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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Streaming: The Substance and the best body horror for Halloween

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Coralie Fargeat’s gruesome body horror satire on ageing, poised for a Halloween streaming release, is a welcome female take on a genre that preys on our deepest fears

The surprise success of Terrifier 3 in cinemas this month – with stories of underage viewers buying tickets to family fare and sneaking into the low-budget gorefest instead – underlines a constant in the mutable horror genre: people will never lose their morbid fascination with the worst possible things that can happen to our bodies. Or the worst impossible things, which is where body horror cinema comes in: the terror of our natural anatomical order becoming, well, unnaturally disordered.

French film-maker Coralie Fargeat, meanwhile, plays on our fear of natural and unnatural bodily deterioration in her swaggering, supersized horror-comedy The Substance (Mubi), a satire on Hollywood ageism that is as broad as a dual carriageway but has enough blunt-force impact to have kept divided audiences talking since its cinema release last month. It cannily makes its streaming debuton 31 October, conveniently sorting out many a Halloween movie night. I found the film overlong and conceptually thin, but there’s gusto in Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s dual performances as chemically warring inhabitants of one has-been star’s body, and in its extravagantly disgusting vision of just how far the ageing process can be simultaneously reversed, accelerated and contorted.

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