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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Dreams review – Jessica Chastain channels rich Americans whose charity comes with strings

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The erotic reward for Chastain’s sponsorship of a Mexican dancer lights a fuse that reveals philanthropy’s toxic underside

Mexican director Michel Franco returns with a chilly, angrily intense and deeply pessimistic tale of erotic obsession among the liberal super-rich in Trump’s US who seek to launder and redeem their guilt by sponsoring the arts. It’s a really involving picture which beckons you hypnotically towards the tacit promise of a sensationally unhappy and violent denouement, and of course Franco is unlikely to deliver any other kind. The two final plot developments are shocking, if not precisely surprising, and in fact vulnerable to the charge of being crudely obvious – but Franco certainly gives us a gripping emotional drama, supercharged with toxic sensuality and fear.

Jessica Chastain plays Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy woman based in San Francisco extensively accustomed to high-end restaurants, couture, private planes and chauffeur-driven SUVs and Franco has an eye for the luxury-porn scenarios familiar from TV dramas such as Succession and The White Lotus, though with a more dyspeptic and fearful edge.

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