Austin Public Library’s Weeknight Cinema continues its Unidentified Interactions series with a sci-fi classic. The season has been inspired by Steven Spielberg’s newest, Disclosure Day, and now APL returns the favor by screening one of the films that was a clear inspiration to the current blockbuster: 1951’s alien encounter masterpiece The Day the Earth Stood Still. In an era of interstellar invaders, director Robert Wise and future Oscar-winning screenwriter Edmund H. North inverted the equation with the adaptation of Harry Bates’ 1940 novelette, Farewell to the Master. Here, it’s we residents of Earth who are the threat – to ourselves, and in time to interstellar peace. The Unidentified Interactions series continues July 22 with touching 2023 aliens-among-us comedy Jules. – Richard Whittaker
