Quietly, lingeringly mysterious, littered with stunning alien imagery that gains from its juxtaposition against the familiar-rendered-strange setting of our own world (the hovering craft over the fog-bathed Montana plain is positively Magrittean), wrapping in a thoughtful take on communication and the way that language shapes experience and then pushing that to the next dimension (so to speak), structured elliptically but designedly around an emotional core of loss, and sustaining several different types of narrative and other tension throughout its two hours, Arrival is wonderful in every sense.
Also - Amy Adams is, as usual, great. In a movie where she's trying to save the world, she's perfectly subtle; she has a knack of inhabiting the characters that she plays (as an actor, she's never distracting) yet leaving a strong impression each time out, perhaps in the way that she finds those little ways to bring out the characters themselves. I don't know if there's another actor going around today who I like more - her turns in The Master and American Hustle are most vivid for me, but extemporanea reveals that she's actually stood out enough in several others that I've seen, including before I really knew who she was (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Her); also, startlingly, it was her and Emily Blunt who were the leads in Sunshine Cleaning which, now that I know that, seems to deserve a rewatch.
Also also - there are some interesting thematic overlaps with Life After Life. Though in terms of films, the ones that it called to mind were Interstellar, Inception (and again, and again), Monsters and I Origins (a pretty good quartet, to say the least).
Also - Amy Adams is, as usual, great. In a movie where she's trying to save the world, she's perfectly subtle; she has a knack of inhabiting the characters that she plays (as an actor, she's never distracting) yet leaving a strong impression each time out, perhaps in the way that she finds those little ways to bring out the characters themselves. I don't know if there's another actor going around today who I like more - her turns in The Master and American Hustle are most vivid for me, but extemporanea reveals that she's actually stood out enough in several others that I've seen, including before I really knew who she was (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Her); also, startlingly, it was her and Emily Blunt who were the leads in Sunshine Cleaning which, now that I know that, seems to deserve a rewatch.
Also also - there are some interesting thematic overlaps with Life After Life. Though in terms of films, the ones that it called to mind were Interstellar, Inception (and again, and again), Monsters and I Origins (a pretty good quartet, to say the least).
