33. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Don’t blame Harrison Ford, who was a spry 65 when he shot this fourth Indy adventure. It’s the rest of the film that’s a mess: we get Mayans, kung-fu assassins, extraterrestrials, giant ants and that fridge, which protects the hero from an atomic blast in the most widely mocked scene of Spielberg’s career.
32. Hook (1991)
This Peter Pan sequel began life as a musical before Spielberg “chickened out after the first week of shooting” and removed all the songs. Show tunes might have distracted from Robin Williams at his most saccharine or Julia Roberts as a swattable Tinkerbell.
Or: All Equine on the Western Front. A boy and his horse are separated by war in this adaptation of the Michael Morpurgo novel and National Theatre hit. Emily Watson, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch do proper Period Drama Acting against a backdrop of CGI skies and synthetic emotion.
30. Always (1989)
Based on one of Spielberg’s two favourite films (A Guy Named Joe) and featuring a final role for Audrey Hepburn (the star of the other, Two for the Road), this labour of love is laborious all right. Richard Dreyfuss is the dead pilot guiding his earthbound sweetheart (Holly Hunter) to happiness.
A futuristic VR hotchpotch featuring a sluggish hero, lacklustre world-building and self-congratulatory references such as the DeLorean from the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future, a device named the Zemeckis Cube, and an interminable sequence piggybacking on The Shining.
Despite some touching rapport between a performance-capture Mark Rylance and the peppery, 11-year-old Ruby Barnhill, this Roald Dahl fantasy goes downhill once it reaches Buckingham Palace and some twee, oleaginous material involving the Queen (Penelope Wilton).
27. The Terminal (2004)
A self-consciously quirky comedy in which an eastern European jazz buff (Tom Hanks) finds himself stateless and consigned to a JFK airport terminal. What might have been a Tati-esque study of man against modernity sinks in whimsy, though Hanks’s romantic dinner with a flight attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is a gem of a scene.
26. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
“If I’m on my heels, I get better ideas than … coming in to do the sequel to Jurassic Park,” Spielberg told this paper last year. “It’s a lot better for me not to make the sequel to Jurassic Park.” Hear, hear. Blockbuster-by-numbers stuff save for a tense sequence involving a Winnebago dangling off the edge of a cliff.
25. The Color Purple (1985)
Nakedly craving Oscar recognition, Spielberg made his first foray into “grown-up” material, casting newcomers Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in an adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel about the struggles of a young African-American woman in early-20th-century Georgia. Performances aside, the film reeks of insincerity.
24. Amistad (1997)
There’s genuine ferocity to the uprising at the start of this real-life 19th-century slavery drama. Thereafter, the film settles into courtroom ponderousness and a predominantly white perspective despite the commanding presence of Djimon Hounsou. Anthony Hopkins grandstands enjoyably as former president John Quincy Adams.
23. Munich (2005)
In following the Mossad revenge mission to hunt down the Palestinians responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Spielberg’s thriller is torn apart by equivocation, and his own temperamental unsuitability for the job in hand. The closing sex scene is the worst of the film’s misjudgments.
Read More: All Steven Spielberg’s films – ranked! | Steven Spielberg