Film

“i deal with kids all day. How much worse could aliens be?”

Personal space

A few years back, a movie called Contactticked me off when Jodie Foster supposedly traveled to some distant place in the universe only to have a chat with her dead dad. I just thought it was trite and a letdown in storytelling.

Director Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, one of the more subdued alien invasion movies you will ever see, also approaches the subjects of parentage and everlasting love. It’s also a much, much better movie.

That’s due in part to the simple fact that Villeneuve is quickly emerging as one of the best visual and pacing directors in the medium today. Arrival follows Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015) and the vastly underrated Enemy (2013) as another movie of definitive vision, style and grace. No doubt about it, this man knows how to make a movie.

Amy Adams stars as Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics teacher crippled by visions of a daughter who died of a rare illness. She lives a life of seclusion, where the only thing she really does is teach her class and mope around her lakefront home. (Man, that must be one abnormally high paying teacher’s gig.) During class, a bunch of phones go off, a student instructs her to turn on the TV, and, bam, that’s how she discovers the planet seems to be getting a visit from an alien force.

Strange giant pods have parked themselves all over the planet, and nobody knows their intent. A solemn military man (Forest Whitaker) shows up in Louise’s office and informs her the world needs her. She has a sense of purpose again.

It isn’t long before she’s inside an alien ship trying to talk to the “Heptapods,” large elephant looking aliens with seven legs. She’s joined by a science officer played by a surprisingly low-key Jeremy Renner.

The aliens communicate visually with symbols that look like coffee ring stains. They seemingly say a few words that get some part of the world

a little worried, and it looks like Earth might find itself at war. It’s up to Louise to decipher the codelike language and find out if the Heptapods want to harvest us War of the Worlds style or give us a helping hand. Adams could find herself in the Oscar race for this one. Hers is quite simply one of the year’s best performances thus far. (She’ll appear in another highly touted film, Nocturnal Animals, this month.) Louise doesn’t have many happy moments in this film, and while another actress could’ve rendered her somewhat of a drag, Adams makes her shine, even when she’s despairing. It’s some of her very best work. Eric Heisserer’s screenplay, based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, is profound in a way similar to Interstellar. This is another example of science fiction taking a theme like universal love and making that aspect of the film just as interesting as the gadgets or alien creatures. The movie, while Arrival challenging your brain on a scientific level, definitely scores major 12345 emotional points. The film was budgeted at just around $50 million, so it’s not a Director: Denis Villeneuve special effects extravaganza. The Starring: Amy Adams, scenes with the aliens are engrossForest Whitaker ing, but there’s nothing whiz-bang about them. Dare I say, the movie is rather laid back. High props to cinematographer Bradford Young for shooting a movie that never seems anything short of very real. Those visuals are assisted by frequent Villeneuve collaborator Johann Johannsson’s excellent score. The movie is drawing comparisons to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a very different type of film from that one. If you are looking for some sort of action pic, you will not find that with Arrival. It’s a movie that gives itself time to breathe, and while it does have a few action scenes, for the most part, it’s intellectual fare. Next up for Villeneuve is Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the Ridley Scott classic and another sci-fi effort. Based on his work with Arrival, I have to say that the Blade Runner sequel stands as one of my most anticipated movies. Ω

3The Accountant This plays out like a deranged Batmanwith-a-calculator action flick. Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff, a high functioning autistic man who has managed to harness his extreme intelligence with numbers and physical tics down into the strangest of professions. By day, he’s your average accountant helping a farm owner find tax loopholes to save a few thousand bucks. At night, he’s some sort of accountant ninja who can take out a room full of mob guys with a dinner knife and some totally Batman forearm blasts to the face. Christian takes jobs laundering books for dirty folks all over the world and, while he does have a modest, sparsely decorated home, he also has a mobile man cave—or, should I say, Batcave— that keeps all the spoils of his riches—money, gold, Jackson Pollock paintings and, yes, collector’s items like Batman comic books. During one job, trying to find missing money for a prosthetics company led by John Lithgow, he takes a liking to fellow accountant Dana (the invaluable Anna Kendrick), and they conspire to find the missing money, which, of course, wasn’t really supposed to happen.

3Doctor Strange The latest Marvel movie is certainly one of the weirder ones, with Benedict Cumberbatch starring as the title character, a sorcerer who can cast spells and slip through passageways in time. It’s an origin story, showing how Strange loses his surgeon’s hands in an accident, travels to India, and learns about the mystical arts from The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). I have to admit, I didn’t always follow exactly what was going on in this movie, and I found some stretches a little convoluted and boring. When the movie soars, it soars high, and Cumberbatch winds up being a decent choice for the role, even with his weird American accent. Director Scott Derrickson (Sinister), who looked like an odd choice for a Marvel movie with his horror film pedigree, acquits himself nicely. The movie often plays like a Matrix-Inceptionmashup with a little bit of CrouchingTiger,HiddenDragonthrown in for good measure. The special effects are first rate. DoctorStrangeis a bit of an oddball character, and he’s supposed to factor into future Avengersmovies. I’ll be curious to see how he fits into the mix with the likes of AntMan and Hawkeye.

4Hacksaw Ridge Mel Gibson directs his first movie in a decade and—surprise—the sucker bleeds. It bleeds a lot. As a director, Gibson stands alongside the likes of Sam Raimi, David Cronenberg and Peter Jackson as a master of body horror. Yes, I will go so far as to say his latest, HacksawRidge, is an all out horror film in parts. His depiction of a World War II battle makes George Romero’s DawnoftheDeadlook like Zootopia. The movie tells the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a battlefield medic and the first of three conscientious objectors in U.S. warfare history to receive the Medal of Honor. The dude refused to pick up a gun, or any weapon for that matter, during his time served in Okinawa. That didn’t stop him from braving the battlefields with comrades, eventually saving the lives of 75 men during horrendously bloody battles. Much of the film’s first half is devoted to Doss’ backstory, a troubled childhood with his alcoholic World War I veteran father (a good Hugo Weaving) and an eventual romance with future wife Dorothy Schutte (Teresa Palmer). The early goings in the film are handled well, although schmaltzy at times. When Doss goes to boot camp and faces off against commanding officers like Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) and Sgt. Howell (Vince Vaughn), the film starts to get very interesting. Due to his Seventh Day Adventist beliefs, Doss refuses to pick up a rifle, and this gets him into all sorts of jams on the training field and in the barracks. After a detour for a court-martial hearing, Doss and his infantry mates are deployed to Japan. When the action switches to the scaling of the Maeda Escarpment a.k.a. Hacksaw Ridge, the movie becomes perhaps the most grueling war movie experience ever made.

1Inferno This is easily the worst of the Robert Langdon series, a series that was already pretty terrible in that both TheDa VinciCodeand Angels&Demonsblew ass. Ron Howard once again directs Tom Hanks as Langdon. When Langdon wakes up in a hospital room, with a bullet scratch on his head and loss of memory, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) is there to help out. Then, somebody starts toward Langdon’s hospital room guns blazing, and the so-called adventure begins. Langdon is having hallucinations about something akin to Dante’s “Inferno” while trying to work his way through amnesia. He’s in Italy, and he doesn’t know why, but Sienna, for reasons unknown, is going to stay by his side until he works things out. Langdon must race against time (and solve puzzles!) in order to save the world. The main “puzzle” Langdon has to solve this time is where a doomsday bomb containing a virus that will wipe out the majority of the Earth’s population has been planted. If he doesn’t find the Make Everybody Sick bomb, it will be an apocalypse like no other. Gee,I wonder if the whole world will die in a Ron Howard movie?

3The Monster This minimalist horror film mixes elements of Cujo,Alienand Ghostbusters. I include Ghostbustersbecause the title monster looks a lot like a greasier version of the demon dog Rick Moranis transformed into in the comedy classic. There’s nothing funny about how badly a road trip goes for Kathy (Zoe Kazan) and daughter Lizzy (Ella Balletine) when they have a blowout on a rainy night in the middle of nowhere. Their car hits a wolf, a bloody wolf, and Lizzy makes the keen observation that something it was fighting must’ve driven it in front of their car and into harm’s way. She’s very right. There’s a monster in the woods, and it wants to not only eat them, but anybody that tries to help them. Writerdirector Bryan Bertino (TheStrangers) has made a decent creature feature here, one that is as much a mother-daughter drama—there are plenty of flashbacks showing their troubled times—as it is a flick about a monster. Kazan is damn good here, and continues to be one of the more under-appreciated actresses in movies today. She needs to get some higher profile roles. Balletine is every bit her match as a daughter who has much more common sense than her mother. The movie clocks in at 91 minutes, but it feels long due to some stretches that are drawn out just a tad. (Available for rent on iTunes, On Demand and Amazon.com during a limited theatrical release.)

3Ouija: Origin of Evil How bad was 2014’s Ouija? It was so piss poor and forgettable that I had to actually look into my archives for a review to confirm I had actually seen the damn thing. I wasn’t sure. In short, Ouijawas a deplorable shitshow. Ouija:OriginofEvilis a bona fide movie miracle in many ways. Ouijawas awful, but it was enough of a hit to warrant a sequel. Still, it shocked me to see the sequel had actually made it to movie screens rather than some direct-to-digital platform. The fact that Mike Flanagan, the director of the crappy Oculus, was at the helm did little to quash my skepticism. After about 30 seconds of watching young Lulu Wilson as Doris Zander, I realized that Flanagan might to be onto something with this casting. This kid, with her authentic 1960s haircut and mature-for-her-years delivery, crafts one of the great horror film performances of all time. Yes, I’m bestowing that honor on a performance that occurs in a sequel to one of the worst horror films ever made. The film, set convincingly in 1965, follows right along with Wilson as truly inspired and creepy. The Doris character plays with a Ouija board, and soon has some pleasant conversations with her dead father. Then, very bad things start to happen.