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Last updated: 21 Jun 2026 at 22:15 UTC

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Review of by Jens S — 16 May 2016

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Spielberg's classic UFO film is the blueprint for the barely used naive, optimistic alien encounter genre. The reason why very few movies after this one even went this direction and rather blew up the White House instead is simply that it can't get any better than this.

Starting out wonderfully mysteriously and disturbing, sometimes even scary, the film soon concentrates on Dreyfuss' character's own approach to the things he saw on the night sky and his visions to culminate in nothing less than the biggest Christmas three ball of movie history.

This film simply combines all the assets of Spielberg's early work perfectly. Even the special effects still look pretty good 30 years later, maybe excluding the aliens. And John Williams' melody went down in pop culture history.

A masterpiece.

This review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was written by on 16 May 2016.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind has generally received very positive reviews.

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