Spielberg co-founded Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks, and he has served as a producer for many successful films and television series, among them Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Band of Brothers (2001).

[10][11] His mother, Leah (née Posner, later Adler),[12] was a concert pianist and ran a kosher dairy restaurant,[13] and his father, Arnold,[14] was an electrical engineer involved in the development of computers.

[44] Formative films included Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous (1937), Walt Disney's Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and The Seven Samurai (1954),[45][46] Ishirō Honda's Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

(1956),[47][48] David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) ("the film that set me on my journey"), Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) ("I'm still living off the adrenalin that...

Spielberg made his theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express (1974), based on a true story about a married couple on the run, desperate to regain custody of their baby from foster parents.

[88] One of the rare films both written and directed by Spielberg, Close Encounters was very popular with filmgoers[89] and won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography (Vilmos Zsigmond) and Best Sound Effects Editing (Frank Warner).

[97] The film was a box office success[98] and won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction (Norman Reynolds, Leslie Dilley and Michael D. Ford); Best Film Editing (Michael Kahn); Best Sound (Bill Varney, Steve Maslow, Gregg Landaker and Roy Charman); Best Sound Editing (Ben Burtt and Richard L. Anderson); and Best Visual Effects (Richard Edlund, Kit West, Bruce Nicholson and Joe Johnston).

[99] Roger Ebert wrote: "Raiders of the Lost Ark is an out-of-body experience, a movie of glorious imagination and breakneck speed that grabs you in the first shot, hurtles you through a series of incredible adventures, and deposits you back in reality two hours later–breathless, dizzy, wrung-out, and with a silly grin on your face".

This was rapture made audible, palpable ... Spielberg orchestrated the movements of the camera and the puppet spaceman with the feelings of—it has to be called love—expressed in young Henry Thomas' yearning face.

And this scaly, wrinkled little man with huge, wide-apart, soulful eyes and a jack-in-the-box neck has been so fully created that he's a friend to us, too; when he speaks of his longing to go home the audience becomes as mournful as Elliot.

A loose adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel The Lost World, the plot follows mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and his researchers who study dinosaurs at Jurassic Park which is on an island and are confronted by another team with a different agenda.

[160] The Village Voice critic opined that The Lost World was "better crafted but less fun" than the first film, while The Guardian wrote "It looks like a director on autopilot [...] The special effects brook no argument.

"[161] Starring Morgan Freeman, Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou and Matthew McConaughey, Spielberg used Allen's ten years worth of research to reenact the difficult historical scenes.

"[164] Spielberg's 1998 release was World War II epic Saving Private Ryan, about a group of US soldiers led by Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) sent to bring home a paratrooper whose three older brothers were killed in the same twenty-four hours of the Normandy landing.

[165][169] Thomson writes "Ryan changed war films: combat, shock, wounds, and fear had never been so graphically presented; and yet there was also a true sense of what duties and ideas had felt like in 1944.

[188] Starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, the film is about an American dock worker who is forced to look after his children, from whom he lives separately, as he tries to protect and reunite them with their mother when extraterrestrials invade Earth.

Released nineteen years after Last Crusade, the film is set in 1957, pitting Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) against Soviet agents led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), searching for a telepathic crystal skull.

[213] In a review for Salon magazine, Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "at this point in his career Spielberg is pursuing personal goals, and everything that's terrific and overly flat and tooth-rottingly sweet about War Horse reflects that.

[227] In 2016, Spielberg made The BFG, an adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book, starring newcomer Ruby Barnhill, and Mark Rylance as the titular Big Friendly Giant.

[223] The BFG received fair reviews; Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune compared certain scenes to the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick,[232] while Toronto Sun's Liz Braun thought that there were "moments of wonder and delight" but it was too long.

[258] Despite the favorable critical reception, West Side Story and The Fabelmans were box office failures, which Variety suggested could be attributed to a decline in the popularity of Spielberg in a film-going environment altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the public's loss of interest in prestige films.

[157][149] Spielberg cited greater creative control and distribution improvements as the main reasons for founding his own studio;[292] he and his partners compared themselves to the founders of United Artists in 1919.

[314] The purchase was made from the King estate, led by son Dexter, while the two other surviving children, the Reverend Bernice and Martin III, immediately threatened to sue, not having given their approvals to the project.

[316] In May 2016, it was announced that Cary Joji Fukunaga was in talks to direct the miniseries for HBO, from a script by David Leland based on extensive research materials accumulated by Stanley Kubrick over the years.

And my film school was really the cultural heritage of Hollywood and international filmmaking because there's no better teacher than Lubitsch or Hitchcock or Kurosawa or Kubrick, you know, or Ford or William Wyler or Billy Wilder or Clarence Brown – I mean, Val Lewton.

It was shown at America's Millennium Gala on December 31, 1999, in the National Mall at the Reflecting Pool at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.[406] Spielberg endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election; he donated $1 million to Priorities USA Action.

[413] Spielberg said in a statement, "I find that my conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual [...] Sudan's government bears the bulk of the responsibility for these on-going crimes, but the international community, and particularly China, should be doing more.

"[419] Speaking of the attacks he said, "I never imagined I would see such unspeakable barbarity against Jews in my lifetime" and that the Shoah Foundation project will ensure "that their stories would be recorded and shared in the effort to preserve history and to work toward a world without antisemitism or hate of any kind.

His work is admired by numerous acclaimed directors, including Robert Aldrich,[464] Ingmar Bergman,[465] Werner Herzog,[466] Stanley Kubrick,[467] David Lean,[468] Sidney Lumet,[469] Roman Polanski,[470] Martin Scorsese,[471] François Truffaut[472] and Jean Renoir[473] Spielberg's films have also influenced directors J. J. Abrams,[474] Paul Thomas Anderson,[475] Neill Blomkamp,[476] Jon M. Chu,[477][478] Arnaud Desplechin,[479] Gareth Edwards,[480] Roland Emmerich,[481] Enrique Gato,[482] Max Hechtman,[483] Don Hertzfeldt,[484] Peter Jackson,[485] Kal Ng,[486] Jordan Peele,[487] S. S. Rajamouli,[488] Robert Rodriguez,[489] John Sayles,[490] Ridley Scott,[491] John Singleton,[492] Kevin Smith,[493] and Michael Williams.

[499][500][497] In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind wrote that Spielberg is "infantilizing the audience, reconstituting the spectator as child, then overwhelming him and her with sound and spectacle, obliterating irony, aesthetic self-consciousness, and critical reflection".