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Turner Classic Movies, March 9, 2:30 p.m.
Before Stephen Spielberg started making Oscar bait, he made Oscar-worthy adventure films, and from that early period in the 1970s, I think Close Encounters of the Third Kind is his best film. Based on the classification of UFO encounters in which the third refers to human witnessing of actual alien beings, the film follows a French scientist (the great director Francois Truffaut), an Indiana electrical line man (Richard Dreyfuss) and a mother (Melinda Dillon) and her young son (Cary Guffey) as they are drawn closer and closer to that encounter. The film was initially amazing because of its then-incredible and still-gorgeous special effects, but it remains resonant because Spielberg’s dramatization of the themes of wonder, fear and destiny. It is one of the greatest science fiction films ever made
