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,

Movies about disasters—natural or human-made—have been produced since the earliest days of film. As early as 1916, a disaster with an extraterrestrial cause was touted in The End of the World, a Danish film about a passing comet causing chaos and ...