There’s a reason why Steven Spielberg is still the undisputed King of Hollywood.
Over the course of a nearly five-decade-long career, he has perfected and/or inaugurated any number of cinematic movements and innovations.
Coming of age as one of the “movie brats” – the generation of filmmakers who transformed American cinema in the Sixties and Seventies
Spielberg also helped kick off Hollywood’s blockbuster culture with Jaws in 1975
Spielberg also helped kick off Hollywood’s blockbuster culture with Jaws in 1975
(and then sent that culture into overdrive with the one-two punch of Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial in 1981 and 1982).
The success of such movies and their imitators has been identified by many as one of the reasons why American film culture took a nosedive in the 1980s, but his career has always alternated between blockbusters and more serious fare.
He has tackled tough subjects – the Holocaust in Schindler’s List, WWII in Saving Private Ryan, terrorism in Munich,
the Civil War and slavery in Lincoln – while somehow always managing to make films that also work as popular entertainments along the way. To wit: in just the past four months,
Spielberg has released one Best Picture nominee, the historical drama The Post, and is now back in theaters with one of the more complicated and ambitious works of his career,
the long-awaited virtual-reality sci-fi adventure Ready Player One.