Steven Spielberg's Best Movies

Steven Spielberg, who currently has two films in release (Tintin and War Horse), is among the most powerful and influential people to have ever worked in Hollywood. He's entertained countless people in his nearly 40-year career, but the following 10 films are what we've humbly deemed his best directorial efforts:

This all-star seriocomic film was based on the autobiography of Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), one of the world's greatest con men and among the youngest individuals ever placed on the FBI's Most Wanted List. The film features a familiar "Spielbergian" theme of a kid from a broken home, only Frank reacts to his parent's divorce by running off and becoming an airline pilot, forging checks, and spending years avoiding capture by the FBI. It never really gets dark or foreboding, as it could in different hands.

Rather Spielberg keeps the pace up, the tone light, and the result is an entertaining flick chronicling the adventures of a teenager who basically broke enough laws to put him in prison for a long time. After Spielberg spent so much time with series fare such as A.I. and Amistad, Catch Me If You Can came as a welcome change of pace. Sometimes you just need a lighthearted movie that doesn't want to shove a message down your throat, and instead just entertain. That's Catch Me If You Can.



Minority Report emerges as one of Spielberg's most underrated films, a much more complete exercise than his previous movie A.I. – one that doesn't fall apart in the end like A.I. did. It creates a realistic future for the extraordinary to take place. It takes on the moral and ethical issues of Precrime right up to the final moments, with both fore and hindsight taking center stage in the debate.

Most importantly, the movie has fun with its premise and lets the audience figure out what's going on just as Anderton does. In a time where summer blockbusters are devoid of personality, Spielberg reminds us what good storytelling is and why its worth being told on the big screen.

Jurassic Park's First "Wow" Moment

You know why this movie still works, almost 20 years after it unleashed the power of CG everything on audiences? Because when Alan Grant first looks up to see that veggiesaurus get on its hind legs to eat some tree leaves, the scene still gets us to mouth "wow" every time. That sense of awe and wonder that only a Spielberg movie could provide is the reason why we still get geek goose bumps when Hammond says, "Welcome to Jurassic Park."

While the story about dino experts forced to survive a hellish Disneyland-esque ride is merely a clothesline by which Spielberg can hang big set-pieces on, it does deliver just enough emotion and character work to elevate the film above simple popcorn entertainment. In fact, it makes it one of the genre's best examples of popcorn fare, a sci-fi tale that reminds man for the millionth time that he should never play God.



Saving Private Ryan was a vastly different type of World War II film from director Steven Spielberg than Schindler's List. Depicting the invasion of Normandy Beach and several bloody conflicts that followed, Private Ryan drew in viewers with the tragic quest of Tom Hanks and his squad to track down the last surviving brother (Matt Damon) in a family of soldiers. In between the explosions and ground skirmishes, Ryan explores the toll war takes on not just soldiers, but the lives they lead before answering the call.

The film works best when the mission detours into the messiness of human conflict, whether it be at the business end of a flame thrower, machine gun or sniper rifle. Spielberg turns a set piece inside a bomb-ravaged village into a tense game of cat and mouse that practically plays out in real time, with our boys' best sniper (the underrated Berry Pepper) blessing his rifle before pulling the trigger on his Nazi counterpart. We still scratch our heads as to why this movie lost the Best Picture Oscar to Shakespeare in Love.



Munich is arguably the most mature and unsentimental movie Steven Spielberg has ever made. Hewing far closer to political potboilers like Bertolucci's The Conformist than the director's own portrayals of historical events, Spielberg crafts a daringly ambiguous and dramatically credible rendition of events that took place following the murder of eight athletes in Munich during the 1972 Olympic games.

Spielberg's mastery as a showman and purveyor of spectacle is the stuff of Hollywood boilerplate, which is why the sophistication and intelligence of Munich is all the more impressive. Where even his previous forays into starkly dramatic material occasionally veered into shameless sentiment, here he approaches his subject with deadly-serious gravitas, never proffering some position of moral justification to elevate the Israeli troops above their victims, nor reducing them to bloodthirsty murderers out for vengeance.