Steven Spielberg has been one of the best directors to work in Hollywood for over 50 years now. The director got his start on television and then directed a TV movie called Duel and made his theatrical debut with a small crime drama called The Sugarland Express starring Goldie Hawn. However, his second theatrical movie, Jaws, helped popularize the summer blockbuster movie craze, and he followed that with films that revolutionized sci-fi filmmaking, action-adventure films, and even historical and war epics. He helped CGI become the norm after Jurassic Park, and he remains one of the most in-demand filmmakers in Hollywood, with a new movie hitting in 2026 called Disclosure Day.
55 years after releasing his debut film Duel, here is a look at the 10 best movies Steven Spielberg directed over his long and successful career.
10) Bridge of Spies (2015)
Image Courtesy of Fox
One of Steven Spielberg’s most overlooked films is the 2015 legal thriller Bridge of Spies. This Cold War thriller stars Tom Hanks as American lawyer James B. Donovan, who negotiates the 1962 Berlin spy exchange of Rudolf Abel for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. The movie won Mark Rylance an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Abel, and it earned five other Oscar nominations besides that one. This was Spielberg and Hanks’ fourth collaboration, and while it isn’t considered their best, it remains a fantastically tense movie that deserves more recognition today.
9) Lincoln (2012)
Image Courtesy of DreamWorks
In 2012, Steven Spielberg directed the historical biopic Lincoln, in which Daniel Day-Lewis starred as United States President Abraham Lincoln. This wasn’t a look at Lincoln’s entire life, and it instead focused on the final dour months of his life in 1865, which is when he got the Thirteenth Amendment passed by the House of Representatives to abolish slavery. Lincoln received 12 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It won two, one for Best Production Design and one for Day-Lewis for Best Actor, making him the first person to win that category three times.
8) Minority Report (2002)
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Minority Report saw Steven Spielberg adapting Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novelette of the same name. In this movie, Spielberg brought in Tom Cruise to star as PreCrime captain John Anderton, a man who leads a team to arrest people before they commit crimes, thanks to the use of two precogs who see the future. However, when John’s name pops up, he goes on the run to figure out what is going on. This movie has stood the test of time, as it correctly predicted things like predictive policing and gesture UI, and it remains a cautionary story about all these scientific advancements.
7) Jaws (1975)
Image Courtesy of Universal
Jaws is the movie that has been credited with helping popularize the summer blockbuster movie craze. Seen as the first of these massive summer films, it helped change how Hollywood released and marketed their movies. That is even more impressive since it was Steven Spielberg’s third movie (after Duel and Sugarland Express), and it was full of behind-the-scenes obstacles that the director faced trying to get through the production. John Williams won his first Oscar in the Original Score category, and the film also took home awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound. Jaws was the highest-grossing movie of all time until Star Wars surpassed it in 1977.
6) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
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In 1977, Steven Spielberg created his first sci-fi masterpiece with a drama called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This was a movie about aliens, but it wasn’t an action movie, and the aliens weren’t invading the planet. Instead, this was a film about aliens who wanted to make first contact and the humans who were excited to welcome them. More than that, it was about a father (Richard Dreyfuss) who was willing to leave his family behind to find his dreams beyond the stars. The movie made over $300 million worldwide, and it earned eight Oscar nominations, including Spielberg’s first nomination for Best Director.
Image Courtesy of Universal
After Star Wars surpassed Jaws as the highest-grossing movie of all time, Steven Spielberg recaptured the top spot in 1982 with the release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a record it held for 11 years before Spielberg beat his own record again. This movie is another alien-based sci-fi release, this time about a scientist alien trapped on Earth and the U.S. government trying to capture and experiment on it. With young children fighting to protect the alien, the movie was Spielberg’s masterful all-ages family feature. The film won four Oscars (Score, Visual Effects, Sound, Sound Effects Editing), with nine nominations including Best Picture and Best Director.
4) Jurassic Park (1993)
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Steven Spielberg released two movies in 1993. One was a historical epic about World War II. The other was a movie about dinosaurs. Jurassic Park was the movie that Spielberg beat E.T. for the highest-grossing movie of all time, which he held until Titanic knocked it out of the top spot. The movie showed the dangers in cloning dinosaurs and bringing them back to life, and its use of CGI was enough to sell Hollywood on the new format. Jurassic Park still has better CGI than many movies made today. The movie won all three of its Oscar nominations, all for technical achievements.
3) Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
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In 1981, Steven Spielberg paid tribute to the adventure movies he grew up loving as a kid. Raiders of the Lost Ark stars Harrison Ford as a professor and archeologist named Indiana Jones. The movie sees Indiana Jones seeking to find lost treasures so they can be placed in historical protection rather than in the hands of collectors, or worse. He fights Nazis who want to find the Ark of the Covenant to help them win World War II. The film earned eight competitive Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won four for technical achievements.
2) Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Image Courtesy of DreamWorks
In 1998, Steven Spielberg directed one of the best war movies of the modern era. In Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks stars as Captain John Miller, a man sent in with a military squad to find a soldier named Private James Ryan to return him home after his three brothers all died in action during World War II. The big scene when they arrived on Omaha Beach on D-Day ran for 24 minutes and remains one of the best war sequences ever made. The film won five Oscars in 11 nominations, including Spielberg’s second win for Best Director. Saving Private Ryan was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
1) Schindler’s List (1993)
Image Courtesy of Universal
The best movie Steven Spielberg ever directed was the war drama Schindler’s List in 1993. Spielberg directed this and Jurassic Park in the same year, and the two movies couldn’t be more different. Jurassic Park was a movie with CGI about dinosaurs, while Schindler’s List was a black-and-white movie about a man who helped save over a thousand Polish-Jewish people from the Holocaust. The movie won seven Oscars, including Steven Spielberg’s first-ever win for Best Director.
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