As if Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t already deserve countless plaudits for his transformative performance as the sixteenth President of the United States in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, it seems his reluctance to take on the role–noting that reluctance to take on a … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Ten
In Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis moves on from acting to alchemy. The two-time Oscar-winner is hardly prolific (he’s made only ten films since collecting that first Academy Award, for My Left Foot, a film now twenty-three years old), but … Continue reading Everything sticks until it goes away
#18 — Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) First, a consideration of the pleasure and reward of a perfectly chosen line of dialogue. One of the most famed elements of Steven Spielberg’s sophomore feature film, Jaws, is the way that the technical … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Eighteen
#26 — Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) In 1990, film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert took a break from flinging their thumbs around in judgment and created a television special called The Future of the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Six
Throughout his lengthy career, Steven Spielberg has consistently been dogged by criticism that his films are overly manipulative, as if appealing to the audience’s emotions wasn’t a wholly relevant goal in making a movie. Considering he’s almost certainly the most … Continue reading Shiver and say the words of every lie you’ve heard
#3 — Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) Just for fun, consider where Steven Spielberg was professionally when Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in the summer of 1981. He had directed four previous feature films, the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Three
#18 — E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982) The nineteen-eighties belonged to Steven Spielberg. Even those who react to the filmmaker’s name with an instinctual would surely concede that point. Considering he closed the seventies with 1941, a film that … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Eighteen
#24 — The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985) When I decided I was going to continue on with the Top 50 Films posts, addressing a new decade every year, I knew some extra homework would be required. Unsurprisingly, the further … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Twenty-Four
#50 — Always (Steven Spielberg, 1989) If you want a snapshot of who I was at the age of nineteen, Always is as good a place as any to start. Like a lot of people who grew up during the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Fifty
#4 — Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) In Empire magazine a couple of years ago, Francis Ford Coppola condescendingly asked Steven Spielberg (buffered by the safe distance afforded by an interlocutor) if he was going to ever make a “personal” … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Four
Coffee for Two 