The best Steven Spielberg films, chosen by directors, critics and super-fans: ‘pure popcorn perfection’

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From franchise hits to historical epics, joyous musicals to autobiographical family sagas: Steven Spielberg has done it all. As his latest sci-fi film Disclosure Day is released, film-makers, authors and Guardian critics reveal which of his movies means the most to them 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 Truffa...
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Limbo review – hardbitten outback noir with a compassionate heart

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Simon Baker plays a ruined cop investigating a cold-case murder in this tough, sandblasted thriller that coolly lays out the racism and discrimination the Indigenous population face

Indigenous Australian film-maker Ivan Sen brings to Berlin a terrific outback noir, a cold-case crime procedural that he has written and directed – and also shot in a stark monochrome, which makes the vast skies and cratered earth of South Australia’s abandoned opal mines look like another planet.

The setting is the town of Umoona, where a grizzled cop arrives, broodingly listening to a Christian talkshow on the car radio, and checking into a place unsubtly called the Limbo Motel, where his room is a bizarre stone grotto, apparently repurposed from one of the disused mines. This is detective Travis Hurley, played in careworn, weatherbeaten style by Simon Baker – very much resembling Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. Hurley is a former drug squad officer who has become addicted to heroin; his superiors have quite clearly given him this hopeless job in the middle of nowhere as a means of getting him out of the way. His ostensible task is to reopen a 20-year-old case: the unsolved disappearance of an Indigenous woman. This was casually and incompetently investigated by white officers at the time, who were concerned only in getting a confession from (any) Indigenous man.

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