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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This is the year the Oscars found God – but can they keep the faith?

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From Conclave to The Brutalist to A Real Pain, films about religion are unusually well represented at the Academy Awards – some with decidedly unorthodox themes
• Warning: contains spoilers

What Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell said of New Labour – “We don’t do God” – applies also to the Academy Awards. The secular gong-dispensing rite annually sweeps religion off its proverbial red carpet. The last best picture winner to deal with the subject was 2015’s Spotlight, which hardly proselytised for organised religion – it dramatised the Boston Globe’s investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic church. You have to go back to 1973 to find a movie with a priestly protagonist that really beguiled the Academy: William Friedkin’s horror movie The Exorcist received 10 Oscar nominations, winning awards for screenplay and sound.

This year, though, may be different. Two leading contenders, The Brutalist (10 nominations) and Conclave (eight), put faith front and centre. And let’s not forget the perversely charming Holocaust road-trip movie, A Real Pain, shortlisted for best original screenplay and best supporting actor, for Kieran Culkin. If not exactly a meditation on Judaism, Jesse Eisenberg’s film is a beguilingly thoughtful musing on Jewish identity from a self-consciously privileged actor-director whose ancestors survived the Holocaust. A Real Pain serves as a reflection on transgenerational trauma and the meaning of religion after Nazi genocide.

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