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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Pigeons! Superheroes! Farts! The best movie moments of 2023

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From angry confrontations to romantic reunions, Guardian writers pick the big-screen moments that have stayed with them the most

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is frequently enthralling over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, sinking into the depths of American shame as it follows William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his unofficial lieutenant Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) as they grasp for the money and land controlled by the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, which involves slowly poisoning Ernest’s wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) as they kill off members of her family and community. But just when it seems like the story’s final dominoes are tumbling over with inevitability, Scorsese jumps ahead for his final scene – maybe the most audacious in American movies this year. Rather than a series of solemn title cards explaining what happened to the people whose lives we’ve seen dramatized, the movie cuts to a true-crime radio show in the 1940s, with major figures from the film reduced to cartoonish voiceovers and sound effects. And then, to detail Mollie’s post-narrative life, Scorsese himself appears. It’s not a Hitchcockian wink of a cameo, but a show of respect, as he steps from behind the camera to essentially read Mollie’s obituary; the mood changes from playful to stark in an instant. Seeing this master film-maker visibly grapple with the limits of artistic expression took my breath away. Jesse Hassenger

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