Of the ones I've seen, I'd say -
16. The Colour Purple
Really can't stand it.
15. Catch Me if You Can
Don't even remember most of it. Leonardo Dicaprio was good but the rest of the film is just a big bore.
14. Jurassic Park
It's clearly all style and no substance. Spielberg has simply remade Jaws, on land, without the interesting characters.
13. Saving Private Ryan
The action sequences is stunning and the acting is solid but this is quite possibly the most over patriotic war film I've ever seen.
12. War Horse
I saw this film again & I liked a lot more the 2nd time but there are lots of missteps that can't be ignored.
11. Schindler's List
Moments of sheer beauty are outweighed by the moral simplicity of the whole film.
10. Duel
An impressive and exciting technical exercise, but I bristle at the film's take on masculinity. Still, Spielberg brings some crafty and thoughtful touches to this that become recognizable in his later films.
9. Empire of the Sun
A story about the horrifying and dehumanizing effects of war that is all too often directed and scored like a rousing Indiana Jones adventure. Finding myself held at a distance from the movie as a result, I couldn't help but wonder how the Steven Spielberg of "Munich" and "War of the Worlds" would better serve this very same material.
8. Minority Report
This would've been in my top 5 had it not been for that bloated 3rd Act
7. Raiders of the Lost Ark & Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
They're both great fun
6. War of the Worlds
Spielberg turned H.G. Welles pantomime story into a powerful meditation on post 9/11 anxieties and this is where finally finds the answer to the question of "What does it mean to be a father?" I cannot emphasise just how superior this film is to Jurassic Park
5. Close Encounters of the Third KInd
One of the few films that gets better as the film moves through its plot. This quality makes Close Encounters uneven and not a masterwork, but what the second half has to offer is a well paced sci fi suspense narrative that rivals the work of Hitchcock.
4. E.T. Extra Terrestrial
It's endlessly fascinating but I didn't like the ending to this film. Spielberg never bothers to devise a convincing physiological (or psychosomatic) reason for E.T.’s false death; and his resuscitation, when divested of its Biblical overtones, appears to be a case of taking twenty tear-sodden pages to kill off Little Nell, so to speak, and applying artificial respiration on the twenty-first.
3. Munich
This is the best of his "serious" films. And like most of his post 9/11 films, Munich is a statement about the "War on terror". It's about how violence begets violence and it asks the question of whether it's justified to invade civil liberties to fight terrorism.
2. Jaws
One of the greatest man vs nature films ever made and it also has the 3 best characters in any Spielberg film.
1. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
I've said this before & I'll say it again, A.I. is Spielberg's masterpiece, his most ambitious & thought provoking film to date & the key to the film's success was Stanley Kubrick. It's no secret that Kubrick was a better filmmaker than Spielberg but it's also no secret that they were polar opposites. But miraculously, this film brings out the best in both artists. A.I. (like Pinocchio) takes an artificial creation on a journey of humanity and in doing so, it tries to understand the very nature of the human condition. Those who say that it should have ended a few scenes earlier or that the bits with Gigolo Joe are the best parts might as well be speaking to me in a foreign tongue. Just like Kubrick's 2001, A.I. is a philosophical meditation on sentience, mortality and god and frankly, through all my subsequent viewings, it continues to move and speak to me more than any feature I’ve seen since. In my opinion, this is the best sci-fi film of the 21st century so far and one that'll forever be under appreciated.
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