E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Review

The craft decision that carries the film is the camera height. Allen Daviau shoots most of it from four feet up, so adults arrive as legs and voices, the world stays scaled to Elliott, and the government men are literally faceless until the story decides they are people. Melissa Mathison's script understands that the divorce in the background is the real wound and never explains it, which is why the alien works as more than a puppet. Henry Thomas gives one of the great child performances, and the audition story is famous for good reason, but it is Drew Barrymore's timing that keeps the house scenes from turning sticky.

Carlo Rambaldi's creature holds up because it is allowed to be ugly. Where critics have reservations they land on the last twenty minutes, where the score and the flying and the swelling strings push past feeling into instruction. That is also the sequence audiences remember, which tells you something about the argument. It is sentimental on purpose and executed with total control, and almost nobody has managed the combination since.