...an epic, ambitious piece of work that effectively captures the viewer’s interest and attention right from the get-go...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 15, 2025

If it doesn't quite match "2001" for cerebral elegance, it nevertheless is far grander than Spielberg's previous movie, Jaws, and vastly more absorbing than Star Wars.

| Apr 3, 2024

This is a revolutionary film. It's revolutionary in the sense that it suggests, as few films have, the extraordinary sensory potential of the medium.

| Apr 3, 2024

The Steven Spielberg movie, instinctively or otherwise, is well timed. It is definitely a movie of the 1970s, for a people disgusted, bewildered -- and lost.

| Apr 3, 2024

Perhaps in this skeptical time, it is enough to know -- enough to wonder -- that a director and creator can still make a movie as awesome and visually satisfying as this one.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 3, 2024

This is the year's big movie, not so much in size or proportions, but rather in terms of heart and spirit.

| Apr 3, 2024

["Close Encounters"] attempts to conquer fear of the unknown with love. Maybe the movies will begin to lead us away from their early '70s nightmare visions to a new, more benign fantasy world. As a filmgoer sated with violence, I'm ready.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 3, 2024

There is no better indication of how far movies have progressed in 75 years than this awe-inspiring, magical foray into the worlds of science fiction and science fact.

| Apr 3, 2024

Simply a thoughtless exercise in instant self-gratification. Actually, I felt sorry for this muddled movie with its childlike vulnerability.

| Apr 3, 2024

A marvellous movie -- an eye-widening, ear-filling adventure that lifts your spirits and sends you home with a great feeling that lasts for hours.

| Apr 3, 2024

Sophisticates will find a lot to snigger over; sophisticates, in fact, must snigger at movies like this. But for most it will be a smooth trip, like King Kong, into movie entertainment at the top of its act.

| Apr 3, 2024

It has moments of great splendor and some exciting special effects, but mainly it is just plain pretentious and maddenly incoherent. This might be the most expensive gibberish ever put on the screen.

| Apr 3, 2024

As a movie, it's fun. It isn't perfect, nor is it a classic film, but it's entertaining and enjoyable, especially in terms of some truly dazzling special effects from Douglas Trumbull.

| Apr 3, 2024

This is Star Wars for the thinking man or woman.

| Apr 3, 2024

So exalting to the senses and awesome to the mind that it approaches the religious... But I still wish that script had been better.

| Apr 3, 2024

The special effects are so breathtaking that one is almost blinded to the fact that this is really a genre film blown up to epic proportions.

| Apr 3, 2024

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind is not a great film but it is a very good one -- certainly the best science fiction movie since 2001: A Space Odyssey, which it closely resembles in intent if not in execution.

| Apr 3, 2024

So dazzling is the fusion of light and sound that Steven Spielberg and his ingenious cohorts have conjured and so benign the spirit that infuses this richly imagined conclusion that large objections to what has gone before are reduced to mere carping.

| Apr 3, 2024

Even for people who never cared whether flying objects were identified or not, "Encounters" makes it as a powerful experience.

| Apr 3, 2024

One feels throughout a little like an unwilling guest at an evangelical meeting: being thumped about the ears with bits and pieces of received "truth" to which the only response is acceptance or baffled disbelief.

| Apr 3, 2024