One of Spielberg's most underseen films, and also one of his least typical, Spielberg's theatrical debut feature has a rough-and-ready quality that no subsequent films of his has ever repeated. In a sense, he got too accomplished for this kind of fare, but it's also hard to imagine him making anything this casually character-driven these days: this story of a fugitive couple who kidnap a cop and criss-cross the country with him in tow has the kind of propulsive story momentum he later honed on more high-concept projects, but with a pavement-level social savvy that he never really returned to. Interestingly, it's his film to compete at Cannes, where it won the Best Screenplay prize.

- Guy Lodge