There’s always heated debate around here whenever Steven Spielberg’s name comes up in a conversation. If anything, I’d say the recurrent flaw with Spielberg is that he can never close the deal in a movie. His endings always fall short. He always overreaches.
“The Fabelmans” is said to have one of his best final shots, and the film supposedly gets better and better as it goes along. Even his most arduous detractors will surely want to see how that film turns out.
I’ve scrolled through his filmography of 33 films and I’ve liked, at the very least, 18 of them. That’s not a terrible ratio. These are, to my eyes, at least, the 10 most accomplished films of his career:
Schindler’s List
Jaws
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
AI: Artificial Intelligence
Minority Report
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Munich
Saving Private Ryan
Duel
Catch Me If You Can
Now to answer the “never-ending” question that’s been recurrently asked over the years: is Spielberg an auteur? Of course, he is.
There is something to be said about the mere fact we can even contemplate Spielberg as an auteur. His themes of universal goodness, and the fantastic co-existence with realism, are more obvious in his harshest movies (Saving Private Ryan, Munich, A.I.) and find their way into his technique. Whatever the moral is (or lack thereof), a lot of people like these films, and watch them over and over again because they’re unassuming.
Spielberg’s use of the medium can be impressive enough that the majority of people seem to overlook it, and they can just enjoy his films, regardless. His technical chops looks simple, yet are incredibly effective. When I re-watch his films, the way he edits, shoots, and lets scenes breathe is fascinating. He loves his long shots. Spielberg loves his reflection shots and long takes as well, using zooms and fluid camera movement to create these compositions.
Now for the ultimate auteur theory test: Would I know a film was directed by Steven Spielberg if I didn’t know anything about it (including who its director was) going in? Yes, of course. The daddy issues, DP Kaminski’s streams of light, and the John Williams scores. Not many directors get to achieve such mainstream success and then have their movies studied over and over again by countless cinephiles.