The best Steven Spielberg movies, according to us

polygon.com:

The best movies of a given year, ranking every Marvel movie, the greatest Steven Universe episodes… We can definitively land on those as a group. But when the Polygon staff started talking about the legend of movie director legends, Steven Spielberg, it was immediately clear there was no way we’d embark on the quest of list-making and live to tell the tale. Spielberg has dipped into every genre, flexed every cinematic muscle, and made too many classics for too many varying tastes. When folks start wondering if a guy’s pre-movie-career Columbo episode should be in consideration for the upper echelon of a ranking, that’s trouble. That’s an S-tier career, but it’s trouble.

So instead of losing sleep over constructing a monolithic Spielberg ranking, we decided to just file our ballots — and let Polygon readers weigh in with their own. With The Fabelmans bringing Spielberg’s entire filmography into focus, and with the 2023 Oscars looming, now felt like the right time to wade through a 50-plus-year run and pick our favorites. For your consideration, here are the best Steven Spielberg movies, according to whoever was prepared to get yelled at for having favorite Steven Spielberg movies.

Austen Goslin

Steven Spielberg has made a lot of great movies in his career and three absolutely perfect ones, which are the three at the top of this list. Raiders is the greatest adventure movie ever made, a beautiful film shot by cinematographer Douglas Slocombe with a pitch-perfect lead performance so well realized that it created a rogue archetype that to this day no one else has managed to capture. Somehow one of the only blockbusters to ever rival Raiders in terms of pure fun, energy, and entertainment is Jurassic Park,which is reason