This week The Unenthusiastic Critic is making first contact with Steven Spielberg's, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), starring Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, and Francois Truffaut.

First, we're having a preliminary discussion about aliens in movies, and about how Nakea believes that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is probably doomed because the extraterrestrials are far too intelligent to ever come here.

Then, we're sitting down for her first viewing of Spielberg's sci-fi classic. Close Encounters has been described as a film "without a sour note," but Nakea finds plenty of troubling notes in the story of a man going crazy and abandoning his family.

Is Richard Dreyfuss's Roy Neary a space-age prophet, or just an intergalactic deadbeat dad? 

Program

0:00: Prologue: from Mars Needs Women (1967)
0:47: Preliminary Conversation: Aliens
20:00: Interlude: Steven Spielberg on Close Encounters
21:00: Cultural Osmosis: Pre-Viewing Discussion
25:29: Interlude: 40th Anniversary Trailer
27:41: The Verdict: Post-Viewing Discussion
1:14:30: Outro and Next Week's Movie
1:16:10: Outtake

For show-notes, links, additional episodes, and other information, please go to unaffiliatedcritic.com.