E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. 1982. Directed by Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg’s *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* (1977) is a science-fiction drama about ordinary people pulled off course by contact with something they can’t name. A Midwestern utility worker and a single mother follow separate trails after a UFO event disrupts their lives, pushing private obsession into public spectacle. Now screening at MoMA, the film sits in New York’s long tradition of art institutions treating Hollywood as modern mythmaking. Its most precise insight is that awe can read like compulsion, and the difference is never fully settled.