Few directors have been as concerned with the little moments as Steven Spielberg. Of course, the filmmaker — certainly the world’s most famous director, and a strong contender for America’s greatest — is concerned with the big picture, too. But few since Lubitsch have had such a facility for the beat, the set piece, the gag, the reversal, the sequence that you replay in your head long after you’ve walked out of the theater.
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Hopefully “The BFG,” which opens this week (read our review), will add a few more memorable Spielberg moments to the canon. But after ranking the director’s films, we’ve taken another look at his work and assembled an exhaustive list of our favorite scenes, bits or snippets across his 45-year career, one of the most extraordinary we’ve ever seen.
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Not all of his films benefit from this treatment — “The Sugarland Express” or “Lincoln” are under- or unrepresented here, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not great (you can read the exclusion of “The Terminal” as a statement, though) — and some of his lesser films still have transcendent moments. But together, it’s a list of accomplishments that only a handful of directors ever could possibly hold a candle to. Take a look at our picks, and watch them, below, and let us know what you would have included in the comments.
50. Captain Nicholls’ Death – “War Horse” (2011)
Even if the whole doesn’t hang together, “War Horse” has some astonishing sequences. The classicism of this one, where a foolish cavalry charge on machine-gun holding Germans, costing the life of Tom Hiddleston’s Captain Nicholls, is a stunner, showing the naivety of the British as a new era of warfare approaches. The simplicity of the cutting — from Hiddleston’s despairing, broken face, to the muzzle flare of the gun, to a horse with no rider — is almost Eisensteinian.
49. The Opening Sequence – “Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull” (2008)
The fourth Indy movie is easily the worst of the series and arguably Spielberg’s worst film, but if it began with the zeal of its opening scene, it’d have been a triumph. Setting a chase scene in the warehouse from the end of Raiders was an ingenious idea, and aside from a few extraneous moments of CGI (particularly the fridge-nuking and gophers), it has a level of wit and invention that feels worthy of its heritage, with the perfect suburban ghost town being a particularly eerie touch.
48. The Mutiny – “Amistad” (1997)
For the most part, “Amistad” is one of Spielberg’s duller affairs, the worst kind of white-savior movie, but it has a very striking sequence, as Cinque (Djimon Hounsou) and his fellow slaves lead a revolt on the titular ship, killing the Spanish crew members among a storm. It’s a bloody and much-needed blast of pure fury, shown in strobing chiaroscuro, though rather misleading as far as the beige courtroom drama that follows goes.
47. “He Chose… Poorly” – “Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade” (1989)
Yes, the ending of “The Last Crusade,” as Indy and his Nazi captors find the Holy Grail and its immortal knight guard, is treading similar ground to the end of “Raiders Of The Lost Ark.” But with Papa Jones’ life on the line, it’s a genuinely tense sequence. And the VFX of Julian Glover’s villain aging into a skeleton in seconds is still tremendous, while the line delivery by Robert Eddison of “He chose… poorly” is the perfect capper.
46. The Monkey Brain Banquet – “Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom” (1984)
Full disclosure: As someone with a fairly disastrous snake phobia, I can’t watch the clip for the banquet scene in ‘Temple Of Doom’ because of the ‘snake surprise’ bit (big snake full of tiny little snakes, something that might actually be the source of my phobia, now that I think about it). That it, and the other courses, most famously the gruesome monkey brains, left such a scar on my psyche is probably a solid testament that it should be here, though…
45. Opening Sequence – “Bridge Of Spies” (2015)
There isn’t a lot of flash to “Bridge Of Spies,” but the closest thing it has to a stand-out set piece is the opening, a virtually dialogue-free sequence that tracks Mark Rylance’s Rudolf Abel through an impeccably realized 1960s Brooklyn as he picks up a coded message while being tracked by American agents. It’s not quite a full-on suspense sequence, but it’s a lovely immersion into the film’s period and time, and an early showcase for Rylance’s turn (the clip below picks up just after, sadly…)
44. Celie Stands Up To Albert – “The Color Purple” (1985)
Once treated somewhat skeptically, and still somewhat unloved in the Spielberg canon, “The Color Purple” has had a bit of a restoration of its reputation over the years, and rightly so. It’s mostly one that works better as a whole that through its moments (see also “Catch Me If You Can” or “Lincoln”), but does have some memorable highs, and the one we remember most is when Whoopi Goldberg’s Celie finally snaps, pulls a knife on Danny Glover’s abusive Albert, and curses him: “Until you do right by me, everything you think about is gonna crumble.”
43. The Pool – “A.I: Artificial Intelligence” (2001)
No Spielberg movie has been reconsidered more than “A.I: Artificial Intelligence.” His Kubrick-inspired sci-fi “Pinocchio” riff is an odd beast that becomes more and more rewarding over time. One of its most haunting moments comes in the crucial scene at a children’s birthday party, when Haley Joel Osment’s little metal boy’s programming causes him to accidentally nearly drown his brother. There’s something nightmarish about the way that tragedy spirals out of good intentions, and the way he’s left alone at the bottom of the pool is one of the film’s most indelible images.
42. The First Attack – “War Of The Worlds” (2005)
Today, the use of 9/11 imagery in big-budget tentpoles is so common that it feels almost hacky. But when Spielberg did it less than four years after the attacks, and in a big-budget blockbuster no less, it was shocking and almost transgressive. While the effects haven’t aged so well, there’s still a very particular horror in the indiscriminate nature of the creature’s attacks, the way it vaporizes its victims into white dust (which ends up caking Cruise, hence the 9/11 comparisons).
41. The Breaking Glass – “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” (1997)
“The Lost World” isn’t a great film; it’s a rather soulless, contrived follow-up to its predecessor. But it is occasionally extremely effective in a mechanical sort of way — particularly so in this scene, one of Spielberg’s best suspense moments, where a bus featuring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and Vince Vaughn’s characters is pushed over a cliff, leaving it dangling and Moore suspended on a thin pane of glass that’s quickly fracturing. Hitchcock would be envious.
