Encounter

If Pearce weren’t so heavy-handed… then Encounter, a flawed sci-fi flick with a simple premise, could be a great adventure fit for...

The excitement and good will so effectively built up in the first hour are distressingly dissipated thereafter; given the material, the film is&nbs...

For a film that tries to be a bravura piece of genre-hopping cinema, "Encounter" too often feels confused rather than assured.

"Encounter" has its moments, but it suffers from multiple storytelling approaches that don’t mesh.

[Riz Ahmed’s] work alone almost makes this worth seeing, but only to imagine the better movie that could have contained it.

If it feels a bad sign to see Octavia Spencer this underused, listen to your instinct. And keep watching the skies.

Encounter has an interesting premise, but pacing issues result in an overlong feeling, and the film rehashes worrying tropes…

In the end, this is a film that hits its marks but fails to step into its own.

Exactly half of a good movie.

It’s dishonest, showy filmmaking.

When the film takes a shift… and it becomes more of a standard coming of age film, it gets a lot duller.

In spite of the film’s troublingly naïve take on mental trauma, Riz Ahmed vividly and empathetically captures a man’s wounded soul.

It all adds up to less than we hoped, though Pearce’s direction is never less than confident.

The direction and the script open up the stage musical so much that unknowing audiences may not detect that the source material was a theater piece...

A typically charismatic performance from Riz Ahmed and a dazzling opening effects sequence won’t be enough to stop most viewers from fee...