Contact
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: July 11, 1997 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
62
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 23 Critic Reviews
Positive:
12
Mixed:
11
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
Contact is that rare big-budget motion picture that places ideas, characters, and plot above everything else. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
Contact is superior popular filmmaking, both polished and effective. But despite its success and its serious intentions, it's finally a movie where the storytelling makes more of an impact than the story. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Sagan's novel Contact provides the inspiration for Robert Zemeckis' new film, which tells the smartest and most absorbing story about extraterrestrial intelligence since "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
If you sign on, disarmed of irony, for her trip -- I did -- you'll be rewarded with a rare thing that may in itself prove the existence of a Higher Power: a Hollywood entertainment that makes you consider deep thoughts. Read full review
80
EmpireNeil Jeffries
Contact delivers on more than a pure visual level, reiterating the idea that greatest progress is made taking "small steps" towards enlightenment. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorDavid Sterritt
Its discussions don't go very deep, and moviegoers with strong religious values may wonder why it comes down for humanism over spirituality. Read full review
70
The New York TimesStephen Holden
The movie, adapted from a novel by Carl Sagan, presents one long chain of teasingly open-ended questions about reason versus faith and technology versus religion, and ends up tentatively embracing mysticism over rationality. Read full review
70
SalonRobin Dougherty
Faithful to Sagan's brand of popularized science, the film never reaches beyond Hollywood spectacle and sentimentality. Read full review
70
SlateSarah Kerr
When Contact finally comes alive, it leaves you frightened and thrilled and emotionally overwrought, as only a child can be. The rest is pandering. Read full review
70
VarietyTodd McCarthy
Beautifully crafted and legitimately involving once it locks onto a dramatic track, film benefits from remaining mysterious about how far it intends to go in pursuing its themes, but also suffers from long-windedness and preachy final-reel explicitness as to its message. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
Contact is so burdened with social, political, and religious issues that they infect and ultimately overwhelm much of the philosophical content. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleRussell Smith
Little effort is made to churn up romantic chemistry between Foster and McConaughey. For better or worse, director Robert Zemeckis sticks to Sagan's original vision for these characters, in which they're basically totems embodying both sides of a philosophical dialectic. Read full review
60
L.A. WeeklyManohla Dargis
What's most frustrating about the movie isn't that it thinks so little of its heroine that it can't let her figure out the moral of her own story, but that it thinks so little of us as to suggest that, after a couple millennia of human struggle, it's indeed possible to answer the unanswerable. Read full review
60
NewsweekDavid Ansen
Robert Zemeckis's movie is frustratingly uneven. When it's good, it's very good. And when it's not, it can be as silly and self-important as bad '50s sci-fi. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter Travers
Contact aims to be a film of ideas but serves too many of them half-baked. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, may be too long, too self-important and too "Gump"-like to be completely satisfying. But it contains elements that are so striking they pretty much redeem the film. Read full review
50
San Francisco ExaminerBarbara Shulgasser
This bloated, self-important and logically absurd movie, made by the director of the equally historically hysterical "Forrest Gump," pretends to the thrones of Serious Thinking, of Important Messages and of Intellectual Provocation. If there were truly anything serious, important or intellectual about this movie, this planet would be in big trouble. Read full review
50
Dallas ObserverPeter Rainer
Contact sure is pretentious. It doesn't deliver on the deepthink, and it lacks the charge of good, honest pulp. It's schlock without the schlock. Read full review
50
TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh
This film is no exception to the rule that philosophical debate seldom spawns compelling cinema. Read full review
50
Washington PostDesson Thomson
The best moments occur when -- as in reality -- we're still in the dark. As soon as the movie gets to its version of a punch line, it turns into another Hollywood vehicle spinning aimlessly in space. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam Lacey
There's a big budget, big cast and big themes about religion, science and life on other planets. But Contact, which aims for awe, ends up with piffle. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterDuane Byrge
Despite its lineage and some impressive special effects, Contact is a disappointingly earthbound production, weighed down by the ballast of talking-heads dramaturgy and bloated storytelling. Read full review
40
Washington PostRita Kempley
In some ways, Contact is just like the universe: big, star-bright and seemingly endless. Not to mention that it begins with a big bang, gradually falls into a lull and finally succumbs to entropy. Read full review
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