14 min readSTEVEN SPIELBERG HAS transformed Hollywood time and time again. Often hailed as the father of the modern blockbuster, the 79-year-old director has proven masterful at dreaming up visually imaginative spectacles, globe-trotting action-adventures, deeply stirring dramas, and beloved children’s films, many of which reflect his long-held fascination with the innocence of childhood, the fracturing of family units, and the triumph of individual spirit in the face of adversity.
At once daring and near-universally adored, conventionally entertaining and dense with complicated emotion, Spielberg’s films fulfill audiences’ fantasies of escapism even as they peer into the unknown, exploring the profound feelings that flow from our confrontations with what we find waiting there. Since emerging from the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s, where the success of his Jaws forever altered the trajectory of the movie-theater business, Spielberg has left an inimitable imprint on every successive decade of cinema.
Across the 35 features he’s made, he has brought his boundless imagination to bear in practically every genre. Still, there’s no question that many of Spielberg’s most enduring contributions to cinema belong to the realm of science fiction and fantasy. Simply saying his name conjures iconic images of dinosaurs once more roaming the Earth, spaceships descending from the heavens, a child riding his bicycle across the moonlit sky. To celebrate the release of Disclosure Day, his latest sci-fi adventure, here’s a ranking of all Spielberg’s contributions to science fiction, action, and fantasy cinema thus far.
16. Ready Player One (2018)
Spielberg’s most soulless film, Ready Player One shrinks down a filmmaker who has spent decades creating popular culture until he more closely resembles a dutiful custodian for intellectual properties past. Adapted from the nerd’s-delight debut novel of the same name by Ernest Cline, previously best known for co-writing the screenplay for Fanboys, Ready Player One is set in a virtual-reality dystopian future where people opt to spend less time in the real world than they do in a simulated reality overrun with avatars that reference pop culture from various time periods. Into this arena goes an orphaned gamer (Tye Sheridan) determined to win a worldwide contest orchestrated by the VR’s enigmatic designer. Those endlessly nostalgic for the ’80s will find Easter eggs aplenty, of course, though Spielberg’s forays into motion-captured performance and animation hit their weightless, meaningless nadir long before the time the Iron Giant is deployed as a war machine during a climactic battle sequence. Yes, Ready Player One ultimately argues that true fulfillment can only be found in the real world, not in this virtual oasis, but this feels like a facile argument for a filmmaker like Spielberg, who has contributed so greatly to the cultural imagination, to be making. And he should know better than to indulge in such trivializing displays of showmanship with the beloved artifacts of that same imagination.
15. Hook (1991)
One immediately sees what appealed to Steven Spielberg about revisiting the story of the boy who never grew up through the frame of an adult Peter Pan who’s forgotten his childhood, and one just as quickly understands why Hook—which cast Robin Williams as the grown-up Peter, now a middle-aged lawyer, and Dustin Hoffman as his old nemesis, Captain Hook—was never going to be remembered as one of his great films. For all its premise’s built-in flights of fantasy, and despite a memorable score by John Williams, Spielberg’s Hook suffers from—among other structural problems—a Never Never Land totally sapped of wonder, all mechanized whirligig contraptions and colorful side characters arranged too busily on conspicuous soundstages. The tonally miscalibrated turns from certain actors, especially Hoffman, and a calculated play for treacly sentiment in the finale additionally mark this as one of Spielberg’s lesser efforts. He’s gone on record to say as much himself, telling Empire in 2018 that “I didn't quite know what I was doing and I tried to paint over my insecurity with production value,” and adding that “the more insecure I felt about it, the bigger and more colorful the sets became.”
14. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Ironically for a franchise all about the dangers of scientific hubris, Spielberg’s direct follow-up to his iconic Jurassic Park is itself a lesser genetic clone, exploiting its predecessor’s residual aura of pure adrenaline, excitement, and adventure without ever approaching similar levels of awe and admiration. This contrived, mechanical continuation delivers more dinosaurs running amok in exotic locales but is otherwise astonishingly deficient, often suggesting the kind of sequel that this master filmmaker would have passed off to an apprentice rather than one he directed himself. The issue—other than the perfunctory screenplay, with its careless characterizations and needless abundance of action set pieces, each elaborate and empty of meaning—is that Spielberg’s heart so clearly isn’t in it.
13. The BFG (2016)
On paper, the prospect of Spielberg adapting this Roald Dahl classic makes all the sense in the world. Focusing on a young child—emotionally neglected by the adults around them—who finds fantastical refuge from their sorrowful everyday circumstances through an unlikely friendship with a magical being, The BFG feels like a mirror image of Spielberg’s own E.T., albeit one made with modern motion-capture effects rather than through mechanical puppetry. It’s possible that the reason why The BFG comes up slightly short as entertainment can be found somewhere in that uncanny valley between Mark Rylance’s expressively animated giant and Ruby Barnhill’s less-than-endearing lead performance; as earnestly as Spielberg seeks to bring his humble beanstalk down to her eye level in a gesture of emotive, intergenerational connection, they never truly seem to meet each other’s gaze. Spielberg separately seems to struggle with a story and a script—by Melissa Mathison, who’d previously penned E.T.—that’s excessively faithful to Dahl’s source material, piling on all the author’s gobblefunk vocabulary in a dialogue-heavy first half.
12. Always (1989)
To call this largely forgotten romantic fantasy one of Spielberg’s more underrated films might be overselling it. Always started with Spielberg’s desire to remake the 1944 war film A Guy Named Joe, in which Spencer Tracy had played a downed Air Force pilot sent back to Earth from heaven to quietly inspire the pilot assigned to take his place, only for Tracy to watch on helplessly as his replacement also falls for his grieving girlfriend. While making Jaws, Spielberg and actor Richard Dreyfuss bonded over their shared love of this melodrama, which roused memories of childhood for them both; over a decade later, they remade it by shifting the setting to modern times and trading out enemy combatants for forest fires. But their Always is a mild, forgettable affair that coasts on easy sentiment with a curious lack of urgency; for all the excitement that its scenes of high-flying aerial peril can muster, Spielberg aims for old-fashioned romanticism and achieves mostly a sensation of mustiness.
11. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Perhaps no movie in Spielberg’s oeuvre better captures the strange sensation of watching a master filmmaker struggle under the weight of his own mythology. Arriving a full two decades after The Last Crusade, this fourth installment in the franchise—while leaps and bounds more satisfying than the moribund Dial of Destiny directed more recently by James Mangold—was never going to fully satisfy those nostalgic for the first three films, all crown jewels of ’80s action-adventure cinema. The burden of living up to that legacy is too great for any filmmaker to shoulder, even one of Spielberg’s stature; still, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sustains itself for at least an hour on the promise of its lengthy prologue, which starts with Soviet agents infiltrating Area 51 and ends memorably with Harrison Ford’s intrepid adventurer surviving a nuclear blast by closing himself inside a lead-lined refrigerator. It’s after that, once Indy and his estranged son (Shia LaBeouf) make their way to South America and re-encounter his lost love (Karen Allen), that Spielberg starts to struggle with a meandering storyline, a crowded coterie of familiar faces (including an inexplicably underwhelming Russian baddie played by Cate Blanchett), and a profusion of middling visual effects. This last, most unwelcome addition particularly makes a muddle of the mid-film vehicle chase through a jungle, while taking some wonder out of the anticlimactic reveal of ancient aliens inhabiting the film’s titular lost city.
10. War of the Worlds (2005)
Perhaps the scariest film Spielberg has ever made, his adaptation of the seminal science fiction invasion story by H.G. Wells was made in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, and it’s overrun with imagery evocative of that destruction. From the opening scenes, set in the aftermath of a heat-ray attack, in which Tom Cruise’s negligent dock worker finds himself covered in the ashes of the dead, to a climactic scene in which he puts together that a red vegetation cultivated by the aliens is being fertilized with human blood and tissue, the film hit unsettlingly close to home for an American public shell-shocked by real-world devastation. It finds the same director of war epics like Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List injecting this timeless science fiction premise with a brutally visceral realism, both in how he surveys the grim fallout of an extraterrestrial onslaught and in his depiction of a fatally flawed father figure who’s confronted with one last opportunity to measure up for his children… and still struggles to do so amid the end of the world.
9. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
The darkest, most dangerous entry in the Indiana Jones series is also its most divisive, taking its whip-wielding, wisecracking hero into the jungles of remote East India, where he battles a sinister cult to free kidnapped children from their underground mines. Made amid personal upheaval for both Spielberg and executive producer George Lucas, Temple of Doom trades out Raiders of the Lost Ark’s exuberant globe-trotting for a more grounded, occasionally grotesque film involving ritualistic human sacrifice, child slavery, and an unfortunate degree of racism and Orientalism. A more relentlessly action-packed picture than even its predecessor, Temple of Doom boasts some of the most accomplished action filmmaking of Spielberg’s career, from the song-and-dance opening sequence set in a Shanghai nightclub to the ensuing car chase through city streets and plane crash in the Himalayas that turns into a river-raft escape down snowy mountain slopes. To its detriment, the film traffics in broad caricatures of Indian culture and comic relief that’s aged poorly. But Spielberg’s direction is so muscular, inventive, and devoted to devil-may-care escalation that it’s impossible to dismiss the film entirely. Every set piece pushes itself toward a new extreme, from the heart-in-mouth mine-cart chase to the suspenseful rope-bridge climax, and the sense that Spielberg’s having an absolute blast behind the camera helps to pave over some of the film’s more dated stretches.
8. Disclosure Day (2026)
At once a bravura chase picture that forces the audience to catch its breath at every turn and an earnest exploration of our capacity for empathetic connection that asks them to open their minds, Disclosure Day returns Spielberg to the wondrous, cosmic possibility of his classic sci-fi films while also exemplifying the defiant humanism of his recent work in movies like The Fabelmans and West Side Story. Spectacularly well-directed on a scene-to-scene basis, from a heart-in-mouth sequence involving a car pinioned against a speeding train to an elegantly enigmatic return to some mysterious construct of a childhood home where miraculous forces coincide, the filmmaker’s latest is equally vivid in its emanating sense of almighty belief. At the height of his storytelling powers, Spielberg here crafts an emphatically entertaining and gorgeously speculative summer blockbuster in the hallowed tradition of Close Encounters, filled with star performances and bravura sci-fi set pieces. But he also delivers an eerily resonant portrait of a post-truth America (a focus reminiscent of The Post) that is not only intellectually but also spiritually and emotionally repressed by what the powerful have concealed, and makes an argument for society’s continued need for storytellers, from whistleblowers to journalists, who bring truth to light no matter what it imperils or how it causes us to reconsider our most sacred convictions. Ultimately, even as he excavates a century of conspiracy thinking and eroded faith in institutions to invoke government black sites and UFO sightings, Disclosure Day emerges as an optimistic film about maintaining faith in people and their ability to make something meaningful of the knowledge they attain. It’s a touching statement of belief by Spielberg, in the transformative potential of the stories we tell on the audiences that remain open to them.
7. Minority Report (2002)
The first high-profile collaboration between Spielberg and Tom Cruise, this futuristic cyber-noir imagines a surveillance state in which technology can predict crimes before they’re committed, a fascinatingly speculative premise that Spielberg takes to its logically dystopian end-destination: “pre-crime” police units reduce murder rates but do so at the cost of free will. Eerily prescient in its depiction of a society consigned to the biometric tracking and targeted advertising that makes their lives seamless and streamlined while eliminating personal privacy almost entirely, the film is a fascinatingly brainy thriller about digital manipulation of reality and technology’s insidious, government-weaponized incursions into fundamental legal principles like the presumption of innocence. Cruise has rarely been more effective as a top cop framed by his colleagues for a murder he has not yet committed and is running out of time to prove his future can be rewritten.
6. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Family is at the heart of Spielberg’s filmmaking, and so it only follows that the third installment of the Indiana Jones series—and the final entry in his originally planned trilogy—has Harrison Ford’s adventurer reunite with his eccentric father (Sean Connery), Dr. Henry Jones. Dr. Jones, it turns out, is an academic whose ardent pursuit of ancient treasures—especially the coveted Holy Grail—has long surpassed his interest in parenting his son. The endearing repartee of their relationship is what distinguishes this film from its predecessors, though it’s separately delightful to revisit Indy’s youth in a scene where, at age 13, he finds himself caught up in a tussle with grave robbers over the Cross of Coronado; an opening-scene escapade that catapults the scrappy Boy Scout from horseback onto a circus train, ultimately leading to the discovery of his iconic fedora, is a magical bit of character mythmaking by Spielberg. The main story never quite reaches the rollicking heights of Raiders, but this is still Spielberg’s best sequel.
5. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Spielberg’s recurring interest in alien encounters reached an emotional apogee early on with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a magnificently ambitious film about a group of people striving to make first contact with the great, cosmic unknown. Here, such an otherworldly encounter is imagined as a spiritual awakening, but also as the kind of life-altering event that can have deep and destructive consequences on family units and other bastions of ordinary existence. For Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary, consumed by visions he cannot comprehend, leaving his wife and children to instead chase something larger than himself is a compulsion born of undeniable yearning; the grace and sensitivity with which Spielberg navigates this story’s cross-currents of parental abandonment and existential uncertainty all lead into one of the most wondrous finales of his career: an extended, ecstatic aria of communication with extraterrestrial phenomena that remains a singular vision of peaceful, profound transcendence.
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4. Jurassic Park (1993)
Bringing the dinosaurs back to life in this landmark adaptation of Michael Crichton’s cautionary tale, Spielberg created a film that felt at once groundbreaking and instantly timeless. The genius of Jurassic Park lies in the filmmaker’s innate grasp of awe, and his understanding that this sensation has less to do with the revolutionary visual effects required to convincingly resurrect prehistoric creatures on screen and more to do with the expressions of astonishment, fear, and emotional investment on the faces of his actors. Every creative decision Spielberg made in Jurassic Park was about building a sense of majesty through anticipation and reifying it through ground-level perspective; as its characters gaze up at these mighty beasts roaming the doomed theme park of the title, this blockbuster takes its place among the great movies about not only humanity’s hubris in playing god with nature but also the earnest desire for scientific progress and the childlike wonder that so often underpins it.
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3. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Misunderstood upon its initial release, when it was thoughtlessly dismissed by certain critics as the product of an unhappy marriage between Spielberg’s warm, humanistic sentimentality and Stanley Kubrick’s cold, mechanized intellectualism, A.I. Artificial Intelligence has since taken its place as an essential film precisely because of that underlying tension between the two master filmmakers. Initially approached by Kubrick in the 1970s, who let it languish in development hell for decades before handing Spielberg the reins in 1995, the resultant film reflects Kubrick’s bleak vision—relayed to scribe Ian Watson—of “a picaresque robot Pinocchio,” wherein a robot child (Haley Joel Osment) is programmed with the ability to love and subsequently left to rust by his naïve, all-too-human parents. But it also embodies Spielberg’s uncanny skill at creating non-human characters that evoke deep and recognizable feelings. The film’s ultimately eerie depiction of artificial intelligence, its undying ethical dilemmas, and our endless capacity for emotional projection makes this one of Spielberg’s most uniquely prophetic and powerful films.
2. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
“E.T. phone home.” The defining image of Spielberg’s career may very well be the silhouette of a child riding their bicycle across the moon; his endlessly masterful achievement in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was to fully inhabit a child’s perspective while transforming an everyday suburban setting into an environment capable of housing magic as well as mundanity. Young Elliot (Henry Thomas) is a lonely boy whose unlikely friendship is with an alien stranded on Earth. Endeavoring to help this intergalactic interloper find his way home, he sets out on an adventure that grows more unexpectedly wondrous by the minute, until both he and his alien acquaintance achieve liftoff, cycling away into the night sky. Based on an imaginary friend Spielberg dreamed up after his parents’ divorce, one with whom he imagined absconding to destinations unknown, E.T. is a deservedly iconic creation and endures as a symbol of the cinema’s endless capacity for empathy and imagination. Spielberg’s film similarly stands tall as one of his most fully formed visions of transformative emotional connection.
1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
There could be no other choice. Raiders of the Lost Ark is—simply put—a perfect film, and one of the most magnificently entertaining adventure pictures of all time. Introducing the world to Dr. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and his archaeological exploits, Spielberg’s film drew inspiration from 1940s adventure serials while transcending them entirely to create a work of globetrotting, swashbuckling, death-defying excitement that exists on a level all its own. Every action sequence is an all-timer; every frame conveys character detail and narrative momentum simultaneously; taken as a whole, the picture thrums with tension, wit, and humor at every turn. Raiders of the Lost Ark embodies everything that Spielberg does better than virtually any other living director: wonder, excitement, escapism, and visual craftsmanship. It remains the gold standard not only for the adventure genre but for popular entertainment altogether.
Isaac Feldberg is a film writer and editor based in Chicago. In addition to Men's Health, his work has appeared in such publications as the Boston Globe, Vulture, Fortune, and Entertainment Weekly. He is an active contributor to RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.
