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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‘I need to feel alive’: Julianne Moore on family, friendship and mortality

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Few actors are as endlessly versatile and compelling as Julianne Moore. Ahead of her extraordinary performance in the latest Pedro Almodóvar film, she opens up about love, death and the complexity and richness of ordinary lives

Yesterday Julianne Moore was on the subway in New York, listening discreetly to strangers. “I was sitting there and I heard one woman say, ‘Well, I know that’s exactly what you’d do, I know that’s what you’re like.’ And the other woman said, ‘It’s true, I just don’t like confrontation, I don’t!’” Perhaps it’s distracting, the idea that Moore, not only an Oscar-winning actor, but one whose airy beauty and long red hair (red hair that an early director warned would limit her career, ha) makes her one of the most recognisable people in the world, could pass unnoticed through a carriage of chattering commuters. But please remember – or trust me – that part of Moore’s talent is the ability to transform, to step back from herself. She is a 63-year-old character actor in the body of a movie star. Anyway: “It was so amazing, because it was these two female friends,” Moore goes on, “and one was saying, ‘I know you, I see you’. And the other was affirming that she saw the right thing. It was fascinating. I thought, nobody’s gonna make a movie about these two, but that’s who most of us are. Right?”

In her 40-year career, which has spanned auteur’s art films like the exquisite Safe, to huge blockbusters like The Hunger Games, as well as award-winning dramas like Still Alice (for which, after many nominations, she won her Oscar in 2014) and recent TV work like the audacious Mary & George, Moore has played characters who are defiant and struggling, sometimes deviant, trapped in an often-gorgeous prison of domestic horror.

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