Forget Jaws, Steven Spielberg's 141-Minute Thriller Is A Masterpiece From Start To Finish

Published Oct 13, 2026, 11:50 AM EDT

Simon Gallagher has worked in movie and TV journalism for more than 17 years. He has written more than 6000 articles and reviews, and edited thousands more. He is an expert in the entertainment industry, particularly in the golden age of screen superheroes. Simon is also a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic.
 

When you’re discussing a legend of cinema like Steven Spielberg, the conversation quickly turns to the best movies made across his decades-long career. When Disclosure Day came out, reuniting Spielberg with sci-fi after years apart, discourse about how it compared to his other sci-fi movies was never far away. That’s obviously somewhat reductive, but Spielberg is a master, and he constantly sets a higher watermark for himself.

Considering his body of work, you think of Spielberg as a master of sci-fi and huge spectacle, and a key pioneer in modern blockbuster filmmaking. He’s made a career out of capturing wide-eyed wonder, family-friendly heart, and incredible set-pieces that often threaten to take your breath away. But, strangely, when evaluating him strictly as a dramatic storyteller, Spielberg is actually oddly underrated.

Jaws is frequently cited as the best Spielberg movie, even decades on, and is celebrated for how he turned a nightmare production into simple, compelling magic on-screen. Ironically, it wasn’t actually the movie he meant to make, but Bruce the shark’s mechanical issues forced him to focus even more closely on suspenseful storytelling, using absence and suggestion to weaponize the audience’s imagination against them. That skill then became a core part of his approach to movies throughout his career, but calling Jaws his absolute best movie is almost limiting because it overlooks how vastly different his work has been across six decades. He actually has a best sci-fi, a best monster movie, a best biopic, a best adventure movie… He’s done a lot.

And whether he’s unleashing prehistoric predators, leading digital avatars through pop-culture-filled virtual reality worlds, or retelling historical flashpoints, it’s that Spielbergian emotional core that always remains. His masterpieces shout loudly, but one never seems to get the credit it deserves, because it’s so wildly different than his bigger movies. In Bridge of Spies, he captured magic in a bottle, creating something akin to a quiet greatest hits collection that stands alongside Schindler's List as the best of his non-blockbuster output.

Bridge Of Spies Is A Too-Often Overlooked Masterpiece

Despite earning six Academy Award nominations, Bridge of Spies rarely gets brought up in the conversation about Spielberg’s best movie. Perhaps because it lacks flashy set pieces or iconic monsters or heroes, it gets misremembered as a gentle historical drama rather than the meticulously crafted thriller it actually is. At 141 minutes long, it takes its time to let conversations and character dynamics build irresistibly, building intensity at the right times with real mastery.

Bridge of Spies is also an elegant marriage of themes and storytelling devices Spielberg has used throughout his career - as I said, it’s like his greatest hits in one place (with some obvious exceptions). You see the principled, everyday man cast into an unthinkable situation (like in Saving Private Ryan), combined with the courtroom element of Amistad. It also displays the tight machinery of suspense of his biggest thrillers, the grounded history of a Schindler's List, and the compelling, often oddly-funny cat-and-mouse dynamic of Catch Me If You Can. And of course, reuniting with Tom Hanks meant drawing upon the great actor’s enormous capacity for empathetic performance.

It’s also a beautiful-looking movie, as Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński paint a portrait of a cold, fractured Berlin that convincingly captures the grim reality of Cold War politics and the hollow elegance surrounding the men of power. Something so oppressive shouldn’t look this stylish. And it’s all balanced with Spielberg’s dry wit, which is helped hugely by the fact that the script was polished by Joel and Ethan Coen alongside Matt Charman. For all of its intense political undertones and its punctuations of high drama, it is, at its heart, a particularly warm film.

As you’d expect from a Spielberg movie, Bridge of Spies’ cast is impeccable. Enough has been said about Tom Hanks as an actor already, but it’s his dynamic with Mark Rylance’s gently ingenious performance as notorious spy Rudolf Abel that really makes the movie. Hanks plays lawyer James B. Donovan, who is almost reluctantly thrust into a political machine that wishes nothing but the worst outcomes for him, while Abel is a traitor, and there wouldn’t always be room for a friendship in a movie like this.

But Spielberg and the exceptional script go to great lengths to find the humanity in the relationship between Abel and Donovan, zooming in against a far bigger, weightier backdrop to explore human nature and to understand the madness of the context. He’s done the same thing repeatedly: think of Quint’s crew in Jaws, bonding over drunken horror stories; the strange charm of DiCaprio’s Frank Abagnale and Hanks’ Carl Hanratty in Catch Me If You Can; Schindler and Goeth in Schindler's List, or even Alan Grant and the kids in Jurassic Park. He understands that audiences process huge events through intimate personal connections, and when the characters are not immediately kindred, it works even better.

In Saving Private Ryan, the chaos of World War II is filtered entirely through Captain Miller’s squad. And Bridge of Spies applies this same intimate lens to the Cold War, with genius little moments like Donovan’s son being profoundly scared of the PSA he sees at school about surviving a nuclear attack. You get just enough of the awful reality of the war - like Donovan viewing the massacre of the young Germans attempting to cross into West Germany - that the tight focus on the main relationship between Donovan and Abel is more crucial. Their humanity makes the brink of war more compelling.

That dynamic also allows Spielberg to show off his greatest strength: humanizing characters, and in this case, one whom mainstream cinema might traditionally villainize. Mark Rylance’s Oscar-winning performance as Abel is nothing like what you’d expect from a spy embedded in American society: he’s a quiet, stoic figure whose dignity wins over Donovan just as it does the audience. By treating him - the recognized enemy - with warmth and subtlety, Spielberg makes Bridge of Spies a deeply moving tribute to principle and mutual respect. And it’s utterly captivating as a result.