. “Jurassic Park” (1993): Sometimes I hear people compare this with “Jaws” and I cry for the future. Stop saying this is one of Spielberg’s finest. It’s merely a master playing his greatest hits — albeit with moments of invention and wit so intoxicating you forget its characters feel painted in and that the ending is a whimper. But the awe is real.Spielberg’s legacy clarified here: A filmmaker with the ability to deliver wonders never seen before.
20. “The Post” (2017): A few rare beast: An underrated Spielberg film. Partly because he stays lean, forgoes his tics, adopts a dashed-off abandon to convey the speed that decisions were made when publishing the Pentagon Papers. I’m also a touch underwhelmed by “The Post,” but that’s partly shaded by the methodical “Spotlight,” because Spielberg is making unabashed didactic contemporary protest art. In which case, I’ll trade good for great.
19. “The Sugarland Express” (1974): His first feature that released solely in theaters. An oddity now, a very ’70s car chase picture about authority and celebrity, starring Goldie Hawn. Also, closer to a ramshackle Robert Altman exercise than anything else he would make later. His signatures are not quite there, but there’s promise and energy to spare.
18. “Empire of the Sun” (1987): Spielberg eventually found a rich partnership with playwright Tony Kushner, but here, he’s with Tom Stoppard, adapting J.G. Ballard. It’s not always clear what they want to say, but in high school, I saw it three times, in one day. It was winter, and I was feeling ignored and lonely. Somehow I recognized those emotions in 13-year-old Christian Bale’s character. Which is nuts. He plays an English boy in wartime Japan who is thrown into a concentration camp, separated from family. Yet it’s a seductive, superficial beauty, and as a vehicle for ambition and lyricism, engrossing.
17. “Duel” (1971): I love telling people what this is about. No matter who they are, they sit up. It’s about a bad driver. A bad driver. Dennis Weaver is a traveling salesman in the Mojave Desert who passes a tanker truck. Soon it’s following him. Why? It’s an action movie. Spielberg strips back story, character, even motivation, and it’s an ingenious thing: the work of a young filmmaker announcing his intentions with two ingredients — a camera and editing. Four years later, he’d perfect this as “Jaws.”
16. “Lincoln” (2012): Even in old age, long after his golden-boy splash, you have to ask sometimes: Is Spielberg getting better? Long, patient moments of just talking — with a few notable exceptions — seemed to elude him, until finally, with a script by Kushner, and an Abe by Daniel Day-Lewis (who earned his third Oscar here), he finds wonder in ideas: Verbal elbows are thrown, rousing rhetoric about slavery and the nature of man take on earthier, messier complexity. It’s so suited to Capra-ish corn, you expect the wheels to snap off. Instead, there’s a “Jurassic Park”-like gasp, and history feels present.
15. “1941? (1979): You’re asking: This guy thinks “1941? is better than “Lincoln”? For personal reasons. It is long for comedy. Unfunny for comedy. Its pitch — a studio musical confection played by edgier sensibilities of the ’70s (John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd) — works better on paper. But when I was 8, my grandmother took me to this, and we laughed and loved its big, nonsensical screwiness. “What a mess,” Robert Stack shouts. Yes, and that’s what I miss. Movie love, like other kinds, is often irrational.
14. “War of the Worlds” (2005): It’s the language of nightmares, and unsettlingly, the anxiety of Sept. 11. The dust of vaporized bodies coating clothing. Families pushed against each other to escape doom. Trees burning. The shocks are indelible. I will never shake its image of a fiery commuter train hurtling past a hushed crowd. The final moments land flat, but then, that’s the point: Here is a story of a father (Tom Cruise) without agency. He can do nothing more for himself or his children but run.
13. “Bridge of Spies” (2015): Maybe Spielberg’s most underrated film (working from a Coen brothers screenplay) and worth a second look, particularly right now. It’s about decency and standing up for your ideological opposite, and it rewards you, never rushing the relationship between Tom Hanks (as an insurance lawyer, tasked with defending a Soviet spy) and Mark Rylance (as the spy). It’s a thriller-free Cold War thriller, because, like “Lincoln,” its real subject is the importance of the words we choose.
12. “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989): A perfect rainy Sunday TV couch surf. Nothing is at stake, the action is fun, the subtext is all smiles: Let’s team Indy with James Bond. Sean Connery looks engaged for the last time in his career, and if that doesn’t give you the warm fuzzies, River Phoenix is great as Young Indy in a flashback.
11. “Schindler’s List” (1993): When I talked to my editor about this ranking, he assumed this was No. 1. In the cultural imagination, of course it would be. A film so sacrosanct, “Seinfeld” fashioned an episode around Jerry making out during it. In retrospect, it’s not the New Spielberg it heralded, but a refocusing of his talent for setting, separated from elation. Some found its notes of sentiment intrusive; decades later, they play like a needed breath.
10. “West Side Story” (2021): Eventually, you’ll find this and wish you had seen it in a theater. Those crane shots that soar through musical numbers do more to argue the need for Hollywood spectacle than a zillion Nicole Kidmans. Throw in its thoughtful, natural relevance to immigration and gentrification, and this is the bracing statement of a veteran filmmaker who knew, for years, that he could do this one better.
9. “Catch Me If You Can” (2002): People smile when they remember this. They should. From John Williams’s channeling of Brubeck bounce to its effervescent con artist slipping in and out of roles, it’s Spielberg skimming the artifice of movies themselves. (Mark my words: Your kids will know this as Leonardo DiCaprio’s best film.)
8. “Saving Private Ryan” (1998): Take away its contrived bookends and you have peak Spielberg, a master class on staging set pieces without losing ordinary people in extraordinary situations. That Normandy beach sequence is rightfully celebrated, but the soul is in quieter, haunted moments. After his best director win for “Schindler’s List,” he won again for this. (Infamously, the movie itself lost to “Shakespeare in Love.”)
7. “Minority Report” (2002): Through nearly 21/2 hours, there’s barely an ounce of fat on this visceral blend of action and dark thoughts about the future. Working off a short story from Philip K. Dick, wielding Tom Cruise more like relentless battering ram than actor, it’s an indelicate noir on the difficulty of free will.
6. “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.” (2001): A couple of friends who mock me for loving this. It’s an ongoing joke, What they don’t understand is its bagginess, its strange meandering uncertainty — that’s part of what makes this patchwork of Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick (who developed it for years, then died in 1999) so exciting. It’s a kind of an homage to Kubrick (Spielberg wears chilliness like a mask), but finds new, almost hopeful thoughts on the decline of humanity, only to fade away into melancholia.
5. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981): Here’s all I want to say on this one: I was 10 when I saw it on a sunny Saturday afternoon when I should have been doing something else, and afterward, I rushed home, stood in front of my grandfather and for 40 minutes, as he snuck glimpses at golf on the TV behind my head, I walked him through every poisoned-dart attack, fistfight among plane propellers and room full of snakes. (Which I believe now was exactly the reaction Spielberg and George Lucas had hoped for.)
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4. “Munich” (2005): My favorite of Spielberg’s “adult” films. The story of Mossad agents retaliating against Black September terrorists for the 1972 Olympics massacre, it turns the typically intense Hollywood vengeance thriller on its soft head, exposing a heart of emptiness, ambiguity and dissatisfaction in even a justified act of retribution. It has the guts to be predictably exciting without steering away from an even greater lingering sense of futility.
3. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” (1982): Despite a whole heart, despite a bottomless warmth, there’s never a false note. I can’t begin to express how surprising this thing felt at 11. You planned for Disney. You got your childhood reflected back, as you knew it, suburbs with undeveloped lots for playgrounds, cluttered kitchen tables, a family holding on. If it’s a cliché that Spielberg is obsessed with childhood, that’s partly because he got it so right, so early in his career. Watch it again, the years flood back. And those final minutes, backed by John Williams’s surging strings, are as timeless as pop culture gets.
2. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977): As a masterpiece should, this grows with you. When you’re young, it’s pure wonder; as an adult, knotty questions at its core begin to nag. Are you willing to dream big? Who are you willing to lose along the way? Government conspiracy and social paranoia, family drama played for unsettling heartbreak, special effects that still solicit genuine wonder 45 years later, a walk-on by Francois Truffaut that feels like a legend’s vote of confidence to a young voice. Even as he ascended to golden child, Spielberg created a fresh kind of epic — a personal one.
1. “Jaws” (1975): Not only my favorite Spielberg, my favorite film, period. It reminds me of home. It’s one of my earliest memories. When I think of movies, it feels like a pure expression of a populist art form: Funny and visceral, touching, made with craft, alive to the unexpected. And visual. But more importantly, keenly awake to the physical world. You think thriller, but I think of the song playing on the beach radio, eyeglasses of a grieving mother, nails on a blackboard, the clarity of its New England light. Yes, it’s also a monster movie. But years later, whenever I stumble across a minute of this on TV, I catch something new, I sense a filmmaker’s career just starting, and I brace for the humanist spectacle still to come.