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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What a sad loss – Tom Wilkinson was quietly and consistently wonderful

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From The Full Monty to In the Bedroom, Michael Clayton to Eternal Sunshine, the actor – who has died aged 75 – was an intelligent and unshowy delight

For British movie audiences of a certain generation, there is one image of Tom Wilkinson that will always sum up his hold on our hearts: a paunchy, respectable bloke in a dole queue, wearing an anorak over his collar and tie, with a bunch of other depressed but much younger and scruffier males, shyly, almost unconsciously, practising some swaying erotic dance moves to the accompaniment of Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff.

He played the upright, uptight Gerald in the 1997 British comedy The Full Monty, an ex-supervisor at a Sheffield steel mill who got laid off like the blue-collar workers under him but, unlike them, he initially tries concealing his humiliating unemployment from his wife. But Gerald swallows his pride and joins the bizarre male striptease troupe of blokes whose manhood was once deeply bound up with their role as breadwinners, and who are now symbolically reduced to earning a few pounds revealing this same reduced manhood at the climax of a horribly unsexy dance routine. It was a gloriously tender, funny, sweet-natured and lovable performance from Wilkinson: he was the authority figure, the teacher/boss/dad character who had to get off his high horse and admit that he was as lonely and unhappy and need of help as everyone else. It was a part that Wilkinson instinctively knew how to play by showing the vulnerability within the grumpiness.

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