Features > Top Lists > Top 10 Steven Spielberg movies

Top 10 Steven Spielberg movies

It’s hard to pick which ten Steven Spielberg movies to feature – the man’s directed nearly 50 titles, and overseen more than a 100. He’s been hands-on Producer for just 19 features though (including JJ Abrams’ Super 8). And he’s only worn the twin hats of Director and Producer for 12 of those. So here is our Top Ten Steven Spielberg films from that duel(!) category...

Top 10 Steven Spielberg films as Producer/Director

ET - The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

ET’s luminous phone-home finger was originally a digit of death, but Spielberg lightened the story’s tone (a lot!), and transformed it into a poignant tale about friendship and loneliness, drawn from the deep emotional well formed after his parents’ divorce. He’d been making movies since the age of 12, had done his time directing TV, and – after creating Jaws, Close Encounters and Raiders of the Lost Ark in 6 years – became Hollywood’s wunderkind with ET.

Rent Watch Trailer

The Color Purple (1985)

Having plunged from ET into the Temple of Doom, the mid-80s found Spielberg looking to stretch “a different set of muscles” from his typical “fast-paced, energetic entertainments”. That said, he felt his adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel – set in early 1900s Georgia and starring Whoopi Goldberg as the much-abused sharecropper's daughter Celie – shared similarities with his previous work in that “it portrays an urgency to fulfill a dream”.

Rent Watch Trailer

Empire of the Sun (1987)

Another book adaptation followed, this time J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel about a British schoolboy (a 13-year-old Christian Bale, in an intuitive and career-triggering performance) trapped with John Malkovich’s fast-talking American in a WWII Shanghai prison camp. It’s about flights of fantasy and wonder as a means to survive, and the death of innocence, and Spielberg felt that “this movie and turning forty at almost the same time was no coincidence.”

Rent Watch Trailer

Always (1989)

For all its state-of-the-art special effects, Always is essentially a remake of the 1943 Spencer Tracy-Irene Dunne fantasy vehicle A Guy Named Joe--minus the wartime context. Richard Dreyfuss stars as a reckless fire-fighting pilot who is killed in what was to have been his final mission. He ascends to Heaven, where businesslike angel Audrey Hepburn instructs him to pass on his aviation knowhow to his young successor, Brad Johnson.

Rent Watch Trailer

Schindler's List (1993)

Based on a true story, Liam Neeson stars as Oskar Schindler, a German businessman in Poland who sees an opportunity to make money from the Nazis' rise to power. But as he arranges to continue using Polish Jews in his plant and sees what is happening to his employees, he begins to develop a conscience, realising that his factory (now refitted to manufacture ammunition) is the only thing preventing his staff from being shipped to the death camps.

Rent Watch Trailer

Amistad (1997)

In the summer of 1839, on a stormy night off the coast of Cuba, 53 Africans held captive in the cramped cargo holds of the Spanish slave ship La Amistad break free of their shackles, take control of the ship and reclaim their freedom. They have one goal: to return to Africa. But they are tricked, re-captured, and charged for murder and piracy. The case becomes the symbol of a nation divided, as two great American Presidents lock horns in the debate.

Rent Watch Trailer

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Spielberg's World War II tour de force chronicles the journey of a GI squad on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. Led by Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), the unit is under orders to track down a soldier, Private Ryan (Matt Damon), so he might return home to his mother in America, where she is grieving the loss of her three other sons to the war. Spielberg gave great credit to the Irish army who helped re-create the Omaha Beach scenes.

Rent Watch Trailer

Catch Me If You Can (2002)

This adaptation of Frank W. Abagnale's autobiography follows the cat-and-mouse chase of Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) and FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) as Abagnale travels the world passing forged checks and assuming false identities. Covering the time period from 1963-69, the film leaps from the suburbs of New York to Georgia, Louisiana, Miami, France, and the skies of Pan-Am airlines as Abagnale, constantly frustrates Hanratty's attempts to nab him.

Rent Watch Trailer

The Terminal (2004)

Viktor Navorksi (Tom Hanks) falls into a bureaucratic crack in the system when his his country of Krakozhia falls to a military coup while his plane was en route to New York's JFK airport, and his passport therefore rendered null and void. He cannot legally enter America, nor return to his now nonexistent home. Barely able to speak English, the hapless Navorski is offered a sanctuary of sorts by kindly staff who allow him to freely inhabit the airport.

Rent Watch Trailer

Munich (2005)

Inspired by real events, Munich reveals the intense story of the secret Israeli squad assigned to track down and assassinate the 11 Palestinians believed to have planned the 1972 Munich massacre of 11 Israel athletes - and the personal toll this mission of revenge takes on the team and the man who led it.

Rent Watch Trailer

Darren Bignell

LOVEFiLM Members' Top Ten (11) Steven Spielberg Movies

We asked, you voted - over 3,500 people had their say, and this is the result: the LOVEFiLM Members' Top Ten (11) Steven Spielberg movies of all time...

1.	Saving Private Ryan	510 votes	14%
2.	Raider's of the Lost Ark	495 votes	13.7%
3.	ET	435 votes	12%
4.	Schindler's List	379 votes	10.5%
5.	Jurassic Park	373 votes	10.3%
6.	Jaws	372 votes	10.25%
7.	Catch Me If You Can	131 votes	3.6%
8.	The Color Purple	129 votes	3.5%
9.	Close Encounters of the Third Kind	123 votes	3.4%
10.	Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade	102 votes	2.8%
11.	Empire of the Sun	101 votes	2.75%