(Credits: Far Out / Martin Kraft)
Fri 2 January 2026 18:15, UK
Most directors would be lucky to have just one film in their careers that’s considered to be a classic, but Steven Spielberg has over two dozen, such that picking a favourite Spielberg film is often a personal question for cinephiles, as it is dependent on the age they were when first exposed to his exciting style of storytelling.
There aren’t many films in the last century of Hollywood that could realistically be described as ‘perfect’, but several of the ones to be included were directed by Steven Spielberg, with perhaps the most impressive thing about him being his ability to work across genres and master them all.
While Jaws is the definitive monster movie and Close Encounters of the Third Kind is as wondrous and thought-provoking as science fiction can get, Raiders of the Lost Ark is an incomparable adventure, and Saving Private Ryan serves as a searing and unforgettable depiction of World War II, and yet he’s only gone from strength to strength since.
The director has a new blockbuster headed to theatres in the summer, ultimately showing no signs of slowing down, and looking at some of his 21st-century output, he has delivered across the board, from an unforgettable heist adventure in the form of Catch Me If You Can, a celebration of American journalism with The Post, to a musical remake that topped the original West Side Story and a semi-autobiographical story about his own childhood with The Fabelmans.
Many directors consider choosing a favourite among their films to be the equivalent of selecting their favourite child, but Spielberg has remained clear-eyed about his own successes and failures, lamenting what he perceived to be failures on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and 1941, even if those films do have their fans. On the other hand, he also admitted to Peter Biskind in a 1997 interview that he had one entry in his filmography that he considered to be perfect.
“ET was a very personal film for me,” Spielberg said, “It was a movie that I absolutely cherished in my heart. I know it has become a much-abused icon, but at the time, it was my first personal film, the opposite of Jaws.”
Although he directed sequels to Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park, both franchises continued with new instalments that he didn’t helm, and there were also several Jaws sequels that he wasn’t involved in, but he was determined that there would never be a sequel to ET the Extra-Terrestrial.
“I didn’t want to do anything that would blemish its memory with a sequel that would not be, could not possibly be, its superior,” Spielberg said, “So despite all the letters and personal requests to make a sequel, I didn’t want to mess with something that I thought was almost a perfect little movie.”
When considering just how many classic films from the 1980s have had sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, spinoffs, and television continuations, the fact that ET remains untouchable indicates why it is still so powerful, and how it can still connect with audiences without feeling like it has aged at all.
Even if an argument could be made that either Schindler’s List or Raiders of the Lost Ark is the director’s true masterpiece, the film about an alien trying to find its way back home is as pure and sincere as his movies have ever been.
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