It’s now been 30 years since Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was first released and his sci-fi adventure is still captivating, even if it seems stranger and stranger with the passage of time.

Richard Dreyfuss plays a family man who goes on an obsessive quest after encountering some dazzling UFOs in the skies above his Indiana home, leaving his wife (Terri Garr) and kids to follow his premonition to the Devils Tower rock formation in Wyoming, where a coterie of military types advised by François Truffaut and Bob Balaban are also looking to make contact.

Close Encounters plays like an inversion of your classic War of the Worlds-inspired alien invasion movie. When the extraterrestrials first appear, they don’t so much cause havoc as go on a psychedelic tour of middle America, blowing people’s minds along the way. Save for one scary scene (involving the—voluntary—abduction of a child), it’s never implied that the relationship between humans and aliens might be antagonistic. Instead of a big battle, at the film’s climax, everyone gets together and jams out on analog synths.

Three versions of the film exist: the original, the 1980 special edition with regrettable, then-new footage of the interior of the alien mothership, and the more recent Spielberg-approved Director’s Cut. All three are available in the new 30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition, along with a handful of docs and behind-the-scenes whatsits. Though you probably have to be a pretty die-hard fan to need all three versions, you also get a handy poster-sized chart detailing their various minor differences. If you put this up on your wall, you are weird.

One of the year’s best films, Johnnie To’s Election, was followed up by one of the year’s best sequels, released in theatres as Triad Election but now available on DVD as Election 2. The continuation of To’s gangster saga goes through some neat reversals in this one, and it’s definitely recommended if you liked the first.

by MARK SLUTSKY