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Silver Bullet, I feel exactly the opposite about Stevie Spielberg's stuff: I love all the early stuff, while I have little to no use for most of what he did after Raiders of the Lost Ark or so. Ranking his work for me would go...
BEST to WORST
1. Jaws (1975)
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
4. The Sugarland Express (1974)
5. Muncih (2005)
6. Empire of the Sun (1987)
7. Schindler's List (1993)
8. 1941 (1979)
9. Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade (1989)
10. Minority Report (2002)
11. Always (1989)
12. Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom (1984)
13. Poltergeist (1982)*
14. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
15. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
16. The War of the Worlds (2005)
17. "Duel" (1971)
18. Catch Me if You Can (2002)
19. The Color Purple (1985)
20. Amistad (1997)
21. A.I. - Artificial Intelligence (2001)
22. Jurassic Park (1993)
23. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
24. The Terminal (2004)
25. Hook (1991)
UPDATED THROUGH MUNICH
As for the original question in this thread: no, of course I do NOT think Spielberg is the greatest director of all-tme...or of any time or any genre. My main problem with Spielberg is that his sentimentality has grown bigger and more mawkish over the years, to the point where it now has a tendency to overwhelm most everything he does, cropping up in inappropriate moments and ruining the flow and overall feel of his films for me.
The top four I listed, Jaws, Raiders, Close Encounters and Sugarland Express, are all intense favorites, movies I have seen countless dozens of times and enjoyed as much on the sixty-third viewing as I did on the first. And all the way up to my number ten, I find all of those movies good to great. But the bottom five I listed, Hook, Lost World, Jurassic Park, The Terminaland A.I., are all deeply disappointing to me, given the promise and flourish of his first eight years or so making feature films. Numbers eleven through nineteen are all deeply flawed for me in one way or another, and most are entirely overrated from my perspective.
But as the kids used to say, whatEVER. The man has talent, no doubt, I just don't think his output from the '90s onward has been anywhere near the promise of Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark. I find him consistently disappointing these days. I rather enjoyed Minority Report, but then he took steps backward with Catch Me If You Can and War of the Worlds, and The Terminal is just dreadful.
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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra
Last edited by Holden Pike; 05-29-06 at 04:08 PM.
Reason: *updating the movies list