Season 3

What do you get when you combine the star studded power of Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks with the blockbuster filmmaking genius of Steven Spielberg with a globe-trotting, fast paced crime drama? Turns out you get a really g...

Minority Report feels like the deepest dive into hard sci-fi that Steven Spielberg has ever attempted, and it is also his first collaboration with fellow Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise. That combination makes for an interesti...

With A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg dove headfirst into sci-fi storytelling more than he ever had before. With incredible production design, another great child performance for Spielberg in Haley Joel Osment, ...

Largely considered the best (or one of the best) WWII movies ever made, Saving Private Ryan showed that Spielberg could make just about any kind of movie and do it masterfully. We talk about how he pulled it off, his …

A new era of Spielberg’s career was launched when he partnered with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen to start a brand new studio from scratch: DreamWorks SKG. I talk through the history of this endeavor and what it means f...

Spielberg’s Amistad, the telling of a true historical event in which enslaved Africans took over their slave ship and were then captured and put on trial to determine their freedom, has some things going for it. It looks grea...

A few years after the most successful year of his entire career, Spielberg released what he called his first true sequel in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Our discussion revolves around the fun elements of this film and it’s ...

Schindler’s List is almost undeniably Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, the pinnacle of his career, and releasing just 6 months after the record breaking Jurassic Park. However, it didn’t come without its struggles on an emotio...

In 1993, Steven Spielberg once again awed audiences by giving them something they had never seen so real before on the big screen: dinosaurs. With Jurassic Park, he started what would turn out to be one of the greatest movie …

With Hook, Spielberg was beginning a new decade of filmmaking, but this adventure movie that acts as a twist on a classic tale really marks the end of a particular phase in his career. This film was a huge deal …

For this intermission in our Spielberg series, we take a look back at his career thus far, analyzing his career of the 1970s and 1980s overall. Then we discuss the transition point Spielberg is in moving out of the 80s …

Spielberg ended his run of 80s movies with the romance-drama-comedy-fantasy Always. If that sounds like a confusing mish-mash of genres, it’s because it kind of is. While the movie is tonally confusing and has a plot that is ...

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, seemingly the last of a trilogy of adventure collaborations between Steven Spielberg and George Lucas at the time, came in the middle of a bit of a career shift for Spielberg. You can see …

Empire of the Sun is a forgotten gem in Steven Spielberg’s filmography, which is fitting since its setting is sort of a forgotten perspective on WWII. This is a bit of a hybrid for Spielberg in that it marries his …

In his first attempt at a serious adult drama, Spielberg takes on not just a new type of movie for his career but also an adaption of an award winning novel with a predominantly black cast (unfortunately a tremendous anomaly …

Twilight Zone: The Movie was supposed to be a collaborative passion project for longtime fan of the TV series Steven Spielberg who produced it and directed one of its four segments. But with a tragedy casting a shadow over th...

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a film in a beloved franchise that actually carries a heavy burden with it for its filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. In this episode I am joined by Elijah Davidson of …

This week, Melvin Benson of the Cinematic Doctrine podcast joins us to discuss what Steven Spielberg has called his most personal film: E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. At the height of his powers in the 1980’s, this awe-filled lo...

Indiana Jones is one of the most iconic characters of all time, and it is all due to a combination of the charm of Harrison Ford and the masterful character building of Steven Spielberg as director and George Lucas as …

In 1941, the 1979 WWII comedy, we have a prime example of a powerhouse director putting out a complete flop. Steven Spielberg along with writers in Robert Zemecki & Bob Gale and producer John Milius were trying to ride the …

Spielberg followed up his breakout summer blockbuster Jaws with a sci-fi adventure thriller in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Its success is due to the incredible visual and narrative storytelling alongside the innovativ...

Jaws marks both the breakout of Steven Spielberg’s illustrious career and the beginning of the summer blockbuster. From crazy production stories to camera work to efficient character building and more, this discussion with gu...

Spielberg’s first theatrically released feature film, The Sugarland Express, showed many signs of what was to come for the young director. In this episode I discuss the many Spielberg-ian themes, character traits, camera tech...

Steven Spielberg’s Duel was never supposed to be as successful as it was. As a movie of the week TV feature in 1971, the 24 year old director gained the attention of critics and studios alike with a road thriller …