4 - Saving Private Ryan

3 - Close Encounters of the Third Kind

2 - Schindler's List

1 - Raiders of the Lost Ark

This is a nearly impossible list to get right. On the other hand, it's hard to get it wrong. There are a couple of Spielberg movies that could be substituted here, most notably Jaws. My reason for keeping that off the list is pretty simple, really. Though he grew by leaps and bounds as a director between Jaws and Close Encounters, if you watch them back to back, Jaws is more simplistic, not really the work of a guy at the peak of his powers. It shows a huge amount of promise, no question, but Spielberg was not quite in total control just yet.

Having said that, Jaws is one of the great films ever, so cheers to you, Mr. Spielberg.

I don't have E.T. as high as some might. I think it's a great family film and a very good movie all the way around, but I don't really have a great deal of reverence for it overall. It's a wonderful fantasy, when you've got this guy's resume...

I don't know if we'll ever find a war movie that so completely changes the rules the way Saving Private Ryan did. The opening 20 minutes of that film are so unlike Spielberg and yet they're undeniable the right way to tell that story.

Close Encounters is Spielberg's first true masterpiece. It's got a great story - which he wrote himself, incidentally - it expands on the summer blockbuster frame of mind he entered with Jaws, but does so with a keen eye for quality and originality. It's a serious film, garnered Spielberg his first Best Director nomination, and stands the test of time when most UFO or space movies from that era seem mostly laughable. And, like it or not, when you think of aliens, you see Spielberg's aliens.

Schindler's List, like Private Ryan, is the definitive word on that subject. Horrifying and expertly made, it's another example of how the man who invented the summer blockbuster is a lot more than that.

But Spielberg's best movie is his most exciting, his most fun, his most rambunctious. Raiders of the Lost Ark is probably the perfect action film; when I was making a case for The Bourne Ultimatum being the "best action movie since..." I had to go all the way back here to 1981.

There are maybe 20, 30 movies that simply don't age. Close Encounters has aged, albeit well, and Star Wars has aged, but Raiders never feels out of place, out of date, or out of style. It could be released today and there's not a frame of that movie that would be anachronistic, in terms of its filmmaking approach.

It has a much better script than you'd think, it's funnier than you expect, the action is terrific, and it has been imitated more often in the past 25 years than any other movie from that era. That most of the also-rans are exactly that gives us even more confidence that Raiders of the Lost Ark is as good as we think it is.