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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Regretting You review – sudsy Colleen Hoover adaptation is no It Ends with Us

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The second big screen take on one of the hugely successful author’s trauma dramas is a bland misfire and wastes Girls actor Allison Williams in the lead

It’s hard to remember now, nearly a year into the legal and reputational slugfest that is Justin Baldoni v Blake Lively, that It Ends With Us, the film at the heart of so much litigious mudslinging – predominantly and relentlessly, it should be noted, by Baldoni’s legal team – was a Hollywood success story.

The first big-screen adaptation of bestselling author Colleen Hoover, an initially self-published romance writer catapulted by BookTok to cult-figure status under the mononym CoHo, successfully elevated what many have dismissed as trauma porn fetishizing abuse into glossy, but effective and emotionally mature, adult theatrical fare. Lively, a Taylor Swift-adjacent style icon (to some) who excels at warm-hearted melodrama, was the perfect anchor for a film targeting what celebrity gossip columnist Elaine Lui termed the “minivan majority” (exurban/suburban, white, middle-class women); the film grossed $350m, against a $25m budget, making it one of the biggest hits of the summer.

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