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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Last Breath review – thrilling underwater survival drama

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Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu star in a terrifyingly well-constructed adaptation of a documentary about a nightmarish accident

It does not take much to convince that, as an opening title card for Last Breath states, the job of a saturation diver is one of the most dangerous on earth. The facts, also summarily listed in the survival thriller’s introduction, speak for themselves: thousands of miles of pipeline traverse the ocean, dependent on human divers to maintain them; said divers spend days in pressurized chambers to reach depths of more than 1,000ft (300 meters), in near-freezing darkness. It may as well be outer space, as the fiancee of one diver bluntly but correctly puts it.

Thankfully, Last Breath, Alex Parkinson’s feature film adaptation of his 2019 documentary of the same name, lets the divers’ work – a maze of levers, pulleys, gas valves, imposing machines and the human capacity to detach from existential risk – largely speak for itself as well. And luckily for viewers, such work, baffling to anyone with a reasonable relationship with adrenaline, is fascinating even if nothing goes awry.

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