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Disclosure Day's Steven Spielberg, Emily Blunt & Colman Domingo on Aliens, Empathy & Humanity
Just because a movie is big does not mean that it's great. And even if it's great, that doesn't mean people will see it.
Steven Spielberg has been threading that needle for 50 years, making the Disclosure Day director the founding president of an elite club of visionaries who make crowd-pleasing, blockbuster spectacles that are also great films.
And yet, he told E! News, “I never think anything is genius. That's the last thing I think about. I mean, I start with, ‘Is this gonna work at all? Is anybody gonna buy this?’”
In that vein, Spielberg movies have grossed more than $10.7 billion, making him the most commercially successful director ever, and he's won three Oscars (two for directing) en route to securing an EGOT earlier this year.
At the same time, the 79-year-old has been making highly personal films, telling the New York Times Magazine ahead of Disclosure Day's June 12 release, "I can't express enough how therapeutic and healthy it is for me to keep doing this job over and over and over again. I work so much out through this process."
And whether it's a movie that demands popcorn—Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park—or a box of tissues, or both (looking at you, E.T.), Spielberg's reputation as the consummate maker of Hollywood movies that mean something to people is set.
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The artists he's inspired along the way include Christopher Nolan, who revealed that Spielberg was the first person, other than studio heads, who saw Oppenheimer before it Barben-hammered box office records in the summer of 2023.
After Spielberg reached out for an unrelated matter, "we screened it for him on his own," Nolan shared in a 2024 AP chat with Dune director Denis Villeneuve. "I sat behind him and watched him watch the film. It was an extraordinary experience."
Which, coincidentally, is what countless theatergoers have said after watching a movie directed by Spielberg. Read on for a look at his best films:
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Duel
Steven Spielberg's 1971 action thriller about a traveling salesman (Dennis Weaver) who unwittingly ticks off the wrong truck driver was a TV movie, but it was so well-received it ended up in theaters overseas, a career-making coup for the film's then-25-year-old director.
In a 2018 Empire essay, Baby Driver director Edgar Wright called Duel "a pure engine for suspense" and "still one of the greatest displays of Spielberg’s talent and a masterclass for young film makers."
As Spielberg put it to Wright, "The reaction I had over the last decade is how I don’t know any of us made that movie in 11 days. I just have no idea. I can’t figure it out. We must have hit the ground running and not stopped running until the last shot."
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Jaws
For the record, it's "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
Aside from that, there's no misremembering that Spielberg's 1975 horror thriller about a Great White shark terrorizing a New England beach town—released in June, just in time for swimming season—birthed the very concept of the summer blockbuster.
It was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, and won for sound, editing and John Williams' indelible score.
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind
This 1977 sci-fi epic about humanity's first contact with aliens was the third-highest grossing movie of the year—Star Wars rocketed a little higher—and set the tone for Spielberg's otherworldly-meets-deeply-personal oeuvre to come.
It also, incidentally, was the film that scored Spielberg his first of eight Oscar nominations for Best Director.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark
Spielberg collaborated with friend George Lucas, who conceived the story, and took a page from his casting playbook, enlisting Harrison Ford to play Indiana Jones in ultimately five films over the course of 42 years. And it all started with the intrepid archaeology professor thwarting Nazis and snakes in this 1981 epic.
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
We're not crying, you're crying just thinking about Henry Thomas' Elliot and his homesick alien pal in this 1982 classic that was by turns funny, heartwarming and terrifying—and that's 6-year-old Drew Barrymore playing Elliot's sister, Gertie.
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The 1989 third film in the franchise, co-starring Sean Connery as Indy's father (never mind that he was only 12 years older than Ford), also rocks.
And its layers run deep, as Spielberg has shared that he was inspired by his complicated relationship with his own father.
He wanted to meet the hero's dad, he told the New York Times Magazine in 2026, "and I want them to have had years of estrangement and father neglecting son because the father was a workaholic. And this story will bring them back together again."
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Jurassic Park
Spielberg returned to peak summer blockbuster form with this pioneering 1993 action extravaganza based on Michael Crichton's best-selling sci-fi novel about man stopping to think about whether he could, but not whether he should.
Jurassic Park popularized computer-generated visual effects—you could say, CGI was also born on Isla Nublar—and spawned a still-chugging world of action flicks about dinosaurs and the humans who just can't quit them.
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Schindler's List
Spielberg's audaciously successful 1993 continued with the December release of Schindler's List, which he shot in Poland during the day while editing his dinosaur movie at night.
At the time, the haunting black-and-white drama about factory owner (and Nazi Party member) Oskar Schindler who saved 1,200 of his Jewish workers from being sent to death camps during the Holocaust, seemed like a departure for the director of all of the above.
And Spielberg thought so, too, recalling to NBC News in 2018 that, when he first read the 1982 book Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally, "I was making movies about extraterrestrials and movies about Indiana Jones and sharks. I was into mass popular entertainment concepts and I wasn't ready to go personal like that."
But once he had The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun under his belt, he explained, that gave him "the courage to take on a story of the Shoah."
And for his efforts he won his first Oscar for Best Director, one of the seven Academy Awards bestowed on the movie, including Best Picture.
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Saving Private Ryan
The visceral, technically exacting 23-minute opening battle sequence depicting Allied forces storming the Normandy coast on D-Day earned Spielberg his second Best Director Oscar—and the 1998 World War II epic marked the first of his now many collabs with fellow history buff Tom Hanks.
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Minority Report
This prescient 2002 neo-noir sci-fi thriller starring Tom Cruise as chief of the police's precrime unit—loosely inspired by a 1956 Philip K. Dick novella and set in 2056—remains timeless.
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Munich
This 2005 drama about a Mossad hit squad tasked with hunting down the perpetrators of the deadly attack on the Israeli Olympic team during the 1972 Munich Games was the first film Spielberg directed based on a script by Tony Kushner, the beginning of another fruitful partnership.
"I'm a kvetch and a worrier and unbelievably unpleasant," Kushner, now a four-time Oscar nominee for his Spielberg films, told the New York Times. And he "puts up with it."
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Lincoln
Working with another Kushner script, which he adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, Spielberg made this very long drama about President Abraham Lincoln's effort to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery at the end of the Civil War into edge-of-your-seat entertainment.
Daniel Day-Lewis basically channeling the 16th president en route to winning his third Best Actor Oscar was icing on the cake.
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Bridge of Spies
The based-on-a-true-story Cold War drama from 2015 reteamed Spielberg with Hanks, who's at peak subtle gravitas playing a lawyer sent to negotiate the release of a U.S. Air Force pilot (Austin Stowell) in exchange for a convicted Soviet KGB spy (Mark Rylance).
Among its six Oscar nominations, Rylance TKO'd Golden Globe winner Sylvester Stallone in the ultimate Best Supporting Actor bout.
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West Side Story
Spielberg's 2021 reworking of the Broadway classic (and Best Picture-winning 1961 film adaptation) didn't make much noise at the box office, not least due to lingering reluctance to go to theaters post-pandemic.
But the heartbreaking film starring then-newcomer Rachel Zegler and Ansel Elgort as star-crossed lovers Maria and Tony is beautiful and a testament to how movie musicals can be done in an organic-to-the-moment fashion.
And it still had a place at the Oscars with seven nominations, including Ariana DeBose's runaway win for Best Supporting Actress for her magnetic turn as Anita.
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