Every Steven Spielberg Movie Ranked From Worst To Best
8. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)
Five years before Spielberg gave audiences cinema's most charming alien, he served up this shockingly unsentimental sci-fi drama, rather than merely follow up Jaws with another adrenaline-surging genre picture.
Spielberg's only"original" creation as writer-director to date - he also wrote A.I., but worked from a pre-existing treatment - Close Encounters encapsulates most of the themes that have defined his career - namely the role of family and humanity's place in the universe - and leaves one wondering why the filmmaker hasn't penned more of his movies over the years.
Douglas Trumbull's visual effects remain utterly spellbinding, and though modern audiences might struggle with a Spielberg movie having such a tough-to-like protagonist as Richard Dreyfuss' family-imploding Roy Neary, it is merely another bold, expectation-defying choice in a movie full of them.