Loving the alien … ET the Extra-Terrestrial. Photograph: FlixPix/Alamy View image in fullscreen Loving the alien … ET the Extra-Terrestrial. Photograph: FlixPix/Alamy Steven Spielberg ‘Once my tummy stopped shaking, I was absorbed by the scale, spectacle and wonder’: your Steven Spielberg film favourites We’ve already listed our writers’ all-timers , now Guardian readers get their say on the seminal director’s best blockbusters
Prefer the Guardian on Google ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) ET is my favourite Spielberg film. It was the first I ever saw at the cinema, when I was eight years old, at Bolton Odeon in 1982. It was also the first film that made me cry – not just cry, but sob all the way home on the bus. I remember feeling completely confused by the fact that I was so happy and yet so sad at the same time. I watched the film with my mum and some of her friends from the Gingerbread Club, a single parents’ organisation that arranged social events and outings, mainly for single mothers. At a time when there was still a stigma attached to being a single parent, it provided a sense of community and support.
Looking back, I think part of the reason I connected so strongly with ET was that it featured a single mum rather than the perfect nuclear family that dominated so many films and TV programmes of the time. It felt much closer to my own reality, and that made me love the film even more. That Christmas, my favourite present was an ET doll with a light-up stomach and glowing fingertip. I adored it. More than 40 years later, I still love the film dearly and never hesitate when someone asks me what my favourite film is. Even now, hearing a few notes of John Williams’s score is enough to bring tears to my eyes within seconds. Andrea, 51, Manchester, UK
Universally touted as a Spielberg flop. So much so, that even Spielberg himself started to regret ever making the film. All of this is inconsequential to its meaning for me as a child of the 90s. The film is a trusted comfort. I can quote all the dialogue, and even use phrases from it in my day-to-day life. The casting, the effervescently sad Robin Williams as the boy who accidentally grew up, the lawyer jokes, the warm haze that permeates the film. I remember it being played on free-to-air many times as a child and having my own – pardon the pun – pirated copy. I returned to this film often as a child, and still return to it at least once a year now, when a dose of nostalgia is needed. So despite Spielberg’s protestations, it is my favourite of his oeuvre for many selfish reasons. Rhea, Melbourne, Australia
View image in fullscreen Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Photograph: Columbia/Allstar Close Encounters of the Third Kind will always be the Spielberg movie that means the most to me, as much for the circumstances that led to me seeing it as the wonderful film itself. I was five years of age and my mum decided to take my sister and I to see a movie double bill at a cinema in nearby Chester. From memory, the films we were meant to see were a Spider-Man movie that was actually made for TV, and a much older, Ray Harryhausen-animated, Sinbad film. Long story short, my dad dropped us at the wrong cinema, on the opposite side of town, and my mum decided we should see whatever was showing there rather than venturing through an increasingly dark, wet evening.
The only “suitable” movie was Close Encounters, although my mum said numerous times before buying the tickets that she was worr...