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

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...

‘It will always be less hellish than the reality’: why cinema keeps returning to the Holocaust

Three new films attempt to address the Holocaust. But can cinema ever hope to adequately confront humanity’s darkest chapter?

Cinema has a troubled relationship with the Holocaust. It is repeatedly drawn to the subject, which seems to offer a shortcut to moral gravity, emotional depth and the highest possible stakes – elements every storyteller yearns for – and yet there is so much that can go wrong.

For one thing, the very act of depicting the horror of the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews risks minimising it. To pick one crude example, no matter how extreme a diet an actor might undertake, they can never resemble the Muselmänner, the walking skeletons who populated the death camps. Whatever can be shown on screen will always be less hellish than the reality.

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