Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of 'Cure' and 'Pulse' has said that Robert Zemeckis is perhaps "the American film director who makes the most authentic films today." Not sure I would go that far, but this movie owns and was unfairly maligned when it first came out for its earnest, heart on the sleeve, humanist sentimentality. Sure, it's a little corny, but the ending of this movie is moving, beautiful and takes seriously the big ideas about faith, science, the existence of God and our place in the universe in a way most films are too scared to touch for fear of being square. Out of all the ideas in this film's secular theology, I appreciated the most the idea that when Ellie asks who built the wormhole transit system she is told "we have no idea, it was here billions of years before us." An alien civilization millions of years more scientifically and culturally advanced than we are, are themselves still looking for God and a reason for any of this.

I love what an absolute bimbo McConaughey's character in this is. A complete jive artist who is exactly the kind of guy who would become Bill Clinton's personal spiritual advisor. Throughout the movie, he keeps getting invited into these super secret high level classified briefings where it's the heads of the military and intelligence agencies and the country's leading scientists and he's just this guy who wrote a Malcolm Gladwell style airport book about how technology is taking the place of God and making us sad that the president liked. I also greatly enjoyed when Tom Skerritt gets what's coming to him for taking credit for the work of a woman in STEM.

Finally, can we please have Jake Busey back in movies? All time goofball/weirdo actor.