Close Encounters of the Third Kind review – a must-watch director's cut

Is it really almost 40 years old? Watching this gem again in the director’s cut – it is also a very rare actual screenwriting credit for Spielberg – makes you realise that it may be the nearest thing he created to an old-fashioned epic, and that maybe the vision of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming was a Spielbergisation of John Ford.

But this is a sci-fi classic that needs no other referents. As with his later ET, the first signs of an alien visit are registered through the eyes of children with their instinctively generous reverence – but also through deadpan officialdom and all its occult, scientific dial-twitches and readings. The coolly extended scene-setting dialogue, with over-talking and middle-distance sound design, still feels great. Casting François Truffaut as the chief investigating scientist Lacombe was a left-field masterstroke; I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – if Jean-Luc Godard was going to be in it, he would have wanted to play the alien, and not a very nice alien, either.

Richard Dreyfuss is the everyman who is touched and sunburned and exalted by his close encounter. His cherubic whiskered face has never looked more like a child’s or a saint’s. John Williams’s eerie five-note alien music-language, ending questioningly on the dominant (like a broken toy), is repeated over and over again until exactly the right cosmic tempo is found for communication. Another inspired touch. Time for another encounter.