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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. (PG, 137 min.)
7:00 PM
Big Screen Classics 2026 is sponsored by Hotel Vandivort.
Richard Dreyfuss stars as cable worker Roy Neary, who along with several other stunned bystanders experience a close encounter of the first kind - witnessing UFOs soaring across the sky. After this life-changing event, the inexplicable vision of a strange, mountain-like formation haunts him. He becomes obsessed with discovering what it represents, much to the dismay of his wife and family. Meanwhile, bizarre occurrences are happening around the world. Government agents have close encounters of the second kind - discovering physical evidence of extraterrestrial visitors in the form of a lost fighter aircraft from World War II and a stranded military ship that disappeared decades earlier only to suddenly reappear in unusual places. Roy continues to chase his vision to a remote area where he and the agents follow the clues that have drawn them to reach a site where they will have a close encounter of the third kind - contact. [Sony Pictures]
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr
Director: Steven Spielberg
Genre: Sci-Fi, Drama
"A masterpiece of wide-eyed whimsy."
— Angie Errigo, Empire Magazine
"Spielberg's greatest work."
— Tom Huddleston, Time Out
"It's one of the great moviegoing experiences."
— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind is unquestionably a great movie."
— James Berardinelli, ReelViews
"A film of incredible power and intensity. It is also, and ultimately, reassuring."
— Arthur Knight, The Hollywood Reporter
"The first film in years to give its audiences a tingle of shocked emotion that is not entirely based either on fear or on suspense."
— David Pirie, Time Out
"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."
— Clyde Gilmour, Toronto Star
"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."
— Bruce McCabe, Boston Globe
"It is a warm celebration, positive and pleasurable. The humor is folksy and slapstick rather than cerebral, as if to confirm that our encounter is with a populist vehicle."
— Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times
"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."
— Jack Kroll, Newsweek
"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."
— Arthur Knight, The Hollywood Reporter
"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."
— Desmond Ryan, Philadelphia Inquirer
"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."
— Vincent Canby, The New York Times
