Without the steely perfection or visual profundity of [Stanley] Kubrick's 2001, Spielberg's rousing entertainment [Close Encounters of the Third Kind] is easily the next most impressive venture in the film art of science fiction. Kubrick was out for apocalypse, Spielberg only for epiphany. Yet more is revealed than the cosmic visitation, for even more obviously than in Kubrick's masterpiece, Close Encounters offers a multiple comment on the genre in which Spielberg is working, the gifts he brings to it and their imaginative nurture in other genres, other film and fictional outlets for the imagination. The most resolutely popular of the successful young directors has given us the apotheosis of his own devoted audience, his Everyman, with the ordinary middle-American men and women whom we see struggling to shape the form of their destiny and that of their planet emerging as the director's personal stand-ins….

Almost a decade after 2001, Spielberg's...