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100
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ReelViews James Berardinelli
Contact is that rare big-budget motion picture that places ideas, characters, and plot above everything else.
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90
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Los Angeles Times Kenneth 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.
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88
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger 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."
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83
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Entertainment Weekly Lisa 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.
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75
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Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Its discussions don't go very deep, and moviegoers with strong religious values may wonder why it comes down for humanism over spirituality.
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70
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The New York Times Stephen 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.
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50
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Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Contact aims to be a film of ideas but serves too many of them half-baked.
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50
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San Francisco Chronicle Mick 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.
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50
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Washington Post Desson 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.
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40
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Washington Post Rita 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.
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