Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg is the most commercially successful filmmaker in history, and the fact that he is also one of the most artistically accomplished is the thing his critics have never been able to reconcile. He has made more money than any director alive and spent most of that career proving that popular cinema and great cinema are not mutually exclusive categories.

Jaws invented the summer blockbuster in 1975. Before Spielberg, studios did not release their biggest films in the summer. After Jaws, they did nothing else. The film itself is a masterclass in tension built from limitation — the mechanical shark barely worked, so Spielberg kept it hidden, and in doing so created a kind of terror that no amount of CGI has ever replicated. The audience's imagination did the work, because Spielberg trusted it to.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is the most purely entertaining film ever made. Close Encounters of the Third Kind turned alien contact into a spiritual experience. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial made the entire world cry. These films cemented Spielberg as the great populist, the man who could make hundreds of millions of people feel the same emotion at the same time.

Then he made Schindler's List, and everything changed. Shot in black and white, with a rawness that felt closer to documentary than drama, it is the definitive cinematic treatment of the Holocaust. The girl in the red coat. The shower scene. Liam Neeson's breakdown at the end. Spielberg made the most important film of the 1990s and proved that the man who made E.T. could also stare into the abyss without blinking.

Saving Private Ryan opened with the most visceral combat sequence ever filmed — twenty-four minutes on Omaha Beach that changed how war would be depicted on screen forever. Munich was his most morally complex film. The Fabelmans was his most personal, a semi-autobiographical portrait of a boy who discovers that the camera can both reveal truth and create lies.

He has won three Academy Awards, directed films that have collectively grossed over ten billion dollars, and created two of the most successful franchises in history. He is seventy-nine years old and still working. The debate about whether Spielberg is the greatest American filmmaker is not really a debate. It is a formality.