The cast of Steven Spielberg’s upcoming, allegedly UFO-themed new project Disclosure Day includes the well-known likes of Emily Blunt, Oscar winner Colin Firth, Oscar nominee Colman Domingo, and It Guy Josh O’Connor. But when the first billboards for the film showed up in Times Square and Los Angeles not long ago, along with the image of an eye within the silhouette of a bird, the message “ALL WILL BE DISCLOSED” and a release date—June 12, 2026—there was only one name plastered on the mysterious teaser, which didn’t even include the movie’s title: SPIELBERG.
Even in his seventies, even as cross-media IP drawing power dwarfs boldfaced Hollywood names on a regular basis, Steven Spielberg remains perhaps the single most marketable American director. He’s been making feature films for over 50 years, the majority of them hits; he has two directing Oscars and countless smash producer credits; and he still works with the frequency and tenacity of a much younger man. Like Hitchcock, his command of the art of film will linger indefinitely, even if his favored approaches and/or genres go out of style. Not that we’re in any danger of that; Stranger Things, with its Spielberg/King hybrid of goopy horror and kids-on-bikes adventure, assures that movies and TV will be pilfering from the best for years to come.
Yet his work is so much more than a few (terrific) suburban-wonder fantasy-adventure movies from a highly specific period (as well as some knockoffs, contemporaneous and not, that he produced himself). Like a lot of his peers, he’s dipped heavily into American history, not just revisiting his pulpy Indiana Jones version of World War II in starker, bloodier movies like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, but exploring courtroom battles, legislative wrangling, and racial struggle. Yet unlike his less fantastically-oriented peers, Spielberg also periodically looks into the future; he’s one of our most versatile sci-fi visionaries, often setting the fanciful and the dystopian side by side. Sometimes derided for his crowd-pleasing, popcorn-slinging instincts, Spielberg does have a canny awareness of the audience, but his movies are often thornier and less reassuring than he’s given credit for. And more than most great directors, a list of the best Spielberg movies can’t be confined to a neat ten. His filmography contains so much that you might as well just sort through the whole thing; more of it is great than not, and even the misfires are shot through with some stunning technique. Read on for further explanation; all will be disclosed. —JESSE HASSENGER
Click here to read Jesse Hassenger’s ranked list of the best Steven Spielberg movies.
