Steven Spielberg curates a masterclass in cinema at MoMA
The legendary filmmaker has designed a series of Sunday double features that trace the artistic lineage of his greatest works, each pairing one of his own films with the classics that shaped his vision.
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To sit in a darkened cinema on a Sunday afternoon, understanding not merely what a filmmaker has created but why, is to glimpse the architecture of artistic imagination. The Museum of Modern Art has orchestrated precisely this experience through Sundays with Steven, a programme that extends an invitation into the mind of one of cinema’s most consequential visionaries.
Steven Spielberg, honoured at the 2026 MoMA Film Benefit, has collaborated with the institution to construct six Sunday double features. Each screening represents a deliberate act of curation: Spielberg has selected a film from his own body of work and paired it with another that profoundly influenced or inspired it. The result is a map of creative lineage, a visual essay written across the programme’s duration.
The series unfolds with particular resonance through its selection. Duel, Spielberg’s earliest feature film, appears in a new restoration that resurrects the tautness and innovation of his directorial debut. The 2021 West Side Story screens alongside the 1961 original, allowing audiences to witness how a visionary interpreter approaches material already consecrated by time. The blockbuster pantheon is represented too: Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark, films that redefined popular cinema and established templates that persist in the popular imagination decades hence.
More intricate pairings follow. Munich and Bridge of Spies, Spielberg’s ventures into espionage and moral complexity, are matched with The Day of the Jackal and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold respectively. These selections speak to something deeper than mere entertainment value; they reveal the intellectual preoccupations that animate Spielberg’s work, the obsessions that recur across his filmography with the consistency of a master musician returning to favourite themes.
A cinema of influences
What renders this programme particularly distinctive is its transparency about artistic influence. In an era when creation is often discussed in isolation, Spielberg’s willingness to contextualise his own work within a broader cinematic tradition offers a generosity of spirit. It suggests that even the most celebrated artists do not emerge from vacuum; they are shaped, challenged and inspired by those who preceded them.
The restoration of Duel carries particular significance. Released in 1971, it announced the arrival of a new sensibility in American cinema, a director possessed of intuitive command over tension and visual language. To encounter it anew, refreshed and clarified by restoration, is to recalibrate one’s understanding of how Spielberg’s subsequent work grew from these early foundations.
Tickets for Sundays with Steven are available through the Museum of Modern Art’s website. The complete schedule of screenings and showtimes allows for planning these afternoons of carefully considered cinema, moments when entertainment and education dissolve into one another, and a Sunday becomes not merely a day of rest but an education in how cinema speaks to the soul.
Imagery courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art (@themuseumofmodernart).
