Arrival

In the era of superhero blockbusters this introspective scifi epic almost feels like a throwback to something pre-Star Wars. Closer encounters, perhaps. Denis Villeneuve’s hit gives us an enigmatic alien incursion: a dozen spaceships strategically dispersed across the globe… To what end, nobody really knows. These newcomers bide their time. Enter Amy Adams’ professor of linguistics, maybe our best hope to get everyone on the same page before the weapons come out.

As always with the French Canadian director, the movie’s surface pleasures run deep. It’s exquisitely photographed and features an outstanding score by Johann Johannson.

A Spielberg-Nolan lovechild of sorts, wondrous and mind-bending in equal parts, Denis Villeneuve’s latest is a quintessential science-fiction blockbuster steeped in genre traditions and made singular by Amy Adams’s transporting performance.

Devika Girish, Film Comment

rrival transcends the limitations that so often govern the less creative examples of the subgenre, instead using it as a loose conceptual foundation upon which to build a theoretically-informed examination of what precisely … makes us human.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, The Blue Lenses

Arrival may be just the poem we need; a departure from the dystopian visions which now appear all too real, a memory of a future in which light still shines in the darkness.

Mark Kermode, The Observer

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