With 'Disclosure Day,' the director returns to a longtime preoccupation. Two Times staffers explore his ongoing fascination with extraterrestrials.

War of the Worlds was an obvious and devastating response to the carnage of 9/11, updating the classic novel to a modern-day depiction of a society coming undone in the face of an apocalyptic alien invasion.

Steven Spielberg’s fourth film about alien encounters is “Disclosure Day,” following “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “War of the Worlds,” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” That inspired us to take another look at what Roger Ebert thought about some of the most famous and infamous alien movies,