D'entre a suya filmografía, se puet destacar bellas cintas como Jaws (1975, con Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw y Lorraine Gary), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, con Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Melinda Dillon y Terri Garr), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982, con Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore y Peter Coyote), Poltergeist (1982, con Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne y Oliver Robins), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984, con Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Jonathan Ke Quan y Amrish Puri), Back to the Future (1985, de Robert Zemeckis, con Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson y Crispin Glover), The Color Purple (1985, con Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey y Danny Glover), Empire of the Sun (1987, con Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson y Nigel Havers), Hook (1991, con Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, Julia Roberts y Bob Hoskins), Jurassic Park (1993, con Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough y Joseph Mazzello), Schindler's List (1993, con Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes y Caroline Goodall), Saving Private Ryan (1998, con Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon y Tom Sizemore), u Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008, con Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Ray Winstone, John Hurt y Jim Broadbent).