Recencies van critici

Close Encounters is sunnier and simpler than the other great American films of its era. But it contains enough angst and confusion to keep it the right side of sappy.

For all its hesitations and insufficiencies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the first of the new breed of science fiction film, which approaches the best in the literature, and effectively obliterates the faint, sterile traces of Star Wars.

Justly celebrated for its warmth and sincerity, Close Encounters shames most contemporary blockbusters for their lack of heart and imagination. The film envisions human contact with extraterrestrial life as a celebratory event; the characters' efforts to understand the strange life-forms—through scientific inquiry, culture, and curiosity—represent the best of humankind.

[Close Encounters of the Third Kind] is the epitome of a truly great film... Even though it was only his third feature film, Spielberg directs the material with the assurance of a veteran director at the peak of his powers. The film moves like a shot yet it never feels overly rushed for a moment.

“Close Encounters” proves to be a magic act with dramatic interludes. The interludes range downward from so-so (the movie is oddly like “Jaws” in that way), but the magic is so thrilling that nothing else matters much.

On many levels the least fashionable American touchstone of the 1970s, Close Encounters is also arguably among the few that truly offered any hope of transcending its era.

Close Encounters is [a] more interesting anniversary [than the original Star Wars], precisely because it is difficult to imagine a blockbuster quite like it appearing in multiplexes today. It is an extravaganza whose modus operandi is primarily—and close to entirely—one of revelation. Close Encounters is essentially an extrapolated daydream, or a vivid, deluxe play-by-play of the genre's most elemental fantasy: contact with alien life.

Kubrick feared that people would laugh at the cliché of [aliens with] spindly figures with oversize heads. I confess to siding with Kubrick on this one. I find the aliens creepy, and the finale wildly overblown. . . . Still, most spectators are as spellbound as Spielberg himself is, thanks to the filmmaker's emotional investment in the extraterrestrials with a sincerity Kubrick never could have managed.

All these years later, it’s the tricky personal stuff that makes [Close Encounters] remarkable: the depiction of a man crumbling under the pressure of forces he can’t understand; the riotous, relatable scenes of madcap family life; the sense that it’s a film as much about the pressures of creative inspiration as alien contact.

In those pre-CGI days, Spielberg’s effects were necessarily limited, but film stock is kind to his fuzzy auras of alien presence, and the drama becomes a sound and light show to the powerful music of John Williams.

Lacombe communicates through a translator (played by Bob Balaban) and Close Encounters is a work which asks if we can connect with other people – other beings – in a way which transcends language. Unlike so many other movies about alien visitation, this is a rare example of one which espouses friendliness over aggression. Its simple message is that it is always better to begin a conversation with a smile.

[Spielberg's] cinema telescopes and microscopes, making big what's small, and near what's far, and always making you feel—both physically and emotionally—the ingenious contraption at work. Rarely has his marriage of form and feeling worked as fluidly and guilelessly as it did in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film of colossal ambition that plays as intimate, of heart-thumping sensations that register as cosmic, of wondrous spectacle that in the end just sings.