Movies Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind: 11 Films About Looking Up in Wonder

Start here. Spielberg's other side of the same coin, first contact told through a child instead of a lineman, and maybe the most beloved film he ever made. Where Close Encounters is about a grown man's obsession, E.T. is about friendship, and both share the same faith that what comes from the sky might love us.

This is the companion piece, made by the same hands reaching for the same warmth.

Denis Villeneuve's film is the modern heir to Close Encounters, first contact rebuilt as a problem of language and grief. Where Spielberg used a five note song, Villeneuve uses whole written symbols, and both films insist that meeting the unknown means learning to listen. Amy Adams gives it a quiet, aching center. The perfect double bill for a colder age.

Robert Zemeckis adapts Carl Sagan into the grown up, science first cousin of Close Encounters, with Jodie Foster as an astronomer who stakes everything on a signal in the noise. It shares Spielberg's core idea that contact is an act of faith as much as science, and that the yearning to look up is itself the point. A film about believing before you can prove.

Andrei Tarkovsky's meditative masterpiece, the deep cut on this list, about a psychologist sent to a station orbiting a planet that reads and answers human memory. It is slower and stranger than Close Encounters, but it shares the sense that the alien is finally a mirror for our own longing. For the viewer who wants first contact turned entirely inward.

Our pick, in case you have not seen it or want to revisit it. Spielberg drops Richard Dreyfuss into an obsession he cannot explain, the shape of a mountain, a five note song, and lets the wonder slowly cost him his ordinary life. François Truffaut plays the scientist who greets the unknown with curiosity, and Vilmos Zsigmond fills every frame with light. It is the purest expression of Spielberg's lifelong subject, the human face turned upward.

If you are building a wonder run, follow it with E.T. and Arrival. If any of the films here move you, they all lead back to this one.

Robert Wise's classic is the granddaddy of hopeful first contact, a visitor who arrives not to conquer but to warn. It shares Close Encounters' belief that what comes from the sky might be wiser than we are, and its faith that fear is the wrong first answer. A deep cut that shows how far back this dream of a friendly sky reaches.

John Carpenter, of all people, made this gentle road movie about an alien who takes human form and falls in with a grieving widow. Jeff Bridges is extraordinary as a being learning to be human. It shares Close Encounters' tenderness toward the visitor and its sense that contact changes the people it touches. An overlooked companion worth hunting down.

Ron Howard's warm crowd pleaser about a group of retirees who find alien pods that restore their youth. It carries the same 1980s Spielbergian faith that visitors from the stars might be kind, and it turns first contact into a story about age, wonder, and second chances. For the viewer who wants the gentlest possible version of the dream.

M. Night Shyamalan builds a first contact film out of a single farmhouse and a family's grief, keeping the vast event at the edges of the frame. It shares Close Encounters' patience, the way dread and wonder can be the same feeling, and its interest in ordinary people rather than armies. A quieter, more anxious cousin, but a real one.

James Cameron sends a deep sea crew into contact with something luminous at the bottom of the ocean, and the awe on their faces is pure Close Encounters. It moves the wonder underwater instead of skyward, but the grammar is the same, light, patience, and people undone by beauty. For anyone who wants Spielberg's astonishment with Cameron's scale.

Jeff Nichols made this hushed, Spielberg haunted film about a father protecting a son with powers no one understands, all of it building toward a moment of contact that pays direct homage to Close Encounters. It is the deep cut for people who love this film specifically, and it earns the debt. Watch it last, once the others have set the mood.