First Contact!

Movies about "first contact" with aliens, both friendly and decidedly not.
Updated September 29, 2022
Unbound Librarians
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977 film]
Steven Spielberg
DVD
A man becomes obsessed with aliens after having a close encounter, and a woman searches for the visitors who took her son. Their searches eventually lead them to each other and a government project.
Released only two years after Jaws,Close Encounters cemented Steven Spielberg's reputation as a young director with talent and range.
Super 8
Abrams, J. J.
DVD
Writer/director J.J. Abrams teams with producer Steven Spielberg for this period sci-fi thriller set in the late '70s, and centering on a mysterious train crash in a small Ohio town. Summer, 1979: a group of young friends are filming a Super-8 movie when a pickup truck derails a speeding train. When...
J. J. Abrams' small-town, big-budget Super 8 feels like a Spielberg movie—in fact Spielberg co-produced—with themes of friendship, loss, and coming of age.
The war of the worlds
Barry, Gene
DVD
Byron Haskin's 1955 film moves H. G. Wells' classic from London to small-town California. Special effects are primitive but terrifying.
War of the worlds
Spielberg, Steven
DVD
An earth-shattering adventure that both "rivets and amazes" (Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune), War of the Worlds reunites superstar Tom Cruise and Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg for one of the most awe-inspiring cinematic experiences of all time! A contemporary retelling of H.G....
Spielberg brings Wells' iconic novel to New York City. Stars include Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Tim Robbin.
2001 : A space odyssey
Dullea, Keir
DVD
A mind-bending sci-fi symphony, Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1968 epic pushed the limits of narrative and special effects toward a meditation on technology and humanity. Based on Arthur C. Clarke's story The Sentinel, Kubrick and Clarke's screenplay is structured in four movements. At the "Dawn of Man...
Kubrick's imagining of Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 novel. Features first contact, malevolent artificial intelligence, and one of the most mind-bending ending in film.

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