Performance

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

0 upcoming performances in New York

Steven Spielberg’s 1977 science-fiction drama follows an Indiana utility worker whose ordinary routines collapse after a brief, unsettling contact with an unidentified craft, alongside a single mother searching for her young son in the wake of the same event. The film treats mass hysteria, private obsession, and institutional secrecy as parallel forces. Now screening at MoMA, it sits within New York’s long tradition of repertory sci‑fi as a civic mirror for Cold War anxiety and media spectacle. John Williams’s score makes communication itself the story.