Synopsis
After an encounter with UFOs, an electricity linesman feels undeniably drawn to an isolated area in the wilderness where something spectacular is about to happen.
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Cast
- Richard DreyfussRoy Neary
- François TruffautClaude Lacombe
- Teri GarrRonnie Neary
- Melinda DillonJillian Guiler
- Bob BalabanDavid Laughlin
- J. Patrick McNamaraProject Leader
- Warren J. KemmerlingWild Bill
- Roberts BlossomFarmer
- Phil DoddsARP Musician
- Cary GuffeyBarry Guiler
Recommendations
- 100
Chicago Sun-Times
It's one of the great moviegoing experiences. - 100
ReelViews
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is unquestionably a great movie. - 100
TV Guide Magazine
Steven Spielberg proves decisively that a special effects-dependent film need not be cold, mechanistic, or simpleminded. - 100
The Hollywood Reporter
The visuals here...are never less than stunning in their impact, yet always seem well within the realm of possibility. It is also to Spielberg's credit, however, that despite all of this visual opulence, his actors are never dwarfed. - 90
The New York Times
Steven Spielberg's giant, spectacular Close Encounters of the Third Kind...is the best—the most elaborate—1950's science fiction movie ever made, a work that borrows its narrative shape and its concerns from those earlier films, but enhances them with what looks like the latest developments in movie and space technology. - 90
Washington Post
It must weather some bummy mid-passage exposition, but the movie survives its flaws triumphantly, evolving into a uniquely transporting filmgoing spectacle. - 90
Time
What lifts this film into orbit—and what saves it from being a shaggy flying-saucer story—is the breathless wonder that the director brings to every frame. Whether he is showing us a pristine, starry Midwestern sky or displaying Special Effects Wizard Douglas Trumbull's formidable arsenal of spaceships and celestial storms, Spielberg seems to be looking at everything onscreen as if for the first time. The freshness of his vision is contagious—and exhilarating. - 80
Newsweek
A genuine work of the popular imagination. It's the first true populist science-fiction film, a blend of the most startling, far-out special effects with the most ordinary human material of the American Heartland. [21 Nov 1977, p.88]
