First Contact!

Movies about "first contact" with aliens, both friendly and decidedly not.
Updated September 29, 2022
Unbound Librarians
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Arrival [2016 film]
Denis Villeneuve
Based on Ted Chiang's 1998 short story "Story of Your Life," Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is a mind-bending journey into alien contact, human frailty, grief and comparative linguistics.
Close encounters of the third kind
Spielberg, Steven
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.
Contact
Zemeckis, Robert
DVD
An astronomer discovers a signal from another planet and is chosen to go into space on a new spaceship and find its source.
Based on Carl Sagan's 1985 novel of the same name, Contact stars Jodie Foster as a driven radio astronomer and Matthew McConaughey as a conflicted spiritual advisor in a tense and thought-provoking exploration of human limitations and alien possibilities.
Super 8
Abrams, Jeffrey
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.
Signs [2002 film]
M. Night Shyamalan
M. Night Shyamalan's charming but spooky masterpiece.
War of the worlds
Spielberg, Steven
DVD
Spielberg brings Wells' iconic novel to New York City. Stars include Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Tim Robbin.
2001 a space odyssey
Kubrick, Stanley.
DVD
A space voyage to Jupiter erupts in disaster when the ship's computer goes mad. Directed by Stanley Kubrick.
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.
The war of the worlds
Lyndon, BarrďĹ˝e
DVD
H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds had been on the Paramount Pictures docket since the silent era, when it was optioned as a potential Cecil B. DeMille production. When Paramount finally got around to a filming the Wells novel, the property was firmly in the hands of special-effects maestro George Pal....
Byron Haskin's 1955 film moves H. G. Wells' classic from London to small-town California. Special effects are primitive but terrifying.
Predator [1987 film]
John McTiernan
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers and other 80s action-figure actors are hunted by a malevolent, transparent alien.
Independence Day
Emmerich, Roland.
DVD
Aliens arrive, fireworks ensue.
The Abyss [1989 film]
James Cameron
First contact under water!
The day the earth stood still
Wise, Robert
DVD
Classic 1950s science fiction.

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