Contact

Contact (1997) — watch online on iFILM — is Robert Zemeckis's adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel, starring Jodie Foster as Dr. Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer who has spent her career pointing dishes at the sky. Then a signal arrives from the Vega system: a structured mathematical sequence that could only come from somewhere else.

From the moment the signal is confirmed, it stops being Ellie's discovery. Governments, military agencies, and religious institutions all want control of what happens next — and who gets to go. Matthew McConaughey plays Palmer Joss, a theologian whose views on faith put him in direct tension with Ellie's demand for hard proof. James Woods, Tom Skerritt, Angela Bassett, and John Hurt fill out a cast of people who hear the same signal but draw completely different conclusions from it.

At 150 minutes, this is a patient, ideas-driven sci-fi drama built around a single question: when confronted with something that changes everything, how do you decide what to believe? Watch Contact (1997) online on iFILM.