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Much has been written about the recent surge of personal stories being told through the horror genre in films like “ It Follows ,” “ The Witch ” and “ The Babadook ,” but there’s an equally interesting trend in the science fiction genre as well. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the genre used not only to examine the power of space travel or a post-apocalyptic future but as a way to address common humanity more than futuristic adventure stories. Joining films like “ Gravity ,” “ Interstellar ” and “ The Martian ” is Denis Villeneuve ’s ambitious and moving “Arrival,” a movie that’s about the day the universe changed forever but becomes more focused on a single story even as it’s expanding its worldwide narrative. It is more about grief, time, communication and compassion than it is warp speed, and it’s a film that asks questions. How do we approach that which terrifies us? Why is it important to communicate through language and not action? The final act of “Arrival” gets to the big ideas of life that I won’t spoil here, but viewers should know that Villeneuve’s film is not the crowdpleaser of "The Martian," Ridley Scott ’s big TIFF premiere last year. It’s a movie designed to simultaneously challenge viewers, move them and get them talking. For the most part, it succeeds.

Amy Adams gives a confident, affecting performance as Louise, a linguistics expert brought in on the day that 12 unidentified flying objects enter Earth’s orbit. Despite what they’re telling the public—which is not much of anything at first—the governments of the world have made first contact with the creatures inside, beings that look vaguely like some higher power merged an octopus with a giant hand. Working with the military and a scientist named Ian ( Jeremy Renner ), Louise seeks to find the answer to a very simple question: What do you want? The Heptapods, as they’re eventually called, speak in sounds that echo whale noises at times, but Louise quickly learns that written language is the way to communicate, even deciphering the complex way the interstellar tourists write. As she gets closer and closer to being able to convey that crucial question in a way that it (and its answer) will be understood, the world’s uneasiness continues. Will man’s protective instinct kick in before its science and language leaders can figure out a way to stop it?

Louise also has darkness in her life. The opening scenes detail the birth, brief life and death of a child. Throughout, Adams imbues Louise with a quiet, effective emotional undercurrent that’s essential to the film’s success. This is a movie that gets too sterile at times, but Adams is always there to ground it. Villeneuve’s vision is not particularly CGI-heavy, allowing Adams to work in a way that feels relatable. There’s so much going on in this character’s mind and heart, especially in the twisty final act, with which Adams could have “gone big,” but it’s actually one of the more subtle and internal sci-fi movie performances that I’ve ever seen. And it’s a testament to the success of “Arrival” that it’s her face—not the impressive alien ship/creature design—that people will remember.

As he has recently, Villeneuve understands the importance of surrounding himself with talented people. In this case, two of the film’s undeniable MVPs are cinematographer Bradford Young , the genius who shot “ Selma ” and “ A Most Violent Year ” and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson . The latter’s compositions here are essential to every emotional beat of the film, defining the air of tension in the first half of the film and the moving undercurrents of the final act. Young’s approach is beautifully tactile, using the natural world to make this unnatural story genuine. We may not be able to fully relate to Louise’s narrative, but we can appreciate the image of a child running through a field. Young’s imagery is fluid, unlike the choppy blockbuster cinematography that we’re used to seeing in sci-fi. Most importantly, it feels like everything here is of one vision—cinematography, direction, acting, score, etc.—instead of the factory-produced blockbusters we’ve seen of late.

Despite all of that, “Arrival” sags a bit in the middle, a point when it may lose some viewers for good. The “first contact” act is undeniably confident and the final thematically purposeful scenes of the film are stunningly ambitious, but the pace of “Arrival” softens a bit too much in the middle and one notices the sterility of the piece overall. Without spoiling anything, maintaining the shock value of the twists of the final act forces some narrative decisions in the mid-section that keep us observers to the action of the film when we’re ready to be participants. Villeneuve is a talented director, but this movie lacks a degree of heat that would have helped it hit the emotional and philosophical beats of the final scenes. As is, we often feel like we’re behind the barrier that Louise uses when communicating with the alien creatures she dubs Abbott and Costello. Like she wants to do, we so want to take off the equipment and get behind that screen.

Having said that, this is ambitious, accomplished filmmaking that deserves an audience. It’s a film that forces viewers to reconsider that which makes us truly human, and the impact of grief on that timeline of existence. At its best, and largely through Adams’ performance, the film proposes that we’ve all had those days in which communication breaks down and fear over the unknown sets in. And it is the best of us who persevere, get up from being knocked down and repair that which is broken.

This review originally ran as a part of our Toronto International Film Festival coverage on September 10, 2016.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Arrival (2016)

116 minutes

Amy Adams as Dr. Louise Banks

Jeremy Renner as Ian Donnelly

Forest Whitaker as Colonel Weber

Michael Stuhlbarg as Agent Halpern

Tzi Ma as General Shang

Denis Villeneuve

Writer (short story "Story of Your Life")

Eric Heisserer

Cinematographer

Bradford Young
Jóhann Jóhannsson

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Arrival Reviews

Without spoiling too much, let’s just say Villeneuve and Heisserer use the Kuleshov effect to turn the non-linear storytelling of “Arrival” from a gimmick to an indispensable part of the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 9, 2024

Arrival is a work that resents the necessity of violence. However, the film ditches some of the meditative qualities of the bleakness-to-idealism dialectic of the album in favor of making a cold hard stand against war and those who clamour for it.

Full Review | Feb 6, 2024

The film not only discusses complex theories about time, but also exemplifies it by creating a circular sequence of events. Embarking on the mounting steps of Villeneuve’s hypnotic structure is assured to leave viewers spellbound.

Full Review | Nov 20, 2023

With “Arrival,” Villeneuve has hit full stride with a film that contains elements of Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Spielberg, via influence rather than imitation or tacky aping. He is his own man, yet recognizes the genius that preceded his creative journey.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 18, 2023

A masterpiece of scifi films

Full Review | Aug 7, 2023

Leaves us with hope... One of the best sci-fi films of recent times without gunfights. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Apr 6, 2023

Melancholy, mysterious and measured as it tracks the struggle to communicate with these alien creatures, Arrival is really about language and how it functions, how it shapes us and sometimes limits us, and how it can connect or separate us.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2023

Amy Adams’ transcendent portrayal of a linguist...

Full Review | Dec 21, 2022

I appreciated the intelligent science fiction, but also how the film steps beyond genre. It turned out to be far more intimate and thought-provoking than I ever expected. And all of that on top of the superb visuals, art direction, and score.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 19, 2022

The trippy events unfolding out of Heisserer’s screenplay tangle the puppeteer’s strings and play with narrative and filmmaking forces few are daring enough, and smart enough, to wield.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 14, 2022

Both cerebral and achingly emotional, Arrival sustains a message about hope and understanding for a better humanity that audiences may need right now.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 9, 2022

One of the most beautiful, emotional and original science-fiction films of the last decade.

Full Review | Nov 5, 2021

The best film of 2016. A motion picture that turns out to be far more focused on humanity than on otherworldly visitors, it's a transcendent viewing experience that gets under the skin and into the heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 18, 2021

Arrival just might be the overall best movie of the decade with the way it cleverly examines what we believe while simultaneously delivering a tense, gripping sci-fi story.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

Hypnotic and strange and beautiful - have I said beautiful fifteen times yet? Because it deserves that word no fewer than that many.

Full Review | Jul 2, 2021

An astonishingly beautiful film, both visually and emotionally.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 23, 2021

One of the finest, if not the finest, science fiction movie of the 21st Century.

Full Review | Apr 13, 2021

True to its theme, Arrival itself seems like a premonition of a more tangible event.

Full Review | Apr 6, 2021

A slow-burn thriller that is profound and beautiful. To say any more would spoil it,

Full Review | Feb 13, 2021

We'll always have power structures that are reflexively defensive, but Arrival reminds us many in prominent positions are committed to peace.

Full Review | Jan 4, 2021

Arrival is a stunning science fiction movie with deep implications for today

One of the year’s best movies is about linguistics, metaphors, and aliens.

by Alissa Wilkinson

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Amy Adams looks up at the sky in wonder.

Science fiction is never really about the future; it’s always about us. And Arrival , set in the barely distant future, feels like a movie tailor-made for 2016, dropping into theaters mere days after the most explosive election in most of the American electorate’s memory.

But the story Arrival is based on — the award-winning novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang — was published in 1998, almost two decades ago, which indicates its central themes were brewing long before this year. Arrival is much more concerned with deep truths about language, imagination, and human relationships than any one political moment.

Not only that, but Arrival is one of the best movies of the year, a moving, gripping film with startling twists and imagery. It deserves serious treatment as a work of art.

Arrival is smart, twisty, and serious

The strains of Max Richter’s " On the Nature of Daylight " play over the opening shots of Arrival , which is the first clue for what’s about to unfold: that particular track is ubiquitous in the movies (I can count at least six or seven films that use it, including Shutter Island and this year’s The Innocents ) and is, by my reckoning, the saddest song in the world.

The bittersweet feeling instantly settles over the whole film, like the last hour of twilight. Quickly we learn that Dr. Louise Banks ( Amy Adams ) has suffered an unthinkable loss, and that functions as a prelude to the story: One day, a series of enormous pod-shaped crafts land all over earth, hovering just above the ground in 12 locations around the world. Nobody knows why. And nothing happens.

As world governments struggle to sort out what this means — and as the people of those countries react by looting, joiningcults, even conductingmass suicides — Dr. Banks gets a visit from military intelligence, in the form of Colonel Weber ( Forest Whitaker ), requesting her assistance as an expert linguist in investigating and attempting to communicate with whatever intelligence is behind the landing. She arrives at the site with Ian Donnelly ( Jeremy Renner ), a leading quantum physicist, to start the mission. With help from a cynical Agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg), they suit up and enter the craft to see if they can make contact.

It’s best not to say much more about the plot, except that it is pure pleasure to feel it unfold. The most visionary film yet from director Denis Villeneuve ( Prisoners , Sicario ) and scripted by horror screenwriter Eric Heisserer ( Lights Out ), its pacing is slower than you’d expect from an alien-invasion film, almost sparse. For a movie with so many complicated ideas, it doesn’t waste any more time on exposition than is absolutely necessary. Arrival is serious and smartly crafted, shifting around like a Rubik’s cube in the hand of a savant, nothing quite making sense until all the pieces suddenly come together. I heard gasps in the theater.

Arrival is interested in how language shapes reality

The film’s premise hinges on the idea, shared by many linguists and philosophers of language, that we do not all experience the same reality. The pieces of it are the same — we live on the same planet, breathe the same air — but our perceptions of those pieces shift and change based on the words and grammar we use to describe them to ourselves and each other.

For instance, there is substantial evidence that a person doesn’t really see (or perhaps "perceive") a color until their vocabulary contains a word, attached to meaning, that distinguishes it from other colors. All yellows are not alike, but without the need to distinguish between yellows and the linguistic tools to do so, people just see yellow. A color specialist at a paint manufacturer, however, can distinguish between virtually hundreds of colors of white. (Go check out the paint chip aisle at Home Depot if you’re skeptical.)

Or consider the phenomenon of words in other languages that describe universal feelings , but can only be articulated precisely in some culture. We might intuitively "feel" the emotion, but without the word to describe it we’re inclined to lump the emotion in with another under the same heading. Once we develop the linguistic term for it, though, we can describe it and feel it as distinct from other shades of adjacent emotions.

Forest Whitaker, Amy Adams, and Jeremy Renner in Arrival

These are simple examples, and I don’t mean to suggest that the world itself is different for people from different cultures. But I do mean to suggest that reality — what we perceive as comprising the facts of existence — takes on a different shape depending on the linguistic tools we use to describe it.

Adopting this framework doesn’t necessarily mean any of us are more correct than others about the nature of reality (though that certainly may be true). Instead, we are doing our best to describe reality as we see it, as we imagine it to be. This is the challenge of translation, and why literal translations that Google can perform don’t go beyond basic sentences. Learning a new language at first is just about collecting a new vocabulary and an alternate grammar — here is the word for chair, here is the word for love, here’s how to make a sentence — but eventually, as any bilingual person can attest, it becomes about imagining and perceiving the world differently.

This is the basic insight of Arrival : That if we were to encounter a culture so radically different from our own that simple matters we take for granted as part of the world as it is were radically shifted, we could not simply gather data, sort out grammar, and make conclusions. We’d have to either absorb a different way of seeing , despite our fear, or risk everything.

To underline the point, Dr. Banks and the entire operation are constantly experiencing breakdowns in communication within the team and with teams in other parts of the world, who aren’t sure whether the information they glean from their own visits to pods should be kept proprietary or shared.

Arrival is about more than talking to one another. It’s about the roadmaps we use to navigate the world

It’s not hard to see where this is going, I imagine — something about how if we want to empathize with each other we need to talk to one another, and that’s the way the human race will survive.

But Arrival also layers in some important secondary notes that add nuance to that easy takeaway. Because it’s not just deciphering the words that someone else is saying that’s important: It’s the whole framework that determines how those words are being pinned to meaning. We can technically speak the same language, but functionally be miles apart.

In the film, one character notes that if we were to communicate in the language of chess — which operates in the framework of battles and wars — rather than, say, the language of English, which is bent toward the expression of emotions and ideas, then what we actually say and do would shift significantly. That is, the prevailing metaphor for how beings interact with each other and the world is different. (Some philosophers speak of this as "language games.")

This matters for the film’s plot, but more broadly — since this is sci-fi, and therefore actually about us — it has implications. Language isn’t just about understanding how to say things to someone and ascribe meaning to what comes back. Language has consequences. Embedded in words and grammar is action, because the metaphors that we use as we try to make sense of the world tell us what to do next. They act like little roadmaps.

You have empathized with someone not when you hear the words they’re saying, but when youbegin to ascertain what metaphors make them tick, and where that conflicts or agrees with your own. I found myself thinking a lot about this reading Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land , which is up for a National Book Award this year and describes the overarching metaphors (Hochschild calls them "deep stories") that discrete groups of Americans — in this case, West Coast urban liberals and Louisiana rural Tea Partiers — use to make sense of the world. She isn’t trying to explain anything away. She’s trying to figure out what causes people to walk in such drastically different directions and hold views that befuddle their fellow citizens.

Arrival suggests that our mental roadmaps need constant adjustment

Part of the challenge of pluralism is that we’re not just walking around with different ideas in our heads, but with entirely different maps for getting from point A to Z, with different roadblocks on them and different recommendations for which road is the best one. Our A's and Z's don’t even match. We don’t even realize that our ownmaps are missing pieces that others have.

Presumably one of these maps is better than the others, but we haven’t agreed how we would decide. So we just keep smacking into one another going in opposite directions down the same highway.

Arrival takes off from this insightin an undeniably sci-fi direction that is a little brain-bending, improbable in the best way. But it makes a strong case that communication, not battle or combat, is the only way to avoid destroying ourselves. Communication means not just wrapping our heads around terms we use but the actual framework through which we perceive reality.

And that is really hard. I don’t know how to fix it.

In the meantime, though, good movies are somewhere to start . Luckily Arrival is a tremendously well-designed film, with complicated and unpredictable visuals that embody the main point. Nothing flashy or explosive; in some ways, I found myself thinking of 1970s science-fiction films, or the best parts of Danny Boyle’s 2007 Sunshine , which grounded its humanist story in deep quiet.

The movie concludes on a different note from the linguistic one — one much more related to loss and a wistful question about life and risk. This may be Arrival ’sbiggestweakness; the emotional punch of the ending is lessened a bit because it feels a little rushed.

But even that conclusion loops back to the possibilities of the reshaped human imagination. And this week, especially, you don’t need to talk to an alien to see why that’s something we need.

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The Epic Intimacy of Arrival

The alien-contact movie, starring Amy Adams and directed by Denis Villeneuve, is the best film of the year so far.

Arrival , the remarkable new film by Denis Villeneuve, begins aptly enough with an arrival—though perhaps not the kind you would expect. A baby is born, and her mother, played by Amy Adams, explains in voiceover, “I used to think to this was the beginning of your story.” We see the girl’s life, in flashback—games of cowboy, arguments, reconciliations—as her mother continues, “I remember moments in the middle ... and this was the end.” We see the girl, now a teenager, in a hospital bed. Then we see the bed empty.

The sequence—a brief life encompassed in still briefer summary—is surely among the most heartbreaking since Michael Giacchino’s magnificently versatile waltz carried us through the “ Married Life ” segment of Up . And while at first it appears to be mere backstory for Adams’s character, it is in fact much more, perhaps the most crucial thread in Villeneuve’s intricately woven film.

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Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a world-class linguist whom the Army once asked for help with a Farsi translation. “You made quick work of those insurgent videos,” a Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) reminds her; “you made quick work of those insurgents,” she rebuts. The Army needs her help once again, although this time the work is decidedly more esoteric: Aliens have arrived on Earth in a dozen giant craft scattered across the globe, one of them in the wilds of Montana. Colonel Weber would like Louise to come with him, learn the aliens’ language, and ask them why they’re here. On the flight into Big Sky Country, she is introduced to her partner in this endeavor, a genial physicist named Ian Donelly (Jeremy Renner, looking relieved that no one expects him to lug around a bow and quiver).

Villeneuve clearly knows his Godzilla , and like Ishiro Honda he takes his time before revealing his leviathan. As the chopper bearing the scientists skims over the plains, the alien craft emerges, literally, from the mist: a 1,500-foot edifice of what looks like black rock floating weightlessly just above the ground, like a giant skipping-stone poised on one tip.

Accompanied by soldiers and technicians, Louise and Ian enter the craft by means of a square shaft in its base. Once inside, however, gravity releases them and then shifts 90 degrees, such that the shaft is now a corridor and one of its walls the floor. It is a dizzying moment for Louise and Ian, and no less so for the audience, like when Fred Astaire danced his way up the wall in Royal Wedding . As Ian responded to the sudden inversion with “holy fuck,” I was right there with him.

At the end of the corridor they meet their hosts, two giant, squid-like beings that float on the other side of a transparent barrier. Louise and Ian call them “heptapods” owing to their seven symmetrical tentacles, and name the two “Abbott” and “Costello,” because, well, why not? Efforts at verbal communication are unsuccessful, but written language proves more promising. From their starfish-like hands, the heptapods can emit swirling circles of inky gas, each one of them—as Louise concludes—a fully formed sentence with neither beginning nor end. Communication with the creatures moves slowly, but it at least begins to move.

Like Villeneuve’s recent films Sicario and Prisoners , the movie is at once evocative and mysterious. As events unspool, we can sense that—like Louise with the heptapods—we do not entirely comprehend them. (We are correct in this.) As she and Ian try to decode the creatures’ language, they are constrained in their efforts by Colonel Weber and, especially, a CIA agent named Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg). Until we know more of the aliens’ intentions—conquest? tourism? cup of sugar?—Weber and Halpern are greatly concerned that we do not accidentally teach them more about ourselves than we learn about them.

Moreover, there are geopolitics to consider. Eleven other craft hover elsewhere on Earth: Shanghai, Siberia, Sudan, Sierre Leone, and even a few places not starting with “s.” What if China or Russia makes a breakthrough with the aliens first and uses what it learns against the United States? What if shots are fired, bringing alien wrath down upon the whole globe? Already their arrival has enveloped America in a sense of dread and anxiety not seen since—well, this entire political season. Looting breaks out in the cities; Pentecostals self-immolate; talk-radio tough guys demand “a show of force, a shot across their bows.”

The look of Arrival is stately and elegant; its pace, sober and deliberate. This is Villeneuve’s first collaboration with the cinematographer Bradford Young, who shot my two favorite films of 2014 in A Most Violent Year and Selma . The score, by the frequent Villeneuve contributor Jóhann Jóhannsson, is multifaceted and occasionally spellbinding, not least when its low horns boom with menace, almost like an alien voice themselves.

The script is by Eric Heisserer, who cunningly adapted and expanded it from a short story by Ted Chiang. It’s tempting to describe Arrival as “thinking person’s science fiction.” And while I will not descend to such hokey nomenclature, there’s a reason you’ll probably see that phrase plenty in conjunction with the film.

It would be a disservice to describe how the plot unfolds any further, as Villeneuve releases information gradually and viewers will likely clue into the film’s true meaning at different points in its evolution. Suffice to say that Arrival is a “twist” movie, but the twist is more than a mere gimmick. Like Christopher Nolan’s Memento , it is central not only to the film’s narrative but also to its moral architecture—which, like Memento ’s, concerns itself with questions of time, memory, and human choice. This is precisely the kind of science-fiction movie, at once epic and intimate, that Interstellar tried (and failed ) to be.

The entire cast is strong, but Arrival is Adams’s movie from the first frame to the last. I confess that I initially thought that her gifts might be wasted on such space-invader fare, but the performance she gives is mesmerizingly open, by turns uplifting and sorrowful. If you are unmoved by the film’s conclusion, then you are made of considerably harder stuff than I.

As awards season gets under way, there are several promising movies visible hovering on the horizon. But for now, the best film of the year, ambitious in conception and extraordinary in execution, has arrived.

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Review: Aliens Drop Anchor in ‘Arrival,’ but What Are Their Intentions?

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By Manohla Dargis

Nov. 10, 2016

In what’s perhaps the first science-fiction film — Georges Méliès’s 1902 marvel “A Trip to the Moon” — a group of astronomers lands in the Man in the Moon’s eye. They’re soon taken prisoner by moon men, but a quick-witted astronomer clobbers the king and they escape, with one earthling vanquishing moon men with an umbrella. Humans have been zapping extraterrestrials ever since. It’s so easy to fight the unknown, at least in movies.

“Arrival” is a science-fiction parable in a distinctly more idealistic hopeful key than most movies in this genre, one in which the best solutions don’t necessarily materialize in a gun sight. It has a little action, a bit of violence and clenched-jawed jittery men. Mostly, it has ideas and hope, as well as eerie extraterrestrials who face off with a soulful linguist-heroine, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), the story’s voice of reason and its translator. She’s thoughtful, serious, at ease with her own silence and fears. She’d get along fine with Sandra Bullock’s character in “Gravity,” which like this movie leans into feeling and thinking, and reminds you again that there’s more to this genre than heavy artillery.

The movie begins with an elliptical prelude that guides you in but is forgotten as soon as the aliens touch down minutes later. The director Denis Villeneuve teases his way through these preliminaries, with shots of newscasts and panicked crowds, revealing just enough to work up some excitement. In a sly preview to things and tall creatures to come, Louise keeps looking up — at a blaring television, at shrieking military jets — turning Ms. Adams’s pale face into a screen for the movie that’s just starting to come into view. She’s soon hustled off to the show run by the military (Forest Whitaker plays the good cop, Michael Stuhlbarg the bad), having been enlisted to interpret the alien tongue.

Movie Review: ‘Arrival’

The times critic manohla dargis reviews “arrival.”.

In “Arrival,” Amy Adams plays a linguist who tries to communicate with aliens by translating their language. In her review, Manohla Dargis writes: Denis Villeneuve’s newest science-fiction movie is distinctly more hopeful key than most in this genre, one in which the best solutions don’t necessarily materialize in a gunsight. It has a little action, a bit of gunfire and clenched-jawed jittery men. Villeneuve likes big stories with big stakes and he’s very good at working your nerves. “Arrival” isn’t a visionary movie, an intellectual rebus or a head movie; it’s pretty straight in some respects and sometimes corny, with a visual design that’s lovely rather than landmark.

Mr. Villeneuve likes big stories with big stakes, and he’s very skilled at working your nerves. In some of his movies, he punctures the stories with bluntly violent shocks — a stunned survivor seated before a burning truck in “ Incendies ,” corpses sealed inside a drug-house wall in “ Sicario ” — that distill terror into a grabber moment. These visuals can be real showstoppers (the narratives briefly shift into idle); they’re at once off-putting and unsettlingly seductive, and even if you want to look away, it can be hard to. Some of his limitations as a filmmaker are best expressed in the perfect crackling of those flames and the pictorial balance of that shot of walled-up torture victims.

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Arrival review: a soulful sci-fi instant classic

Director denis villeneuve successfully merges hard sci-fi and real emotion in one of the best films of the year.

By Bryan Bishop

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Early on in Denis Villeneuve’s new film Arrival , it becomes pretty clear that for an alien-invasion movie, it’s actually not all that interested in aliens. As 12 mysterious spacecraft land in different locations around Earth, we see college students getting texted with the news, newscasters describing it, and a linguistics expert played by Amy Adams taking it all in — but we don’t see the ships themselves. Humanity’s reaction is what’s important, and it’s only after the film has slowly, methodically established its priorities that the ships — or "shells," as they’re dubbed — are revealed.

It sets the tone for what’s to come: a mature, thoughtful piece of science fiction that uses a first-contact premise not just as a setup for a doomsday scenario, but as a platform for an incredibly powerful, nuanced look at love, relationships, and the human condition itself. If big-screen science fiction has been going through a maturation process over the past few years, searching for a truly genre-defining moment, it has finally arrived.

Warning: minor spoilers ahead

The films opens as Dr. Louise Banks (Adams) struggles with the death of her teenage daughter, trying to find solace in her daily routine. That process is suddenly interrupted when the 12 shells appear on Earth and the U.S. military comes asking for her help. It turns out they’ve been able to establish some minimal contact with the alien creatures in the shells, but their language is unlike anything known to man. Joining forces with a theoretical physicist named Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), Banks goes inside the ship and meets the aliens face-to-tentacle, and slowly starts learning their language and teaching them ours. She’s convinced their intentions are good, but with shells located all around the globe, other countries are having their own interactions, and soon Banks is trying to uncover the reason behind the visit before China or Russia kick off a war with the aliens.

Accessible without ever shying away from the science in sci-fi

That’s the most broad, generic description of the film I can possibly provide, and that’s where I’m going to leave it, because Arrival is a film that’s not so much built up out of plot points and story beats as it's built from emotional and character turns. Adapted from Ted Chiang’s short story "Story of Your Life," Arrival doesn’t flinch when it comes to serious discussion of linguistics, math, or the complex semagrams the aliens use for their written language. But screenwriter Eric Heisserer ( Lights Out ) is remarkably deft in his ability to use those concepts in service of character and theme. The results feel remarkably accessible, even when Arrival is tackling dense concepts that would normally be verboten in a studio film.

Another huge component of that is Villeneuve's approach. The director has been steadily building a rich body of work with movies like Sicario and Prisoners , and working with cinematographer Bradford Young ( Ain’t Them Bodies Saints ) , he creates a beautiful world of cool, symmetrical compositions and ever-patient camera moves. It would be foolish to avoid the Kubrick comparisons — several shots when Banks and Donnelly first enter the alien ship read like direct callbacks to 2001: A Space Odyssey — but that trademarked sterility isn’t just artifice; it’s the nature of the world Villeneuve is creating here. Whether it’s Banks, Donnelly, or the head of the Chinese military, everyone is alone, and can’t find it within themselves to connect with one another, even in the face of world-changing circumstances.

The promise of overcoming that inability to communicate — not just with aliens, but with one another — is what lies at the heart of the film, and it’s an idea that’s brought forward most directly by Amy Adams' performance. She's played a variety of roles covering a range of colors, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her so raw and emotionally compelling. Watching her struggle with the alien language, driven by memories of her daughter, is like mainlining empathy, pushing the film toward a crescendo of an ending that is quietly triumphant and heart-wrenching.

Watching Amy Adams' performance is like mainlining empathy

The funny thing is that we’ve seen swings at this kind of thing before — and more recently than you might think. In 2014, Interstellar launched with the ambitious mission of using a hard sci-fi story to explore the notions of legacy and sacrifice between a father and a daughter. With the talent of Christopher Nolan, a lead actor at peak McConaissance, and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne all on board, expectations were understandably high. While the end result was lovingly rendered, ultimately it fell short — and it wasn’t because the film’s puzzle-like construction or loop-around ending were too convoluted.

It failed because it didn’t resonate emotionally. Interstellar leaves all its grand themes and ambitions inert and lifeless. Arrival 's extraordinary success is that it combines its bravura style and grand science-fiction questions with tremendous emotional intelligence and a heart so full, it’s ready to burst. It’s a film that dares us to look ahead, to open ourselves up to vulnerability and sacrifice, and to take chances and engage with the world around us, no matter what dire consequences we fear may be just around the corner. That transcends genre, or even medium. It is simply art, and at a time when so many seem intent on walling off themselves or their countries, it’s exactly what we need.

This review originally appeared on September 10, 2016 in conjunction with the film's screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has been republished to coincide with the film's wide theatrical opening.

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Review: ‘Arrival’ is deeply human, expertly realized science fiction

Kenneth Turan reviews ‘Arrival’ directed by Denis Villeneuve, starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma, and Mark O’Brien. Video by Jason H. Neubert.

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You can stop watching the skies.

They’re here.

Movies that begin with confounding aliens on the loose have been around for awhile (at least since 1951’s “Man From Planet X” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still”) and they invariably share a family resemblance even if the space visitors themselves never look the same way twice.

Where do these beings come from, baffled scientists and frightened government officials inevitably want to know. Are they friendly or hostile, what do they want from us and what are they doing here in the first place?

One of the most satisfying things about Denis Villeneuve’s elegant, involving “Arrival” is that it is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many of these alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart.

Working from a smart and effective script by Eric Heisserer adapted from a cerebral short story by science-fiction luminary Ted Chiang, the French-Canadian director and his team have found ways to make these way-out-of-the-ordinary events seem plausible and convincing.

This cannot have been easy because Chiang’s story, though containing a splendid central idea, is a cool, scientific, even philosophical exploration of the nature of language and does completely without many of the plot specifics that make “Arrival” involving.

Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker star in “Arrival.”

Always an effective, if at times coolly manipulative director (“Sicario,” “Prisoners”), Villeneuve and his team have embraced the script and even found space for emotion. This is especially true in the film’s audacious conclusion, a moving, nervy reveal sure to spark lots of after-movie conversation.

In his success Villeneuve is helped considerably by the finely calibrated performance of star Amy Adams. Though the credits list her as one of a group of top actors including Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg, “Arrival” is really Adams’ film, a showcase for her ability to quietly and effectively meld intelligence, empathy and reserve.

Before we know anything else about her, we see Adams’ Louise Banks as a parent, enjoying the happiness and the sadness that can come with raising a child, her daughter Hannah. Chiang’s short story is titled “Story of Your Life,” and “Arrival” is similarly structured as a kind of message from mother to child.

Almost immediately, however, we cut to the chase. Banks is a professor of linguistics, but when she shows up to teach, her classroom is almost empty. A timely look at the television tells all: an ominous extraterrestrial spacecraft has landed in Montana and the country is freaking out.

Looking like the universe’s largest skipping stone, or a surfboard big enough to daunt Duke Kahanamoku, that spacecraft is one of 12 that have shown up at apparently random locations around the globe, including Venezuela, Siberia and China.

Banks thinks all this has nothing to do with her, but she’s wrong. Because she’s an ace linguist who already has security clearance, the Army’s all-business Col. Weber (a letter-perfect Whitaker) shows up at her door in need of help figuring out both how the aliens speak and what they are saying.

Whisked off to deepest Montana, Banks is joined by another scientist, top Los Alamos theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Renner), and Agent Halpern (Stuhlbarg), the inevitable watchful guy from the CIA.

Every 18 hours the alien craft opens and Banks and Donnelly and a support crew go in and confront the pair of aliens, who they nickname Abbott and Costello (a big improvement over the short story’s Flapper and Raspberry).

Banks’ mandate is double-edged: to learn as much of these creatures’ language as she can, while for security reasons, not revealing any more English to them than she needs to.

This process turns out to be a more fraught procedure than the linguist imagines, and not only because in the rest of the world everyone is acting on pure fear alone.

But for Banks, whose sessions with the aliens are punctuated by frequent visions of herself and her daughter, learning that alien tongue, as short-story writer Chiang puts it, “changes the way she understands her life.”

While Chiang’s story provides “Arrival’s” essential core concept, almost everything else is brought to the table by Villeneuve and his accomplished team, led by gifted cinematographer Bradford Young (“A Most Violent Year,” “Pawn Sacrifice,” “Selma”).

Almost taking as a challenge the familiar nature of alien movies, Villeneuve, Young, production designer Patrice Vermette and visual effects supervisor Louis Morin have taken it as a challenge to show us things from unexpected angles, keeping us off balance visually and emotionally in a very accomplished way.

Adams’ contribution is essential to this plan, especially when you realize that the story is in large part about the nature of language learning and linguistics. Her ability to create empathy and emotional connection, with the audience as well as the aliens, reminds us that the best and most effective science fiction is invariably deeply human at its core.

MPAA rating. PG-13 for scenes of science fiction violence and terror and for brief language.

Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

In general release.

Critic’s Choice. “Arrival.” Amy Adams stars in this elegant, involving science fiction drama that is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many alien invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart. - Kenneth Turan

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Arrival Is a Great Sci-Fi Movie—and an Even Better Election Allegory

At the climax of Arrival , when hope for humanity seems lost, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) steals a satellite phone and barricades herself in a room to try to save the world. Outside the room, intelligence agents and soldiers train their guns on the door. Across the planet, alien ships dot the globe, and military superpowers everywhere are preparing to launch nuclear attacks on the interlopers. Banks is at this moment the most capable person on the planet—experienced, knowledgeable—and she uses those skills, the weight of great and terrible information she doesn’t yet understand, to save the world from men who would rather visit apocalypse upon the unknown than seek to to understand it. Director Denis Villeneuve didn't set out to create an allegory for this year's presidential election—but now it’s a painful one.

Based on Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” Villeneuve’s adaptation begins just after the alien ships have appeared—a dozen of them, hovering around the world. Louise, a linguistics professor, walks into her regular classroom to begin a lecture, unaware of the ships and the ensuing existential panic that has gripped the planet. She receives a visit from Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), an official for whom she'd once provided some translation work, and who now invites her to join a team of scientists inspecting one of the ships in Montana.

Figuring out an alien language is painstaking work, but Louise takes to it with aplomb. While everyone around her is looking for immediate, significant progress—and failing—she has the linguistics background to know where to start, and moves through the building blocks of communication to try and find ways for the humans and heptapods to communicate. In contrast to her theoretical-physicist teammate Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), she’s the one who not only has seemingly limitless ideas but actually delivers useful results. Her first breakthrough: discovering that both species have some form of writing. The alien language is beautifully rendered, with "logograms" of curving black smoke that can encompass entire sentences.

Louise’s dominant trait is her competence, but there’s an aching vulnerability to her as well, revealed in flash-sideways scenes only the audience sees. We see the parts of her life that no one around her does: a strained marriage, a beloved daughter. Villeneuve, along with cinematographer Bradford Young ( Selma ), has a knack for revealing information just as it demands to be known, while also dangling a parallel mystery about Louise’s life. And composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score, full of choirs and deep bass, highlights both the scientific excitement and the global panic that suffuses Arrival .

What sticks out now, as the film hits theaters in the United States nearly two months after its Venice Film Festival debut, is how pivotal Louise’s role is in mediating a potentially catastrophic misunderstanding—and how unrewarded as well. Unlike the hostile invaders from Independence Day , these visitors don't attack, but simply allow a team of humans to see and communicate with a pair of seven-legged aliens. (Ian nicknames the Montana pair Abbott and Costello, effectively undercutting the potential danger in the minds of the researchers.)

But not every nation takes Louise’s approach, or even supports her efforts. She’s a stellar communicator and a talented diplomat, but many perceive her as icy and idealistic. China chooses to interact with its nearest visitors through Mahjong, a game that teaches winners and losers, but not parity. Fearful of the aliens’ intentions, and unable to do anything but play a game and keep scores, China—along with Russia, Sudan, and others—prepares to take military action. Meanwhile, even the US armed forces, influenced by conservative pundits, seek to violently undermine Louise and Ian's work. Yet, Louise ends up being the only person on Earth who fully grasps the repercussions of the message the heptapods are trying to send.

Arrival is not the kind of science-fiction film that delivers a jaw-dropping opening weekend. It's unlikely to earn more money than Doctor Strange , which is heading into its second week in theaters. But it's as moving as it is cerebral, contemplating the nature of time as ably as it considers the chasms that divide so many of us. At its center is a talented, successful woman whose tireless work goes unrewarded—and in these times, there's perhaps no more dystopian scenario than that.

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Forest Whitaker, Amy Adams, and Jeremy Renner in Arrival (2016)

A linguist works with the military to communicate with alien lifeforms after twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world. A linguist works with the military to communicate with alien lifeforms after twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world. A linguist works with the military to communicate with alien lifeforms after twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world.

Denis Villeneuve
Eric Heisserer
Jeremy Renner
Forest Whitaker
2.3K User reviews
758 Critic reviews
81 Metascore
69 wins & 268 nominations total

Louise Banks

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Colonel Weber

Agent Halpern

Captain Marks

General Shang

8-Year-Old-Hannah

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6-Year-Old-Hannah

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Trivia Director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer created a fully functioning, visual, alien language. Heisserer, Villeneuve, and their teams managed to create a "logogram bible", which included over a hundred different, completely operative logograms, seventy-one of which are actually used in the movie.
Goofs In the main landings chart, the Australian contact point seems to be in the Indian Ocean off Geralton in Western Australia. Later, there is a brief shot of an alien spacecraft with central Sydney in the distance across water; Sydney is on Australia's east coast.

Louise Banks : But now I'm not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings. There are days that define your story beyond your life. Like the day they arrived.

Crazy credits Denis Villeneuve 's daughter, Salomé Villeneuve , is listed as "Hazmat Suit Specialist".
Connections Featured in The Graham Norton Show: Amy Adams/Jeremy Renner/Chris O'Dowd/Niall Horan (2016)
Soundtracks On the Nature of Daylight Written and Performed by Max Richter Courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon GmbH Under license from Universal Music Enterprises

User reviews 2.3K

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Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada
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$47,000,000 (estimated)
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Nov 13, 2016
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Runtime 1 hour 56 minutes
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Arrival, film review: Finally a sci-fi thriller that doesn’t rely on action movie clichés

Amy adams carries denis villeneuve's cerebal and contemplative hit, article bookmarked.

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Denis Villeneuve is currently working on the next Blade Runner movie starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford. His new film Arrival (a premiere in Venice this week) is also a sci-fi movie, albeit a very cerebral and contemplative one. The film, based on cult sci-fi yarn Story Of Your Life by Ted Chiang, starts with a War of the Worlds -style alien invasion. Its plot, though,turns out to be more preoccupied with linguistics, philosophy and non-linear time than with humans in boiler suits zapping the creatures from outer space.

The main protagonist Dr Lousie Banks ( Amy Adams ) is a brilliant academic. In a deliberately dream-like and confusing prelude which stands as a mini-movie in its own right, we see a montage of incidents from her life with her beloved daughter. Back in the present, she is teaching in a sparsely attended lecture hall when one of her students makes her turn on the new channel on TV. A dozen oval spaced alien spaceships have arrived on earth. They’re hovering everywhere from Devon to the Black Sea. World leaders have no idea whether the spaceships have come in peace or with murderous intentions. Louise is recruited by the military authorities alongside scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to try to communicate with the visitors.

The film is fascinating in its own slow-burning way as it depicts Louise’s painstaking efforts to come up with a set of language conventions that the aliens can understand. The “heptapods” are spidery creatures with starfish-shaped hands who communicate through their own incredibly complex form of hieroglyphs. They create inky patterns of circles and symbols that look elements from Jackson Pollock paintings. A jarring, minimalist score by Johann Johannsson adds to the general eeriness.

This is one sci-fi movie in which there is no attempt whatsoever to anthopomorphise the aliens. They’re not like humans. Louise is patient and dogged in her attempts to understand them but she has no time. Across the world, everywhere from China to Russia to Sudan, military forces are gathering, ready to try to blast the aliens back to the galaxy whence they came. In the wake of their arrival, the stock market has collapsed, looting is widespread and there is a very real danger that the superpowers, instead of joining forces to deal with their new visitors, will soon turn their weaponry on each other.

Amy Adams is a very versatile actress, equally adept at playing con artists and ingenues; in appearing in screwball comedy and in very dark drama. Here, she is utterly credible as the academic so passionate about her work that she hardly seems to notice that Armageddon may be nigh. This is a Hollywood movie in which semantics matter. The difference between “weapon” and “tool” is crucial for the future of humankind.

Early Oscars 2017 contenders

Villeneuve has assembled a strong supporting cast. Forest Whitaker is a furrowed-browed, no-nonsense US military Colonel, trying to get Louise to hurry up and crack the code that will enable her to understand the Heptapod language. Michael Stuhlbarg is the vaguely sinister intelligence chief type, ready to turn against Louise if he even suspects that she is compromising national security. They, and Renner’s scientist, are all subservient to Adams, who carries the movie.

Occasionally, when characters breathlessly utter lines about language and time being “not the same” for the aliens or we’re suddenly whisked into the past or future, the film can seem a little silly. It’s heartening, though, to encounter a science fiction thriller that is ready to deal with abstract ideas and that doesn’t rely on the slightest on action movie clichés.

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Arrival Is a Tantalizing Sci-Fi Puzzler, Until It’s Highjacked by Melodrama

Not to sound too much like a finger-wagging extraterrestrial (“Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!” — Eros , Plan 9 From Outer Space ), but it’s pure arrogance to expect space aliens to master the Queen’s English from the get-go, let alone to have tongues capable of forming sentences like “Sheila seldom sells shelled shrimps.” The mystical sci-fi adventure-weeper Arrival makes the credible case that you can’t get anywhere with ETs if you don’t know exactly what they want, and you can’t know what they want if you can’t ask and they can’t answer. Are they here to exterminate us? To save our bacon? To make us part of an intergalactic performance-art piece? Having arrived in titanic wedges that look about a mile high and are settling — seemingly at random — in spots all over the Earth, these aliens seem even more Rorschach-ian than the ones behind Stanley Kubrick’s monolith.

Much of Arrival — the part that sticks closest to its source, egghead sci-fi cult figure Ted Chiang’s “ Story of Your Life ” — is an eerie, tantalizing, altogether superb puzzler. As directed by the Quebec-born Denis Villeneuve, it reminds us that much of what we assume about life outside this planet is based on our own dumb pop culture. In films as various as Incendies, Prisoners , and Sicario , Villeneuve mingles penetrating close-ups with chill, blurred backgrounds to make us intimate with characters who are trying to discern the rules of existence in a void. Strangeness is the only reality.

Arrival’ s hero is Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguistics professor. She’s a woman in mourning for a lost daughter, seen in dislocating glimpses from cradle to hospital deathbed. Adams seems born to be Louise. She’s a grounded actress, direct and plainspoken. But there’s something brittle about her, as if she has survived a trauma and can’t quite break through into the moment. Her blue eyes are alien-blue, not fully of this world. When Louise enters the spaceship’s long, vertical entryway, her body twisting as it undergoes changes in pressure and gravity, she’s clearly on a voyage of self-discovery as well as scientific knowledge.

That’s the part of the puzzle that grabs us. But there’s another, equally insistent puzzle: Why did Villeneuve and the screenwriter, Eric Heisserer, let the grade-B military melodrama run away with the story? The thrust is that a Chinese general named Shang (Tzi Ma) wants to start blasting the alien ships — and since we never hear from the American president, it’s as if the fate of the entire planet were in the hands of a stereotypical warmonger. Arrival doesn’t crumble, exactly. It’s still suspenseful. But the two parts of the film inhabit a different time-space continuum.

The reason for this disconnect is that Chiang’s story isn’t really about an extraterrestrial invasion — let alone a paranoid military. It’s a device for challenging Newtonian physics and linear time, which Einstein once called “a stubbornly persistent illusion.” What Louise comes to realize is that merely learning the aliens’ syntax will require changes in our brains — a controversial idea in linguistics but one that’s seen, by its partisans, as bringing us closer to a unified theory of matter. Chiang wants to move the sci-fi border in the direction of quantum physics.

In Arrival, Louise’s attempts to discern this syntax are mysteriously truncated. The aliens’ writing takes the form of exquisite ink paintings on currents of air that seem like water, as if a squid had learned Japanese calligraphy. But Louise’s breakthrough seems to happen during a montage, and she gets disappointingly little help from a physicist (Jeremy Renner) who turns into a sidekick. The revelation toward the end is genuinely shocking, and the final moments are very moving. But the audience might wonder — as I did — what questions of free will versus determinism have to do with the fate of the planet. To which the only winning argument would be: “Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”

*This article appears in the October 31, 2016, issue of New York Magazine.

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Movie Review: Arrival (2016)

Vincent Gaine
Movie Reviews
10 responses
--> November 19, 2016

From its opening shot of a house both sleek and warm to its transcendent finale, Arrival arrests attention with a grasp that is firm yet ephemeral. It is a sublime and profound experience, touching its audience on an emotional, intellectual and spiritual level, a film that declares both its originality and its ancestry.

And what ancestry! One of the great pleasures of science fiction is the interplay of repetition and variation, as science fiction cinema (as well as literature and television) reworks and reformulates elements of earlier films. Viewers can identify these elements and enjoy the new film’s interpretation, thus perpetuating a dialogue between filmmakers, films and audiences, each group responding to each other and exchanging with the other parties.

Dialogue, communication and exchange are indeed central to Arrival , Denis Villeneuve’s science fiction drama about first contact between humans and extra-terrestrials. Through careful focus on the experiences of linguist Doctor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and theoretical physicist Doctor Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), with anxious oversight from Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker, “ Southpaw ”), Arrival creates a tangible and plausible vision of the pitfalls and possibilities of a truly alien encounter. While the giant looming spacecraft might echo “Independence Day,” Arrival more closely recalls “Contact,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Solaris” and “Monsters.” Crucially, however, Arrival also stamps out its own territory perfectly. After the grim crime thrillers “ Prisoners ” and “ Sicario ,” Villeneuve exceeds his previous achievements to prove himself one of the most exciting directors working today, as comfortable with wide scale epic scenes as he is with intimate moments of human memory and interaction. From the early establishment of tragic events (that recall Pixar’s “ Up ”) to immense moments of global importance, Arrival never puts a foot wrong in its portrayal of a close encounter of the profound kind.

The film’s success is testament to the balance of its various elements. Eric Heisserer’s script is a smart and subtle beast, delicately interweaving character, plot and theme in such a way that no one aspect overshadows the others. Editor Joe Walker cuts with precision between different time frames that inform each other carefully. Production designer Patrice Vermette crafts evocative locations both earthly and unearthly, the interior of the alien vessel an exercise in the uncanny. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score shifts from quiet and subtle to boomingly bombastic when the scene calls for it. If there is anything missing from the film, it is the extraordinary cinematography that Roger Deakins brought to “Prisoners” and “Sicario,” but Bradford Young’s cinematography conveys a sense of “dirty sci-fi.” Grit, grime and fog obscure the light which gives the film earthiness and texture, allowing the viewer to feel both grounded and alienated, much like the characters.

As the major characters, the central actors give a convincing and distinct range of responses to an extraordinary situation. Whitaker delivers a performance far beyond a military stereotype, concerned with alien intentions but without bullishness or overt aggression. Renner demonstrates range beyond his tough guy roles in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “ The Town ” and “ The Hurt Locker ,” his skepticism and purely mathematical understanding softening as he comes to understand the linguistic approach. As the film’s center and rarely off screen, Adams is never less than mesmerizing and after “Junebug,” “ Doubt ,” “ The Fighter ,” “ The Master ” and “ American Hustle ,” she may well be on her way to a sixth nomination, and perhaps even a win. Whether Banks is countering Weber’s military expectations with linguistic realities, grappling with her own trauma or conveying a palatable sense of wonder and reverence, her arc is a beautiful and soulful journey towards understanding.

Indeed, understanding is central to the film. Banks must learn to understand the alien language and, pleasingly, attention is given to the painstaking team work of research, as both Banks and Donnelly have large teams to work on their findings. While there are generic moments of revelation, they feel earned because the film creates a sense of long hours worked, falling asleep at the desk and sharing the load, rather than everything being the work of one exceptional individual. Villeneuve takes his time to build up dramatic tension, often using long takes reminiscent of those he used in “Sicario.” Near the beginning, Banks leaves her office and crosses a parking lot, and the shot continues long enough for the viewer to see two cars moving towards a collision which does take place, a moment that foreshadows later events of greater ominousness. Later, when Banks is first brought to the alien landing site, a long aerial shot pans around the enormous vessel as well as the army camp below and the surrounding wilderness. It is a breathtaking moment that expresses the wonder and grandeur of this encounter, filtered through the individual experience of Banks which ensures the audience’s understanding.

Yet Banks’ experience is not the only one that matters, as the whole world is (understandably) involved in the alien arrival. Information is shared among different countries, although tensions rapidly rise and China takes on an intriguing role through the character of General Shang (Tzi Ma, “ The Campaign ”). The snippets of information about Shang’s approach convey the extremely murky territory that Banks and the viewer are in, a constantly evolving knowledge that could so easily lead to severe misunderstandings. Yet throughout this journey, optimism and hope never disappear, even when events that would thwart a peaceful understanding override the work of Banks and Donnelly. It is this non-partisan but widely applicable philosophy of sympathetic engagement that elevates Arrival , making it not only a superbly crafted piece of cinema, but a timely intervention in geopolitical discourse that calls for communication, understanding and peaceful coexistence.

Tagged: aliens , military , scientist , short story adaptation

Dr. Vincent M. Gaine is a film and television researcher. His first book, Existentialism and Social Engagement in the Films of Michael Mann was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2011. His work on film and media has been published in Cinema Journal and The Journal of Technology , Theology and Religion , as well as edited collections including The 21st Century Superhero and The Directory of World Cinema .

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'Movie Review: Arrival (2016)' have 10 comments

November 19, 2016 @ 9:24 am normandy

Good science fiction has the effect of making people think. Arrival is good science fiction and I definitely thought!

November 19, 2016 @ 9:46 am densing cotton

Seemed kinda silly to me.

November 19, 2016 @ 11:30 am mashiko

Arrival is my favorite movie of the year. The idea, the atmosphere, the directing and the performances are all top notch stuff.

Everyone should see it. Now.

November 19, 2016 @ 12:04 pm Skids

This is one of those ‘hihgh concept’ movies that’s a jumble of ideas and never fully comes together. It confused the heck out of me so much I napped midway through..

November 19, 2016 @ 10:11 pm I Think I Thought

its pretentious fuckery

November 19, 2016 @ 4:48 pm consumable infrastructure

If you like Contact and Interstellar and Close Encounters, Arrival is a movie for you.

November 19, 2016 @ 5:58 pm Gidget

Good review- I agree it is the perfect movie for the times to give a sense of hope and understanding so desperately needed.

November 20, 2016 @ 1:07 am annetbell

Well written, thoughtful and inclusive review!

November 27, 2016 @ 2:22 am Carole Field

I thought it was a remake of “Close Encounters”. Beautifully done,but pointless. Everyone is assigning some deep stuff to its linguistic orientation. Careful- they manipulated you into that one!

January 13, 2017 @ 3:57 pm Andrew

I thought the guys in the rubber octopus suits were pretty marginal for what is supposed to be sophisticated SCIFI. Basically a waste of time and a mess of a movie

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'Arrival' Review: Decoding a New Visual Language

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[Note: This is a re-post of our review from the Telluride Film Festival; Arrival opens in theaters this week].

Denis Villeneuve ( Sicario, Prisoners ), to this point, has been a frustrating director for me. Frustrating because his films have always shown a delicate craftsmanship, but the final product never coalesced into a film that was equal to the visuals, score and pacing that Villeneuve had shown complete mastery of. Prisoners ' eloquent visuals colored suspicion in every corner of a suburban street but was undid by a script that over-relied on red herrings. Sicario couldn't commit to its vantage point of a bewildered DEA agent and instead switched to the hitman at the climactic point for tidy answers. In these films (and in his Canadian productions), Villeneuve was a director that I knew would eventually make a film that would floor me. He obviously had all the tools, but his visual construction was beyond the texts he was working with. Fittingly, with Arrival , a film all about language between alien species and worldwide miscommunication, Villeneuve has free reign to decode an entire universe of language with visuals. And it's a monolithic achievement.

Arrival is a spiral helix of information, but to keep that looping staircase a surprise this write-up will barely engage with plot. And despite how intricate the story feels during its runtime, its ultimately a film that will require multiple viewings. But the visual poetry will pull you through into an exciting, brave new world of ideas about global construction, and the Tower of Babel that has kept us from perfecting a worldwide construction. And perhaps keeps us from being capable (right now) of engaging with another civilization.

In basic terms, 12 black, oval alien pods appear one day in 12 distinctly different parts of Earth. In the USA, it's a field in Montana. Others appear above the Black Sea, in Shanghai, Denmark, etc. The world, for the first time, attempts to work together in direct communication about this event. A feed is set up with scientists and armies all around the world to share information that they are receiving from these alien pods. In Montana, an army colonel ( Forest Whitaker ) recruits a renowned linguist, Dr. Louise Brooks ( Amy Adams ) to attempt to teach the two black heptapods constructs of English to be able to ask them their intentions on Earth and decode their language. Dr. Brooks shows more bravery in making direct contact with the beings (separated by a communication wall on their ship) than any of the armed men who keep a safe distance. Eventually a scientist, Ian Donnelly ( Jeremy Renner ), joins her in direct contact, thus forming a duo of communication to the dual beings.

In an early scene, the Colonel chooses Dr. Brooks as the proper linguist because she has a more thorough definition of "war" from sanskrit than a colleague of hers. Her contemporary translates the Hindu word as "an argument", and she offers the more complex (and correct) definition as "a desire for more cows". This is extremely important because as each country begins decoding the aliens' language, each country interprets the alien messages differently. Some see specific words as a threat, some as a gift, and as the governments begin to disagree with the meanings of these messages, different factions form, and some go offline from global communication completely. Our inability to communicate efficiently on a global scale creates a schism and the US base races to understand the beings before a domino effect begins from oppositional countries.

Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer very wisely include how communication off base—via news and telephone calls to loved ones—further disrupt patience on base. Patience is key for the film as well. Anyone expecting major actions might be disappointed, but anyone ready to unpack major ideas will be thrilled. Arrival is not a thrill ride, but it is perhaps the most necessary science fiction film of this decade. It involves modern concerns of a global disconnect the more connected we become. And it involves forward-thinking ideas of the concept of time and how our survival as a species might not come on the plane of existence that we've known for thousands of years.

arrival-movie-amy-adams-jeremy-renner-forest-whitaker

For a film about language, Villeneuve smartly relies most on the cinematic language: cinematography, production design, visual effects and musical scoring. His collaborators flex some of the best work of the year in every cinematic realm. The interior of the pod is influenced by the lighting space of a famous James Turrell piece, except instead of shifting color gradients from warm to cool, it is a constant black and white. The heptapods emerge from a fog and communicate with ink that emits from their long legs, and this stylistic choice of being allows for the visual effects to play with liquid and cloudy elements to keep the aliens just enough in the foreground to look incredibly real.

Cinematographer Bradford Young gets to go handheld, up close and personal for Terrence Malick-inspired views from Dr. Brooks' memory and the intimacy in this motif provides many visual clues that will aide her language decoding pursuits (and break your heart). And frequent Villeneuve scoring collaborator, Johann Johansson , creates a chilly atmosphere without making us scared. In fact, every area of Arrival , from the main actors to the crews mentioned above, work exquisitely together to maintain an atmosphere of constant discovery instead of dread and fear.

The maintained feeling of discovery is where Villeneuve deserves so much applause. Arrival is very exciting because it is a sci-fi about ideas and interpersonal communication. Even when it engages with a type of conflict that we're familiar with, Villeneuve only uses sound and a detached viewing from above. We are so attached to the researchers and their methods, we want them to be able to do all their work devoid of violent conflict.

Arrival makes us care about each discovery and less about what conflict might impede it. It's truly a game-changer for modern science fiction.

Arrival opens nationwide on November 11, 2016.

Forest Whitaker

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Movie Reviews

'arrival' is smart, stylish sci-fi about language, not laser beams.

Andrew Lapin

Caught Without A Babel Fish: Amy Adams plays a linguist tasked with speaking fluent Alien in Denis Villaneuve's Arrival . Jan Thijs/Paramount Pictures hide caption

Caught Without A Babel Fish: Amy Adams plays a linguist tasked with speaking fluent Alien in Denis Villaneuve's Arrival .

Close encounters get a whole lot closer with Arrival , a furiously intelligent sci-fi film descending into cinemas from somewhere far, far beyond our current realm of understanding. Its premise instantly solves one of the hardest things to swallow about the traditional movie alien: the fact that it usually acts so much like an Earth-bound creature. After all, it's hard to conceive of extraterrestrial life if we have, well, no concept of it.

This first contact starts in the familiar way: The aliens pull up in style in their 12 giant, sleek, oblong spacecrafts, looking like 2.0 versions of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey . But while they float just above the Earth's surface at seemingly random intervals, for once we can't tell if they want peace or war. We can't even tell what they're saying. And when it's time to send in reinforcements, we don't turn (immediately) to the tanks: we call up a linguist to put her knowledge to the test. Her weapon isn't a gun but a whiteboard. Carl Sagan would be proud.

The educator who can save the world is Dr. Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams with equal parts steadfastness and vulnerability. Owing to some past Farsi translations, Louise is the first name on the military's list once the aliens land. And it must be a short list: Once the official who courts her (Forest Whitaker, sporting what appears to be a rough New England accent) flies her to the Montana farmland where the lone America-based spaceship is idling, we're off to the races. In rapid succession, we come to understand that the U.S. is attempting to work alongside adversarial militaries from China, Russia, and elsewhere; that our only contact opportunity with the mysterious leggy insectoids comes when a hole opens up in their spacecraft once every 18 hours; and that no one has yet made any progress on deciphering their spoken language, which sounds like a rusty oil tanker swaying in the wind.

So it's time to move onto written language, and the most thrilling elements of the film are the geekiest ones: when Louise gets to explain what she's trying to teach the aliens and why. To broach the essential topic ("What is your purpose on Earth?") she needs to make sure they can understand and communicate concepts like pronouns, questions, and locations. She has to decipher their own chicken scratch, which is a cross between a Rorschach blob and a coffee ring. And she has to make all necessary progress before the Chinese get too antsy and declare war on the foreign entities. Along for the ride is a physicist (Jeremy Renner) who gently ribs Louise about the building blocks of the society they are now fighting to preserve: "Language isn't the backbone of civilization," he tells her. "Science is." Or maybe, to an outsider's eyes, they're one and the same.

Arrival is directed by Denis Villeneuve, the Quebecois filmmaker who has fast become North America's most reliable helmer of smart, adult thrillers. Most people familiar with his work will cite the dark themes and twisty plotting of his last four films: Incendies , Enemy , Prisoners , and Sicario . They delved into crimes, wars, and the seedy underbelly of humanity, always with a wicked closed-loop logic that delivered satisfying payoffs to every tee-up.

Likewise, Arrival (whose script is by Eric Heisserer, from a short story by Ted Chiang) does feature some killer twists that will send theaters buzzing at the end credits. There's also a break in temporal logic that brings to mind, of all things, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure . But that's not where the film's true pleasure lies. Villeneuve is secretly skilled in the ways of the set-up: He likes to studiously record every step his heroes make as they approach the unknown, be it a young woman crossing a bridge into the warzone of her former home in Incendies or a heavily armed DEA caravan growling through Juarez in Sicario . There's a great sequence to that end here, too, as Adams and Renner are introduced to the spacecraft (which is very, very black, a screen-filling hue) via a rickety chairlift that leads to a slick antigravity tunnel.

Such a literal jump from the present to the future, from the Earth to the skies, is bolstered by cinematographer Bradford Young's radical lighting choices: He often leaves only the characters' faces, shielded by helmets or not, visible in a sea of black. Separated from the aliens by a blindingly white glass enclosure, the military brings along a canary to test the spaceship's atmosphere, as though entering a coalmine. The bird's erratic chirps punctuate composer Jóhann Jóhannsson's industrial, menacing soundtrack to spectacularly eerie effect.

We can glean much about our modern relationship to the stars by looking at the sci-fi films that have been released since the Space Shuttle's retirement. In 2013's Gravity , outer space was a menace to overcome; in 2014's Interstellar , it was the only solution to a failed Earth existence; and in 2015's The Martian , it was the fertile soil in which to plant American ingenuity. But all those films thrust their heroes into the great beyond and asked them to find their way back, and we as a culture now seem ill-equipped to go out there.

So Arrival , like the Spielberg classic it aspires to, brings the beyond to us. In doing so, it asks a challenging, prescient question: Are we ready to teach, and ready to learn?

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Common sense media reviewers.

Great, deeply thoughtful, compassionate sci-fi tale.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

While many sci-fi movies are about battles and war

The central character is a strong, intelligent, in

A young girl dies (off screen) of a vicious illnes

A man and woman slowly form a bond, culminating in

One use of "f--k." Also "damn,&quot

An adult character drinks wine at home.

Positive Messages

While many sci-fi movies are about battles and war, Arrival is more interested in compassion for and understanding of an alien race than in trying to wipe it out; the danger in the movie is that war will start if the good guys can't make a connection in time. There's also a message about time and choices that's better experienced than explained. If you could see the future and the past all at once, would you make different choices?

Positive Role Models

The central character is a strong, intelligent, independent woman. Her natural curiosity and compassion -- as well as those same qualities in her male colleague -- eventually pay off in a big way.

Violence & Scariness

A young girl dies (off screen) of a vicious illness; hospital scenes, girl in bed, hair gone. Explosion. Threat of war.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A man and woman slowly form a bond, culminating in a hug. References to a spousal relationship.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

One use of "f--k." Also "damn," "hell," "God no," "screw it," "idiot," "I hate you."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Arrival is a deeply thoughtful sci-fi movie about trying to communicate with aliens rather than defeat them. It presents battle and war as last resorts, with only frightened, desperate people looking to violence as a solution. It champions education, compassion, and curiosity and has a strong female lead character ( Amy Adams ). Brief, upsetting hospital scenes show a girl dying of an invasive disease, and there's an explosion and the threat of war. Language is infrequent, although there is one use of "f--k." Other words heard are more along the lines of "screw it," "God no," "I hate you," and "idiot." One adult character drinks wine, and there are references to a married relationship, a budding romance, and a hug. Although the movie is slow-paced, it's a great, exceptionally compassionate pick for families with curious, thoughtful tweens and teens. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 31 parent reviews

Whoa! Communication front and center!

What's the story.

In ARRIVAL, professor of languages Dr. Louise Banks ( Amy Adams ) is headed to work when news of an alien landing spreads. Twelve alien pods are now hovering in different spots all over the world. Before long, she's approached by Colonel Weber ( Forest Whitaker ). He asks for her help in translating the alien language, in hopes of learning the purpose of their visit. Paired with scientist Ian Donnelly ( Jeremy Renner ), Louise ascends into the spaceship and meets the aliens face-to-face. After several trips, she finds she can communicate with them through writing. As the world waits and starts to panic, and talk of war begins, Louise and Ian may have discovered the secret that could save them all -- if it's not too late.

Is It Any Good?

This deeply thoughtful, profoundly compassionate sci-fi movie beautifully mixes realism with a sense of wonder. It keeps its mysteries at bay, and, amazingly, doesn't disappoint when all is revealed. French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve ( Prisoners , Enemy , Sicario ) is becoming one of the best, smartest cinematic storytellers in the world, finding new ways to pull the camera back and observe, taking a little extra time to find emotions, and explore spaces and sounds (a chirping bird is especially poignant). The cinematography by Bradford Young ( Selma ) is breathtakingly mesmerizing, still and patient, without relying on action or adrenaline.

The long build-up to the meeting of the aliens in Arrival is as wondrous and breathless as anything the movies have conjured up recently. Most films that begin with mysteries eventually give up everything, and invariably too soon, resulting in an anticlimax. But, as written by Eric Heisserer ( Lights Out ), and based on a short story by Ted Chiang, the puzzles and the thought-provoking solutions in Arrival only enrich the movie's transcendent quality; we're left with satisfying answers, but also fantastic questions.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Arrival 's violence . What's shown and not shown? How is violence kept in the margins of the movie and used more as a threat or a suggestion? What impact does that havce?

How does Arrival compare with other sci-fi movies about aliens? What other movies in this genre can you think of that focus on peace, rather than war?

Is Louise a role model ? How does she demonstrate curiosity and compassion ? Why are those important character strengths ?

Are the aliens scary ? What about them is scariest? How does the movie go about introducing them to us? Would you have been afraid to talk to them?

Movie Details

In theaters : November 11, 2016
On DVD or streaming : February 14, 2017
Cast : Amy Adams , Jeremy Renner , Forest Whitaker
Director : Denis Villeneuve
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
Studio : Paramount Pictures
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Great Girl Role Models , Space and Aliens
Character Strengths : Compassion , Curiosity
Run time : 116 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : brief strong language
Award : Common Sense Selection
Last updated : May 5, 2024

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Home » Movie Reviews » Arrival Review: Amy Adams Deciphers Language in Denis Villeneuve’s Science Fiction Apex

Arrival Review: Amy Adams Deciphers Language in Denis Villeneuve’s Science Fiction Apex

Review: Arrival is a beautifully presented, excellently edited piece of work that stands as a testament to Denis Villeneuve’s directorial ability and taste. Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner costar in one of the 2010s best science fiction movies.

Denis Villeneuve ‘s Arrival is an undeniably powerful journey into the depths of the unknown, blending elements of science fiction, mystery, and drama to create a thought-provoking masterpiece. Led by the stellar performances of Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner , the film transcends its genre constraints to deliver a captivating exploration of language, communication, and the complexities of human existence.

One of the film’s most striking features is its visual aesthetic, masterfully crafted by cinematographer Bradford Young . From the iconic scenes of alien encounters to the breathtaking landscapes of rural America, every frame is imbued with a sense of wonder and intrigue. The deep blues and greens that permeate the film’s palette serve to enhance its otherworldly atmosphere, drawing you deeper into its narrative.

While at its core, Arrival is a story about connection – both with extraterrestrial beings and with each other. Amy Adams delivers a scarred, beautiful in-tune performance as Louise Banks, an expert linguist tasked with deciphering an inky alien language. Her journey is not only one of intellectual discovery but also of profound emotional resonance, as she grapples with the implications of her newfound understanding of the universe and the memories of her child that’s passed away.

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Jeremy Renner provides strong support as physicist Ian Donnelly, bringing a sense of warmth and humanity to the proceedings. However, Michael Stuhlbarg ‘s character (the immediate antithesis of Louise and Ian – Agent Halpern) feels somewhat out of place, detracting from the film’s otherwise cohesive tone.

What sets Arrival apart from other science fiction films (cough* Interstellar *cough) is its refusal to rely on exposition and scientific jargon. Instead, Villeneuve trusts in the intelligence of his audience, allowing the story to unfold organically and in a captivating, nonlinear timeline. This approach lends the film a sense of authenticity and depth, inviting you to engage with its themes on a deeper level.

While there are moments where the film’s pacing may falter, particularly in its exploration of time and causality, these minor flaws are easily overshadowed by its overall impact. The climax of Arrival is both powerful and heartbreaking, leaving you with a melancholic sense of wonder and hope.

Arrival is a beautifully presented, excellently edited piece of work that stands as a testament to Denis Villeneuve’s directorial ability. It is a rare achievement in the realm of science fiction, offering both spectacle and substance in equal measure. With its powerhouse thematic accomplishments and compelling performances, it cements its place as one of the standout films of the 2010s .

Genre: Drama , Mystery , Sci-Fi

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Arrival Movie Cast and Credits

Amy Adams as Louise Banks

Jeremy Renner as Ian Donnelly

Forest Whitaker as G.T. Weber

Michael Stuhlbarg as Agent Halpern

Tzi Ma as General Shang

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Writer: Eric Heisserer

Cinematography: Bradford Young

Editor: Joe Walker

Composer: Jóhann Jóhannsson

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‘Arrival’ review

See 'arrival' for the alien-invasion, but leave with much, much more.

Sometimes a movie comes out of nowhere and turns out to be so unlike anything you expected that you’re left wondering whether the experience was something uniquely brilliant or an elaborate bit of bait-and-switch cinema.

That’s the sort of film that director Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi drama Arrival proves to be, and whether it falls into the former category or the latter will likely depend on what audiences come into the theater expecting from it – and how rigidly they hold to those expectations. One thing is certain, however: Arrival is a movie unlike anything else we’ve been given in recent years.

Directed by the Sicario and Prisoners filmmaker from a script penned by Eric Heisserer ( Lights Out , The Thing ), Arrival is based on based on the award-winning 1998 short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. The film casts Amy Adams as prominent linguistics professor Louise Banks, who is called upon to find a way to communicate with the aliens inhabiting a group of strange spaceships that suddenly appeared in the sky at various points around Earth. She’s joined by a theoretical physics expert played by Jeremy Renner, and a senior military official played by Forest Whitaker, who supervises their interaction with the extraterrestrial visitors.

The initial previews for Arrival hinted that it was more than just your standard alien-invasion movie, but exactly how far it strays from that genre while still remaining firmly entrenched in its fantastic, sci-fi premise is one of many impressive feats the film pulls off.

Simultaneously exploring the philosophical quandaries of predestination, the complexities of linguistics, and the nature of time itself, Arrival layers some pretty deep subject matter over its basic genre foundation. And yet, the film does a surprisingly good job of conveying complicated concepts that blend into the narrative and rarely – if ever – feel forced.

Arrival is a movie unlike anything else we’ve been given in recent years.

For example, how Adams’ character approaches the task of establishing communication with lifeforms that don’t relay information the way humans do is handled in a way that’s both intelligently presented and fascinating to watch unfold on the screen.

Villeneuve has proven himself as a master of tone – both visually and through the use of music cues – and his talents are on full display in Arrival . The human characters’ first interaction with the aliens is a wonderfully crafted, slow-burn sequence that plays with classic movie tropes (and pays subtle homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey ) while introducing some entirely unexpected elements that make the well-worn “revealing the alien creature concealed in smoke behind the glass” scene feel fresh and surprising. Subsequent scenes featuring the aliens are handled just as well, with Villeneuve keeping the level of uncertainty about the creatures just as high as the tension, and making sure not to spoil them by giving too much away or maintain so much secrecy that the audience feels cheated.

It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his work, but Villeneuve also offers up some compelling moments with the human cast without any aliens, too.

The film has a relatively small cast of human characters – and an even smaller number of characters who actually spend any significant time on the screen – but Villeneuve certainly doesn’t waste any of the time or characters he’s given. The dialogue is efficient when it needs to be, conveying complicated concepts with surprising ease and not spending a second more than it needs to on developing certain relationships (adversarial or otherwise). This allows him to slow down and linger on the more emotional, dramatic moments that benefit from that extra attention the camera pays them.

Arrival earns the intense emotional response it asks from its audience.

In the film’s featured role, Adams does a remarkable job of adding depth to her character, and seems to find ways to make her linguistics expert feel like more than the typical academic. Her reaction to the aliens feels authentic to her character, and this – along with excellent performances from the supporting cast – contributes to Arrival feeling like a sci-fi movie that achieves far beyond the genre standard.

At a time when so many films that fall under the “science-fiction” banner forego the science for spectacle-driven fiction, Arrival offers the best of both worlds with a thought-provoking story that still manages to provide memorable, breathtaking visual moments. It also taps into the sort of emotions – and depths of emotion – that aren’t usually mined in sci-fi fare, and does so in a way that earns the intense emotional response it asks from its audience.

Easily one of the best sci-fi films of the year and certainly one of the most unique, Arrival is a reminder that the science-fiction genre is truly a wide-open field that can offer a little something for everyone and move you in powerful ways that remind you what it means to be human.

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Rom-coms make you feel good any time of the year. But on a nice summer night, it’s the best way to relax in front of the TV after a busy day out with the kids or while chilling at the trailer or cottage. The 2000s was a pretty hot year for rom-coms with several memorable ones that performed well at the box office and/or went over well with fans.

Actors like Steve Carell, Jennifer Garner, and Paul Rudd are no strangers to the genre, and they star in three rom-coms on Amazon Prime Video you need to watch in July. Each begins with a unique story, from a man trying to achieve a milestone to a teen who wishes to bypass the awkward years and a couple whose marriage is put to the test. They all have their own tones and twists, but each is fun to watch in its own right. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) Official Trailer - Steve Carell, Paul Rudd Comedy HD

Max's impressive library of movies makes it one of the must-have streaming platforms. The sheer quantity of movies available is enough to keep audiences busy, but the variety in the service's catalog remains its best feature.

With Max's library boasting everything from fantasy and superhero blockbusters to comedies and sci-fi, subscribers are guaranteed to find their niche. Still, new subscribers can easily feel overwhelmed by the amount of content. Thankfully, this guide is updated monthly and focuses on the platform's recent hits to highlight some of the best movies on Max right now.

What's on tap for Hulu's movie selection in July? With Alien: Romulus over a month away, Hulu added Aliens, Alien: Covenant, and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem to stand alongside Alien within its library. Comedy classics like Step Brothers and The Cable Guy are also now available to stream this month.

What else is on Hulu? Not every movie is visible on the homepage. Sometimes the more underrated films are hidden within a certain genre's page. Luckily, we picked out three of these movies to watch in July. Our picks include a charming romantic comedy, an exhilarating war drama, and a thriller with two A-list icons. Plus One (2019)

Arrival Review

11 Nov 2016

If you need a deeply thoughtful and impressive new take on a familiar old genre (and in this era of identikit sequels, we clearly do), then Denis Villeneuve is your man. The French-Canadian director gave the drug-war thriller a violent shake-up with last year’s morally murky Sicario , and before that he turned the kidnap drama on its head with Prisoners . Now we get his take on alien visitation. Arrival is Villeneuve’s The Day The Earth Stood Still or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind , and somehow he makes it true to the tropes while also feeling like something new.

Like all the best sci-fi, Arrival has something pertinent to say about today's world; particularly about the importance of communication.

It helps that Villeneuve and his creative team have made their extra-solar visitors as truly ‘alien’ as possible, and thereby ensure this first-contact narrative is inventively, fiendishly and (you’d imagine) realistically problematic. The alien craft, or “shells”, are immense, lens-shaped, black-rocky obelisks which levitate noiselessly several metres above the Earth’s surface, never actually touching terra firma. Every 18 hours a hatch opens in the shell’s lower tip, admitting a delegation of Homo sapiens into the gravity-bending interior. The human visitors, carrying an achingly symbolic canary in a cage, arrive at a rectangular audience chamber in which they’re separated from a sea of ominous white mist by a transparent wall. And from the swirling space-fog they emerge: the eerie, graceful “heptapods”, resembling a hybrid of squid, spider, whale and mangrove. The tips of their gnarled, finger-like limbs, it transpires, peel open into starfish-like appendages which ejaculate ink that flows into lazily floating, coffee-mug-stain symbols. This is the aliens’ language. It’s way beyond “klaatu barada nikto” — or even Close Encounters ’ five-note salutation.

They have something to say, and the race to figure out what it is gives the film both its tight structure and pulsing momentum. Without a single planetary leader to be taken to on our divided world, the heptapods have suspended themselves over a dozen points around its surface. But why 12, exactly? And why those specific locations? The mysteries layer up, though despite all the heavy portent, Eric Heisserer’s script isn’t without levity — at one point physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) correlates that all the arrival sites are in places where Sheena Easton had a hit in 1980. Perhaps they’re just inter-galactic fans of 9 To 5 ’s perky pop stylings.

While the Chinese and Russians get stroppy and sabre-rattley, the Americans put linguist Dr Louise Banks on the case. Like all good movie eggheads, she’s both intensely brainy and able to distil her science down into digestible soundbites for the sceptical military-types, represented by Forest Whitaker’s weary Colonel and Michael Stuhlbarg’s CIA prick. She also comes with some outsize emotional baggage, connected with the death of a loved one.

But before you roll your eyes over the cliché of the grieving hero, be reassured this particular emotional thread is ingeniously connected with the macro-trauma playing out around her. Also, in finding an actress to sell it convincingly, Villeneuve could have done no better than Adams, who negotiates and balances Louise’s frustrations with the army wonks, her bewilderment/awe at meeting E.T.s, and her personal tribulations with subtlety and absorbing naturalism.

On the exterior, Louise is the calm, albeit shaky, eye of this interplanetary storm. On the interior rages a silent storm of her own, a fugue of memory fragments that comes to twist and bend like a psychic cyclone as she begins to decode the visitors’ inky vernacular. Adams is the film’s quiet, luminous heart, and Villeneuve spends more time focusing on her face than he does the aliens or their mysterious vessels; we’re not even allowed to see the first shell properly until Louise herself witnesses it, and quite right, too.

Arrival is a beautifully polished puzzle box of a story whose emotional and cerebral heft should enable it to withstand nit-picky scrutiny. And like all the best sci-fi, it has something pertinent to say about today’s world; particularly about the importance of communication, and how we need to transcend cultural divides and misconceptions if we’re to survive as a species. An ideal that shouldn’t need any translation.

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Arrival Movie Review (2016) | Denis Villeneuve Helms a Masterpiece

Arrival Movie Wallpaper still of a space ship

Wonderstruck! Dumbfounded! Arrival movie confounds you as it crushes dams of conventions. It is the arrival of a change, a different outlook at the word ‘alien’. So many movies we have seen hitherto, all showing aliens in ugly limelight, branding them destroyers, marauders or invaders. It used to paint the same old picture with its destructive cliches.

Arrival movie changes everything. Your perception of strangers in our land. It stresses on the fact they could be here for a reason other than war. The movie unfolds gorgeously from a stupefying elusive pickle into a mind-boggling explosive revelation. That’s the entire driving force on which Arrival runs.

The Direction of Arrival Movie

Denis Villeneuve stays highly revered in my head owing to all the uncanny topics he picks. He isn’t afraid to experiment, takes bold awe-inspiring risks and literally fuels avant-garde cinema. His direction abounds with intelligence that nips at our traditions of perceiving movies. He challenges us to think, knocking us out of our comfort zone. It’s ballsy, different and simply remarkable. Something we don’t see every day in the cinema today. Primarily because such films vex many, and then all the movies end up becoming nothing but moderate crowd-pleasers. But this man right here never ceases to take risks.

still of Amy Adams as Louise Banks and Jeremy Renner as Ian Donnelly in Arrival movie

In particular, I love how Denis Villeneuve imparts tranquil focus to his frames. Everything happens for a reason. It merges and overlaps with wistful thinking and asks of you to do the same. In those momentary transitions you are forced to hear your thoughts, you think of the possibilities and given his reputation try to envision the figurative side of the story.

The Plot of the Arrival Movie (Minor Spoilers Ahead)

Created on a story by Ted Chiang titled ‘ Story of Your Life ‘ the movie runs beautifully making up stunning placid frames for its plot. To understand the movie truly you must get this first: There is no definite order! It is a ragbag of tenses. And Denis, the genius he is, intermingles them often supersedes them brilliantly amongst each other. The main theme goes like this:

Louise Banks is an insanely gifted linguist who is sought after by a US Army Colonel to communicate with alien spaceships that have landed on Earth. She meets physicist Ian Donnelly who has also been hired to accompany her for the job.

still of alien letters and symbols from Arrival movie

I loved how Denis decided to show repercussions of alien arrival. Betwixt his poised frames, we get to see our world flame up in chaos, even though all alien ships did was stand still on our ground. The contextual insinuations that human mind read are beyond our grasp. It goes on to show how humans are akin bubbles waiting to explode with a mere instigation without comprehending the what, the why and the how of a situation.

What then follows is constant prodding in order to understand the language of the aliens to figure out their true purpose of visit. The final revelation is so huge (and yes it has time theory entailed) that I have decided to pen a separate article to expound it better. You can find the article here:

Arrival Explained

But really, you need to watch it to experience that climactic relentless pile driver yourself.

You can buy Arrival movie from here:

Music and Screenplay

The music of Arrival has been given by none other than two times Oscar nominee Johann Johannsson himself. It is beautifully done, you have to live it to truly experience it. Being an art movie, limited words get spoken. But those that get spoken try to expand how huge the subject of language is. Also, there are pretty cool one-liners that don’t fail to titillate your ears every now and then. Like when Ian Donnelly confesses:

You know I’ve had my head tilted up to the stars for as long as I can remember. You know what surprised me the most? It wasn’t meeting them. It was meeting you.

What also constantly elevates the movie is an artful performance by Amy Adams . Being the lead protagonist, the driving force, the film basically revolves all around her. If it weren’t for her, things would have been really different. A nod to the movie casting there! Great Job.

The Final Verdict

Arrival is not for everybody. I learned this the hard way as I was compelled to hear two of my friends, who accompanied me to watch the movie, snore profusely throughout the movie. It was ‘their’ loss of course. Because it was only by the time we reach the end that we get to learn the colossal secret. It wraps up beautifully around the concept that eludes us throughout. It almost brings back memories from Christopher Nolan ‘s magnum opus Interstellar movie.

You know, what else really makes me happy? It is the director’s next colossal project. It is none other than Denis Villeneuve himself who helms the Blade Runner sequel with Jared Leto and Harrison Ford in the vanguard. Can’t wait for that one as well.

You can check out the trailer of Arrival movie here:

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Arrival's ending explained.

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Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for Arrival ahead

Arrival presents many clues without revealing its hidden truth until the film's conclusion. The success of the movie’s masterful storytelling is owed to director Denis Villeneuve and author Ted Chiang, whose sci-fi novella “Story of Your Life, ” served as the film's source material. Chiang’s narrative nominates a linguist, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), to decipher the otherworldly language of the Heptapods, an alien race who has descended across the earth. As the international community grows increasingly alarmed by their presence, and foreign and domestic armies prepare for retaliation, Louise is tasked with the unenviable responsibility of peacefully communicating with the Heptapods before global violence eclipses the conversation.

Since Arrival premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, it has been widely praised as one of the best science fiction movies in decades. In addition to exceeding box office expectations, Villeneuve’s movie has earned the respect of critics and audiences for its mature and thought-provoking approach to the genre. As the enigmatic story unfurls, Arrival reveals some paradoxical twists and a disarmingly emotional ending. There’s a lot to unpack from the movie, so we’re here to help clarify some of the story’s most pressing questions.

This Page: Who Are the Aliens?
Page 2: What Is The Alien Gift?
Page 3: Arrival's Twist and Time Travel

Who Are The Aliens?

Despite the foreboding news reports and hasty military intervention, it is eminently clear that the “arrived” are non-aggressive beings. If they sought to punish planet earth, they would have already done it. Despite landing in a group of twelve, the alien spacecraft leave no emissions or radioactive signs of inter-communication between ships. They have no " footprint, " as modern environmentalists might say. Like a giant, obsidian contact-lens, these airborne monoliths have clearly come to earth for one reason: to communicate. They even have visiting hours established where interested parties can enter into the ship through a fascinating zero-gravity portal.

While the rest of the world scrambles to interact with their own local Heptapods, Louise, Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) focus their attention on the one that landed in Montana. After making first contact with the aliens, Ian finds himself increasingly persuaded by Louise’s linguistic gifts, naming the Heptapods after the legendary comic duo, Abbott and Costello. Through a variety of visual aids and mechanisms, Louise and Ian struggle to identify “ Who’s On First?” as they build a pathway to communicating with the aliens.

What Do They Want?

As Abbott and Costello grunt with their whale-like sounds and emit ink-laden symbols, it becomes clear that their language is a world apart from our own. Because the Heptapods perceive time non-linearly, their language becomes an increasingly difficult lexicon to crack. As the film's promotional posters and every onscreen member of the armed services ask, " Why Are They Here?" It's the primary reason Colonel Weber hired Louise in the first place.

After the death of Abbott (which Costello describes as " death process , ” affirming the Heptapod’s non-linear perception of time), he reveals to Louise that the Heptapods will need earth’s help in 3,000 years. Though we never learn more about the nature of the threat, Costello clarifies the earlier confusion over the “weapon” he discussed with Louise. Less a tool of force and more of a gift of understanding, Costello lays the groundwork for the Heptapods’ future alliance with mankind by helping Louise learn their language. When she visits Costello by herself, wading in the murky atmosphere of the ship, she absorbs the total understanding of Costello’s form of communication, viewing time from the same omnipresent perspective of the Heptapods.

Page 2: What Is The Alien Gift?

What Is The Alien Gift?

Given the impending doom of which Costello warns (with non-linear time, 3,000 years is just seconds away), he and the other 11 Heptapod hosts intend to impart their nonlinear perception of time to all of mankind. It’s implied that the universal “invasion” was intended to serve as a twelve-point dissemination for the Heptapod language. Despite their best efforts at executing this global diaspora, only Louise proved accessible and humble enough to actually listen and learn it.

Along with the American soldiers planting explosives in Abbott and Costellos' ship, the rest of the world congress elected to take a more bellicose approach to the Heptapods, completely missing the truth of the aliens' benevolent mission. While the rest of the world sees them as a clear and present danger, Louise has effectively had her mind rewired to speak the limitless language of the aliens and break the human boundaries of time. She's the Heptapods' only hope.

How Does it Work?

Arrival treads lightly with explaining the machinery of the Heptapods’ nonlinear language and perception of time. While the details of the mechanics are largely left to our imagination (after all, it is Louise the linguist's story, and not Ian the scientist's), Villeneuve and Chiang do allude to several key components:

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Much is made about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in both Arrival and modern academia. The well-worn hypothesis suggests that the language we speak is inimitably tied to the reality we experience. Midway through the film, Ian asks Louise if she dreams in foreign languages, and indeed, the more she understands the Heptapods’ communication, the more she experiences waking visions of her future. The dream world merges with a flat chronology that irrevocably changes her perception of time and memory.
Nonlinear Orthography: Arrival screenwriter, Erik Heisserer, admitted he never expected the phrase, “ nonlinear orthography, ” would make it off the film’s cutting room floor . Instead, this linguistic expression is essential to understanding the nature of the Heptapods’ language and the symbols they use to communicate.

Part of Louise and Ian’s initial difficulty in translating Abbott and Costello stemmed from their own well-entrenched mode of language. We write and speak sentences in a literal line (usually from left to right), where the images we depict are dependent on the way we order our words. The Heptapods, however, rely on a form of semiotic communication that tells a full story unbound by time in one fell swoop. Indeed, the ends of their circular symbols never fully touch, perhaps implying the infinite possibilities inherent in their mode of communication. It’s no wonder, then, that the Russians were sorely confused by their local Heptapods who said, “ There is no time.” Unfortunately, their linguists ignored the simplest explanation of all: that the Heptapods meant the phrase literally, and that their form of communication is utterly independent from the human construct of time. They communicate across the temporal sphere, and their language is unbound by the past, present or future.

By this point, it’s abundantly clear that the only person better suited to the job than Louise is Mr. Rust Cohle himself .

Page 3: Arrival's Twist and Time Travel

The Arrival Ending Explained

When Louise tells her daughter, Hannah, that her name is a palindrome, she is also explaining the structure of Arrival. When the movie begins, we are thrust into the bleak worldview of Louise and the subsequent illness and death of her child. Framed with Terrence Malick-like photography and Max Richter’s haunting song, “ On the Nature of Daylight ,” we firmly believe we’re watching flashbacks of Louise’s tragic past. As it turns out, the palindromic function of the story tells us that these scenes of love and loss are neither flashback nor flashforward, but one in the same. Thanks to the omnipresent perspective given to Louise, these sequences simply exist free from the constraint of time.

This is the paradox of Arrival, and arguably the most complex and mentally taxing part of the movie. When Louise hijacks the military’s phone and contacts General Shang (Tzi Ma), she transcends the present to access future knowledge of a past event. In talking the Chinese leader down, she repeats the final words of Shang’s dying wife: “ War does not make winners, only widows.” How did she gain such intimate knowledge? General Shang himself, having benefited from Louise’s warning, had to travel to the relative future himself and impart his wife’s powerful words so the American linguist could use them to persuade him on the phone.

Louise’s prescience is the essential component to convince Shang of the Heptapods’ gift, of the relative nature of time, and of the importance for the international community to rally as one.

Louise’s Choice

Unshackled from the constraints of linear time, Louise experiences the breadth of her life in a single moment. The flashbacks to the loss of Hannah are projections of what’s to come, though she feels the gravity of those moments in the now. Louise’s choice, then, is to embrace the sum of her life regardless of the tragic moments within it. Though the death of daughter and the abandonment of her husband sting her to her core, she accepts the knowledge of what’s to come knowing the beautiful moments that accompany it. While it may seem to be a deterministic (or perhaps fatalistic) tale, Arrival actually empowers Louise with the gift of free will and the option to choose her future.

By the same token, Louise also chooses to shield Ian that she knows their future child will die of cancer. When he asks her if she wants to “ make a baby ,” she jumps at the proposition with every fiber of her being. Her joy, however, is underscored by great sadness, knowing that when she eventually reveals her longstanding knowledge of Hannah's fate, Ian will crumble at her admission and leave her forever. Though some may see Louise as a misguided soul, Villeneuve and Adams create a character emblematic of us all, as our greatest triumphs will ultimately result in the same inescapable end.

On another note, it’s worth asking why Ian didn’t also inherit some of Louise’s consciousness, given the many weeks spent working alongside Abbott and Costello.

Though re-imagined by many, Ralph Waldo Emerson is the father of the phrase, “ Life’s a journey, not a destination.” In many ways, Arrival is a thoughtful adaptation of that adage. Denis Villeneuve uses Louise as the audience surrogate, and as the Heptapod-like and omniscient director, he introduces us to a new prism by which we can better view our own lives. There is no salvation in this vantage point, nor protection from death. Instead, Arrival asks a simple question: if you could view your life as an image, a story told in one nonlinear and infinite symbol, would you change it?

Louise hardly entertains the prospect, electing to embrace life for all of its myriad victories and losses, knowing that the journey is worth far more than the final destination.

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Kevin Costner’s Horizon Is as Bad as You’ve Heard

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Supposedly the first of four films, Kevin Costner’s dull and messy Western throwback, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 , is almost certainly dead on arrival.

The bloated and bloviating three-hour epic is only the first of four Horizon movies that Kevin Costner plans to foist upon us. (New Line Cinema)

I finally went to see Kevin Costner’s flop Western, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 . Not because I wanted to see Horizon — at this point, does anybody? — but because morbid curiosity drove me on. If you read enough annihilating reviews and gleefully slagging commentary, sometimes the burning question becomes, “How abysmal is it, really?”

Horizon is the kind of movie that makes you contemplate with awe the people who read the script and claimed to like it; who acted in it thinking they were going to come across well, without realizing, “Here is where I earn my Razzie nomination”; who watched the final cut of this barely formed slurry of a film and said, “Yeah, this movie is ready to show to a paying public.”

But the most jaw-dropping aspect of the whole experience is learning that this bloated and bloviating three-hour epic is only the first of four Horizon movies that Costner is planning to foist upon us. He’ll never do it! Surely we’ll unite as a society, despite our differences, to prevent this outrage!

Writer Stephen King might claim we should be grateful for any original media in an IP world of sequels, reboots, and exhausted franchises, but I say we still have a right to call a turd a turd.

Anyway, Horizon interweaves many stories about settlers surging westward in a massive land grab partly catalyzed by handbills touting the glories of fantasy communities like Horizon. And if I had to watch one more shot of a character gaze longingly at that damn handbill, I was about to torch the theater.

These settlers encounter increasingly violent resistance from the indigenous peoples living on the land. In the actual drab and remote Arizona settlement called Horizon, there are just enough people to raise an old-time, fiddle-playing, foot-stomping dance at a roughhewn, newly raised building, as celebrated in John Ford’s Westerns, before an Apache raid decimates the place. The cavalry officer Lt Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) tells the survivors they have to move to a more populated area where the US Army can offer some reliable protection, or else take their chances.

Costner, cowriting with Jon Baird, has set up several other storylines ranging from the Southwest to the northwestern states like Wyoming and Montana. One involves a wagon train of pioneers led by cranky trail boss Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson). And then there’s a taciturn prospector named Hayes Ellison (Costner), who arrives at a muddy degenerate hamlet and gets involved with a flirtatious prostitute named Marigold (Abbey Lee). She’s minding a small boy for another sex worker named Lucy “Ellen” Harvey (Jena Malone), who’s run afoul of one of those feral, fur-wearing barbarian clans who always represent the downside of frontier liberty in classic Westerns like My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Big Country (1958). Soon Ellison, Marigold, and the boy are on the run through rugged territory, pursued by gunslinging degenerates in wolf hides.

There are some indigenous characters identified as White Mountain Apache members, led by the peaceable Tuaheseh (Gregory Cruz) facing off against his militant son, Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe), who headed up the massacre at Horizon. They have a big scene arguing two sides of the widening tribal schism. It’s that familiar plotline that’s been done in several old Westerns like Broken Arrow (1950), The Battle at Apache Pass (1952), Conquest of Cochise (1953), and Apache (1954), though it generally involves two chiefs, Geronimo vs. Cochise, arguing about the decision to either engage in an all-out war against whites or adopt a conciliatory approach based on the hopelessness of stopping the tide of settlers.

And as in Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), there’s a troubled cavalry officer who concerns himself with the Native Americans being violently displaced by whites. When, in Horizon , Lt Gephardt asks about “indigenous” concerns, as if that were an ordinary term of discourse in the US Army of the time, it’s an awkwardly ahistorical moment that stops the whole lumbering movie in a moment of acute embarrassment.

These gestures give Costner plausible deniability about his old-fashioned triumphalist Western, indicating he’s being more sensitive to the fraught history of the West in terms of the Native American experience. His narrative features two massacres, for example — the Apaches who wipe out the Horizon settlement and the revenge massacre led by white survivors. The revenge massacre shows understandably anguished survivors being persuaded toward greater evil when they can’t locate the tribe they’re after, so they settle on a random tribe to attack, but only once the warriors leave and it’s just women and children left in the camp. And the taking of scalps from the corpses, which pay a generous bounty, becomes one of the main motivating factors.

But even with all these gestures taken together, Costner’s supposed evenhandedness just doesn’t hold water. He wants to have it all ways, and it can’t be done. Critic Armond White, writing for the conservative National Review , sneers that the film represents Costner’s shaky RINO political stance, with “the skepticism about America’s founding combined with the optimism that made both Dances with Wolves and his ecological Third World fantasy Rapa Nui into fatuous hippie visions of global conquest.”

It’s incredible how stupidly celebratory of the Western genre Horizon ’s whole elegiac shooting style is. There’s so much worshipful footage of white men standing tall among mesas and raising guns symbolic of conquest against sunset horizons and riding fast horses against Apaches. Like Jerry Seinfeld, Costner clearly likes a world-dominating “ real man .”

If you enjoy aspects of old Westerns, in spite of their generally nightmarish Manifest Destiny ideology, you’ll recognize amid Costner’s nervous and unconvincing feints just how much he owes to traditionalist Western filmmaker John Ford. Ford’s later questioning of his own beliefs, instigated by the civil rights movement, found its way into his later, darker, more troubling film-noir-ish Westerns, and no doubt Costner thinks he’s treading the same fraught, disturbing territory. But somehow the disturbance doesn’t come across. Neither does Ford’s excellent handling of bold narrative, his exciting, inventive action, or his generally riveting cinematography and editing. Those qualities writer-director-producer-star Kevin Costner cannot seem to get a handle on.

Even Ford at his most excessively old-fashioned and sentimental would be shocked by how far Costner takes certain Ford tendencies, like demonstrating how rough frontier men worship delicate ladies as the pinnacle of civilization, while lower-class women and women of color who are sex workers or serve drinks in saloons are insulted, kicked around for laughs, and thrown into horse troughs. Of the white survivors of the Apache massacre at Horizon in Costner’s film, for example, there’s a refined blonde woman named Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her even blonder teenage daughter Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail), and they’re treated with slack-jawed, pop-eyed reverence by all the men in the cavalry.

Costner’s Horizon is a slack, boring, sickening mess of a film, every bit as bad as you’ve heard, and even more moronically regressive than you might’ve imagined. But at least there’s no need for you to see it, since all the reviews and commentary by the honestly repulsed are representing it accurately. Stay away, so that even if a Horizon – Chapter 2 is destined to pollute our screens, we might at least avoid the fate of chapters three and four.

Movies | Julianne Nicholson is terrific as the mom in…

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Movies | julianne nicholson is terrific as the mom in ‘janet planet.’ what is she doing right.

Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler star in debut feature filmmaker Annie Baker's "Janet Planet." (A24)

For years now, in conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues, the name Julianne Nicholson comes up and it’s praise and admiration all around but maddeningly little specificity from any of us about why she’s so good.

After winning an Emmy as Kate Winslet’s best friend and the stealth MVP of HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” you heard lots of vagaries along those lines. She’s just so, I don’t know, you know, good! Honest. Natural. Something. That something is crucial to the title role in “Janet Planet,” the supple debut feature from playwright-turned-screenwriter and director Annie Baker.

Now 53, Nicholson plays Janet, a Western Massachusetts woman raising her 11-year-old daughter Lacy (played by Zoe Ziegler) across a series of transitional clauses we call a life. The movie takes place in the hazy, birdsong-filled summer in 1991, as Janet bends her days in different ways around three different men, while Lacy navigates her own place on the planet of Baker’s title.

What I love about “Janet Planet” is its devotion to the ambiguities filling the space between emotional extremes in any mother/daughter or parent/child relationship. “What Julianne does so beautifully,” Baker told me, “is hard to describe because she’s doing five different things. She can hold four or five intentions at the same time as a performer. And you never know exactly what she’s thinking.” To Baker, “that’s what real life feels like. And it’s hard to find on screen, and so hard to find an actor with that kind of mysterious nuance.”

I talked to Nicholson on her final day of a four-month, Los Angeles-based project: “Paradise,” the eight-part Hulu series created by Dan Fogelman (“This Is Us”). Nicholson has done episodic television for 27 years and features for 26, plus a lot of theater and, early on, some modeling. Watching some of her early screen work, you’re aware of several things. She was always good, even in not-good material. Her fluid physicality — loose, spontaneous, easy-breathing — plays like the work of someone brought up with plenty of space, time and room to just be. (She was raised partly in rural Western Massachusetts, 10 miles from where she made “Janet Planet.”)

And this: The mysterious nuance Baker mentioned may simply be a terrific actor listening, and responding, using instinct and precise, incremental choices as her divining rod, pointing to the root of a character. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Julianne Nicholson and (below) filmmaker Annie Baker on the set of "Janet Planet." (Claire Folger/A24)

Q: So many movies have a way of making the mother in a mother/daughter scenario either completely noble or completely hideous, because everything in between is harder to make interesting. In “Janet Planet” it’s not like that. What did those in-between spaces require from you?

A: Those are what I found so deeply interesting about Annie’s script. On any given day as a parent, you can be the savior, the villain or both. That’s what parenting is! (laughs). But all those moments in between are the most interesting and beautiful and simple, really. That’s where most of our lives take place. I’d rarely seen that on screen, and it felt like something exciting to figure out.

Q: One line in particular I think is so damn good: the moment when Janet tells her daughter, Lacy: “I’ve always had this knowledge deep inside of me that I could make any man fall in love with me, if I really tried. And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.” You barely emphasize the drama inherent in that.

A: That line jumped out at me, too. Totally believable. It’s a jumping-off point for the audience to get to know Janet a little bit more. I’ll say this, too: My tendency sometimes on this film (Nicholson made it in the hot, hot summer of 2022) was for Janet to be warmer with Lacy. But Annie encouraged me against that. And I’m glad she did. It’s more interesting to see both the closeness and the distance between them. Clearly they love each other deeply but in this particular summer of their lives, this is where they are.

Q: When you were seven, you and your sister moved to Western Massachusetts with your mother near where you filmed, is that right?

A: That’s right. Ten miles down the road. My stepfather-to-be joined us there later. We moved from Medford, about two hours outside of Boston. My sister and I used to take the Greyhound or the Bonanza bus every other weekend from one (household) to the other, depending on who we were living with.

Q: What was your dynamic with your mother at that time?

A: I remember very clearly being a little threesome. It was probably only for a year and a half or so, but my mom, my sister and I were a threesome. We changed apartments at one point. I think my mom was asked to leave the apartment we were living in, in Medford, because the landlords didn’t want to rent to a single mom. This was in 1978, and there were certain ideas about who was respectable and who wasn’t.

Then we lived in Newton in a great big house with several different characters living there as well. We were there about six months, this tight little unit. There’s a certain closeness, along with some blurry lines, of a single parent and children. The amount of time together is different. It’s a very precious time in my memory.

In Newton we were suddenly living in this house with no electricity or running water, so it was a big adjustment. But kids are adaptable. It didn’t long for us for that to become our life. It was pretty sweet. Live in the woods. Be bored. Stare out the window. Listen to birds. Take walks.

I can’t recall ever seeing a movie filmed in that specific, special part of the Pioneer Valley region. A month before we started filming I went there with Annie. First time in 30 years for me. There’s different air there. You can almost feel it in your mouth watching the movie.

Q: A film like “Janet Planet” has to work so much harder than it might’ve before the pandemic just to find the audience it deserves. The industry right now —

A: I’m concerned. I wish it wasn’t so hard to get a smaller-budget film made, and then get eyes on it. But the industry is changing how we take in — “consume” (makes a fleeting “yuck” face at the word) — our entertainment. I find it sad, and distressing. But I have to trust that there will always be people like Annie, and companies like A24 (distributor of “Janet Planet”), that will continue. And take risks. We all have to make an effort, though. I think every actor should be going to see movies in the theaters. Everyone in the industry. Because if we aren’t doing it, how can we expect it of people who aren’t making movies?

Q: So what’s next for you?

A: I just finished “Paradise,” and I did a series for the BBC called “Dope Girls.”

We just moved to England, so I’ll be going home for a while to be with my family. (Nicholson has been married to actor Jonathan Cake since 2004.) The move came out of different reasons. Our kids were about to start high school. We lived in Topanga Canyon (outside L.A.) which was a big fire hazard; we’d been evacuating regularly. So, you know. Family. Life. Politics. It just felt like a good time to move. And I think we were right.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

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