Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977

1975’s Jaws wasn’t Steven Spielberg’s first film, but it was the one that announced the arrival of a major talent, one with a visual sensibility that would arguably change the movies forever. (After seeing Jaws, Alfred Hitchcock reportedly said that Spielberg is “the first one of us who doesn’t see the proscenium arch,” meaning that he and other directors of his own era came to cinema with a sensibility informed by the theater, and Spielberg didn’t have those constraints at all, instead seeing bold new possibilities for fluidity and framing.) But if Jaws indicated the arrival of a cinematic prodigy, his next film, 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, cemented it. I still think its UFOs are the most spectacular spacecraft I’ve ever seen in a movie, so vast and colorful, ships made for cinema.

Close Encounters is a visual feast, a sci-fi adventure yarn, and a fascinating character study in the simultaneously life-saving and life-shattering impact that faith, yearning, and a search for greater meaning can have on our lives. It’s also a wonderfully personal film that brought together elements of Spielberg’s life in ways that, for a long time, he himself did not realize. And while it’s undeniably composer John Williams’ work on franchises like Star Wars and Indiana Jones for which he will be most remembered, let’s not overlook his wonderful score for this film, and his contribution of the playful, lively exchange of sound through which the aliens and humans first strive to communicate.— Carolyn Petit