With its elaborate, unprecedented use of special effects and novel portrayal of extraterrestrials, Close Encounters of the Third Kind opened to popular acclaim in November 1977, eventually earning $240 million in worldwide release and significantly...

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is a science fiction movie about unidentified flying objects. It was written and directed by Steven Spielberg. It stars Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, and Cary...

At a recent trade show, I was buttonholed by a researcher from a West Coast think tank. He told me that his organization wanted to find out how young people could be encouraged to enter technical fields. My knees were throbbing. I had...

Sunderland bounced back from last weekend's five-goal mauling by Manchester United at Old Trafford with a third win in five games. But Peter Reid's side had to work hard to overcome a determined Derby, both goals coming in the second half of a frantic...

Here are some facts and trivia about the American Film Institute's new list of top-100 U.S. movies, with some comparisons to the institute's first such list in 1998:_ Out of the 43 newly eligible films released from 1996 to 2006, only four made the new...

The American Film Institute's original 1998 list of the top-100 American movies:1. "Citizen Kane," 1941.2. "Casablanca," 1942.3. "The Godfather," 1972.4. "Gone With the Wind," 1939.5. "Lawrence of Arabia," 1962.6. "The Wizard of Oz," 1939.7. "The Graduate," 1967.8. "On the Waterfront," 1954.9. "Schindler's List," 1993.10. "Singin'...

In the following essay, Engel asserts that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is primarily concerned with language in a variety of forms—“verbal, visual, electronic, and musical.”

Without the steely perfection or visual profundity of [Stanley] Kubrick's 2001, Spielberg's rousing entertainment [Close Encounters of the Third Kind] is easily the next most impressive venture in the film art of science fiction. Kubrick was out for apocalypse, Spielberg only for epiphany. Yet more is revealed than the cosmic visitation, for even more obviously than in Kubrick's masterpiece, Close Encounters offers a multiple comment on the genre in which Spielberg is working, the gifts...

Almost everyone both in and out of [Close Encounters of the Third Kind] seems … to be waiting for some kind of miraculous salvation, an escape, an awakening, from the bad dream of social stagnation and middle-class malaise which the first half of Spielberg's movie so emphatically reminds us of. And we would probably all arise and go now … were it not for the film's sustained promise that soon, suspensefully soon, our questions will be answered, our emptiness will be filled, that ...